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Comment by jdoliner | Hacker News Reader

Would a union make life better for the starry-eyed people entering the industry. The only parallel I can really draw is the movie industry, which also has lots of starry-eyed people entering it and has a union. I'm not sure it's better, I've talked to a number of people who had to work for years at very low rates just to get their SAG card, after they got it they had a lot more earning power. But you still get the same effect of low wages for entry level people. That seems tough to avoid when you always have a bunch of young talent flooding the market.

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The problem with game dev isn't the entry level jobs.

Also a game dev union would probably work more like the film and TV trade/technical unions than SAG. I know people who work in film doing things from lighting to sound to driving. Their working conditions and pay are much better than they would be without the unions.

I don't think lighting, sound and stunt people have the same influx of young starry eyed people coming into the profession though. That's what makes unions really difficult. Same thing applies to academia, which is arguably worse than both game-devs and actors.

From a friend, I've heard great things about the treatment they got as part of The Animation Guild, and I imagine that that demographic of artists and creators is quite similar to the "young starry eyed people" going into the game industry. In fact, there's likely a good amount of overlap of artists that have worked in both (supported slightly by anecdata of friends who are 3d artists).

I'm not sure that's true

Plenty of starry-eyed people enter academia. There isn't quite the same unionization gateway into academic jobs, but mostly just markers of effective work - papers, grants, etc

The game development industry would probably start outsourcing even more tasks if unionization takes hold. If relatively cheap roles like QA and art asset production suddenly get more expensive then setting up remote development offices abroad becomes much better from a cost benefit perspective. Unionizing would likely bring better pay to those jobs that still exist, but make it a lot harder to get one of those jobs to begin with.

Most studios need leads/experienced developers/artists/audio folk in house. If they are unionized, wouldn't they have leverage over how and when outsourcing was used?

Maybe. But they're competing against developers that aren't subject to these limitations. Art assets often make up the bulk (50-70%) of the development costs of modern games. If one studio has to pay 3D modelers $50,000 a year and another only has to pay $10,000 a year (not to mention no healthcare, retirement fund, etc) then the former is at a huge disadvantage.

Outsourcing isn't a hypothetical. Naughty Dog started outsourcing art asset production to Asia with Uncharted 3. Music recording has been outsourced for at least a decade. Sure, the company hires experienced people (like art directors and composers) in house but the heavy lifting is done offshore.

The former Soviet countries probably have a bunch of low cost talent as well.

The heavy lifting in game music is not outsourced. It’s really only the orchestra musicians that are outsourced. The music direction, supervision, engineering, orchestrating, score prep and copy services, editing, mixing,mastering, integration and testing is still done in-house or by a contracted music service, usually US based. The reason for outsourcing orchestras is ironically to avoid overly strict contracts with AFM, the musicians union. This is why Nashville is bursting with video game scoring sessions. Tennessee is a right-to-work state.

Guess it's time for a outsource music and art tariff.

The video game development industry already makes extensive use of contractors, dedicated outsource studios in various disciplines (art, audio and QA being the most common), and "support" studios (internal or external studios that work on large, cross-functional parts of a project). While I can see this increasing, the majority of the staff on the larger projects are not full-time staff at the "lead dev" studio but fall into one of the aforementioned categories.

I wouldn't mind seeing broader unionization in the video game industry - it already exists in some European countries - but I don't see it as a panacea to the issues often associated with it. Collective bargaining wouldn't have prevented a company like Activision Blizzard from making a strategic decision to move in a different direction, a direction that necessitates staff restructuring. Potentially, it could improve severance agreements, work rules, or entry-level pay, all laudable goals, but much of that is orthogonal to what is happening here.

The unionization efforts in European countries don't seem to be doing much good. See fiasco after fiasco at Eugen Systems, for example.

Not if the union was globalized.

It actually already exists in some countries so USA would not be first unionising software workers. That would seriously help with the outsourcing problem if everyone would get the same benefits in all countries. Stop outsourcing everything to China would probably stop them from growing into the superpower it has become during the last decades. But I guess that train has left the station already.

Doesn't even have to be a global single rate, just a way to collectivize the negotiations worldwide while still accounting for local economic conditions.

Business people form conglomerates together whenever it makes strategic sense. How this became so stigmatized an action for business people selling their own labor makes no sense at all.

> Their working conditions and pay are much better than they would be without the unions.

This is true, but those are gig jobs, not full-time jobs. A show might last 8-12 weeks. The crew need the union just to carry over health care and retirement benefits, and it's less about higher pay.

In games, the art department might need these kinds of unions, since many of those people are hired on contracts for a game. (Though a lot of art creation has gone overseas already.)

I don't really see a union being necessary for engineers or game designers for now, for the same reasons it's not needed at tech companies (engineers are hard to hire/retain).

The working conditions are horrible. That's why unions are necessary, and it's been the main driver of unionization over the centuries. Ancillary benefits don't drive unionization nearly as much as core horrible working conditions and bad pay.

The labor movement's utility in improving horrible working conditions was based on the fact that laborers were considered to be coerced into these conditions by the threat of starving to death (or the modern-developed-country equivalent of standard-of-living resource constraints). I don't know much about game development, but aren't the majority of the relevant skills for most roles quite transferable? If the working conditions are miserable enough that unions are necessary, what is keeping people from switching to a similar role in an industry without substandard conditions? Is it the broader problem that these roles aren't well-treated in any industry? (certainly not the case for developers, but that's just one role).

