The bottom line is that the supply of game developers has historically outpaced the demand. There are simply a lot of people who really want to make games, and are willing to put up with those work conditions.
I mean (for developers at least), it's not as though most of them couldn't find work doing some other kind of SW dev that doesn't typically involve death marches. Game dev programming skills have plenty of applicability in other kinds of software. I know this from first hand experience. So there are definitely a lot of people who are doing this voluntarily, and not because they have few or no other options.
Given that, it's hard to see a way of solving these problems via unions that doesn't effectively increase the barrier to entry for game developers. I guess that's one way to deal with it..
If game developers don't feel exploited by their conditions, then they probably won't join/create the union. If they do feel exploited, then the union will be a good thing.
> Given that, it's hard to see a way of solving these problems via unions that doesn't effectively increase the barrier to entry for game developers.
What barriers to entry do you foresee coming out of a union?
Making game development more expensive, obviously, since ending the current abusive practices is going to cost the publishers and development studios more money plus the overhead imposed by the union itself. Unions may have their benefits but it's undeniable that there's a cost there.
(1) The profit from abuse/exploitation gave a pure surplus, and the barriers to entry will remain the same but the surplus on the back will go down
(2) There is no real surplus, the profit from abuse/exploitation was the only thing keeping barriers to entry as low as they currently are, and they'll increase.
So we'll see what happens.
So why aren't the people leaving then? Maybe they love the game they are working on and prefer bad conditions over working on something else? Maybe they have non-standard backgrounds and would be forced to wash plates if not for this company? It isn't clear to me that a union would make the life of these people better.
If I rephrase that as "If a startup can't afford to provide for its employees, why should a startup exist?", it should be clear to HN readers why that is problematic. Without a way for new players to enter the market cheaply, you wind up with a stagnant industry fully of deeply entrenched players who are afraid to take creative risks. (Not unlike Hollywood, come to think of it.)
Obviously, this is less the case at somewhere like EA/Activision/2K/Epic, and you could make the case that if they can't treat the employees better, then the project doesn't deserve to exist.
Some segments of game development may continue to look like that. However, the mix of procedural content generation, user generated content, a strong skilled global talent market, and the US being of piece of a much larger global sales pie, makes it look nothing like Hollywood.
Hollywood has traditional been very much an American cultural product dependent on American talent both on and off screen to produce. Games are neither.
The boom-bust cycle of studios is of course another matter. Games-as-a-service may appear to be more suitable for unionization but the end result may just improve the economics of user generated content marketplaces.
I could understand if things were at one point great, and then some series of events lead to a worse situation with no options leaving. But I can't understand having options and choosing the bad one and then complaining about it being bad.
Does someone have a different viewpoint that could help?
If game design as a field can survive a decrease in exploitation, then why wouldn't someone want to follow their passion to game design, but not be exploited? Why wouldn't someone want to change the status quo?
Collective bargaining at its most basic is a means by which employees can band together to increase their leverage and negotiate better deals for themselves.
Employees agitating for change is the basic building block for improving conditions.
Take the bad option knowing the downsides and work to make it less bad.
For them, perhaps. But not so much for future would-be game developers, who will likely have a harder time finding a game dev job.
> What barriers to entry do you foresee coming out of a union?
Even if union membership does not become a requirement for a job, merely reducing the number of hours worked will increase the cost of making games, even if pay doesn't increase under a union. If games become more expensive on average, consumers will buy fewer games, all else being equal. Fewer games made = fewer opportunities for new developers = studios can be more selective in hiring.
As I said in a different comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21982787), I don't think it's 100% sure that games would become more expensive. But if they do, I think it's a tradeoff we have to make in a humane society.
In the referenced comment, you speak of "profit from abuse/exploitation", which presupposes that abuse or exploitation is occurring. Most game developers (programmers at least) have skills that are valuable in other kinds of SW development. If they wanted to, they could usually find work that didn't require so much overtime and in many cases would pay better as well. So if they choose to continue working on games, it's just that: a choice, not something that is being forced upon them. Given that, the implication that they are somehow being 'abused' sounds at best paternalistic.
The point is that the large majority of these developers are choosing this line of work, not being forced into it. Including the long hours and frequently lower than average pay. Any comparisons to slavery or child labor are an insult to all those who actually suffer(ed) under those conditions.
And just because people currently are satisfied with mistreatment doesn’t mean it’s not worthy of change. Whether if that change comes from unions, or from the companies themselves.
> ..failing to act for fear of “increased costs” is a poor justification for being satisfied with a status quo.
Saying this is about "increased costs" is a gross oversimplification of my position. Personally I don't care much about what the costs are for these companies; I'm more interested in what things will be affected by changing those costs. If SW dev talent is made more expensive for game companies (for whatever reason), then fewer SW devs will be employed there than would otherwise have been. Now this may or may not be a good thing, but it does seem like a very likely and unintended effect.
> And just because people currently are satisfied with mistreatment doesn’t mean it’s not worthy of change.
If they don't like it, the particular people in question are literally free to stop putting up with it at pretty much any time! We're talking about people with very marketable skills working in a relatively thriving industry. Here I'm speaking of all software, not just games, since most skills of SW devs working on games are useful in other kinds of SW as well. If more of them chose to not put up with such mistreatment, then game companies would be forced to increase compensation and/or improve the work environment in order to find people to work for them.
That's a point I keep trying to make. It's easy to see that the status quo sucks; understanding why requires more consideration. There is a reason why these adverse conditions are more common in the games industry than in other areas of SW dev, and that reason is that there are a lot of people who want to work on games compared to other kinds of SW dev work. Having worked in games myself, I can think of a few reasons for this:
* Games are fun to play (well, ideally).
* There is a great variety of different kinds of technical problems that need to be solved in a typical game: graphics, sound, collision detection, network communication, performance, all manner of different kinds of custom development tools, to name just a few. Personally I always liked this aspect.
* There is definitely a certain cachet to being able to tell people that you work on games, and even more so if it's a game they know of. I know it may sound a bit far fetched, but don't underestimate this one.
If unionization