These aren't rhetorical questions trying to make a point, I'm genuinely curious.

There is no "similar" role. There's no other industry that is involved in making games. That's why it's the video game industry. That's what they do. If you leave that industry, you're not making games anymore. And that's what people want to do. And before you or anybody else argues, that isn't reason enough for shitty work hours, ridiculous amounts of crunch, complete lack of life balance, etc. to be acceptable. The same way it's not okay to pay teachers or nurses or firefighters so much less just because they might be fulfilling a passion in helping other people.

I'm not sure why one should need to leave the industry one wants to work in before one is afforded a job that doesn't guide one directly towards burnout within 5 years.

And even if these people leave, there's plenty of young blood who'll gladly work in these conditions because they want to make video games, so nothing changes.

The thing is that if you fire a teacher, they must find another job _as a teacher_ because they have no other skills because it isn't transferrable. As a game dev, programming is programming and if you can program a game you can program other things. You won't starve or even have a serious problem if you get laid off and need to change fields.

But most involved in game making are not programmers.

Programmers are not the only employees in game companies, nor even the majority or biggest plurality (the latter are probably graphic artists). Programmers are indeed the ones in the best position & probably why they are generally the best paid segment.

I already addressed this. Why are we okay with an entire industry having shitty work conditions, regardless of circumstances? Why should a game developer have to work 80-100 hour weeks for months on end just because he wants to make games? The issue of skills transference is just distracting from this issue.

> The issue of skills transference

The issue of skill transferance is that nobody is forcing them to work in such companies; it means they can leave and try to find another job.

That's what they do after a few years, but I'm not sure how that excuses it.

I don't understand why it's so hard to understand that these people don't want to work in other industries, they want to make games. And thus it makes sense for them to organize and try to improve the industry they want to be in rather than having to flee to another industry, which currently happens all too often after severe burnout.

If it's so bad that many people are being forced out, then clearly it meets the bar of unionization being helpful. I'd rather start organizing than quit the industry I love, as the worst that could happen is I get fired (and potentially get a big payout on a subsequent lawsuit), and if it's so bad that the alternative is to leave anyway, it's the same result.

Can’t speak for SAG - but having worked non-union camera crew jobs and union jobs as a member of the Cinematographers Guild, my experience was day/night with regard to pay, safety, and limited (and compensated) hours. 100 percent would go back to union film jobs.

Same. Absolute life changer.

Another parallel: the animation industry. Life's a lot better after you get into a union shop, according to my friends who stuck it out longer than I did - the studios are constantly pushing to have one person's work duties expand to what several people used to do without paying them anything more, and the unions fight back against that and generally make sure that if you can keep picking up union jobs, you can afford to live in Los Angeles.

Like games, animation is an industry full of eager kids with stars in their eyes.

While entry-level actors in Hollywood might struggle indefinitely to find enough very small jobs (maybe even a single day) to qualify for SAG membership, entry-level software developers easily get full-time positions, with a duration of at least a few weeks and more realistically a few months: they are immediately past the stage of "entering" anything and in need of unions.

Sounds like the union works well for the people in it

isn't that the point?

Ideally it should be working well for society, right? (by whatever metric you choose, not simply an easily measurable one like GDP). It could go either way, in theory, even if you narrow your optimization objective to the working class. If a union benefits its members and has second-order effects that benefit other workers, then great. OTOH, if its second-order effects on the economy or industry come in some way at the expense of other workers, then it seems fair to call this out.

See an example of transport unions in the UK. Tube drivers are in the top 5%/10% of income in the UK, for a 35 hour or so week, and a lot of other benefits. The union power has done amazing things for them... but at a huge cost (albeit dispersed) cost to the rest of society.

Fully agree the ideal is where you have both. Germany seems to have good models where unions improve the efficiency of companies in giving a point of contact for negotiations, and helping the company succeed - winning together.

Yup. It's very much about putting their members first and too bad for everything else.

Railway Signalers are unionised. After a series of incidents the recommendation was that all signaller's maximum shift length be restricted to 8 hours to avoid fatigue. Same as air traffic control. Unions should be on board with that right?

Nope. Signallers liked 12 hour shifts. 3 working days is 36 hours and that's your whole week. Nobody was going to pay them the same wages for 24 hours work, so they'd be putting in an extra day and a half per week to make it up.

So the UK rail unions fought this safety change. That's what to expect from unions. Good for individual employees, bad for society as a whole.

Unions certainly should work for the benefit of employees, while employer's associations certainly should cater to the interest of the industry.

Unions are a required counter-balance to the forces of business who employ people. If either end dominates, things go sour very quickly. It's the state and government that should maintain this power balance between these out so that neither party is in the position to dictate decisions to overrule the other party.

That is for the benefit of the society.

The moral hazard is that if a union has second-order effects benefiting other workers in the industry but not in the union, workers in the industry lose their short-term incentive for membership in the union.

At which point everybody loses except the rentier class.

The movie equivalent is VFX, which has no real unions.

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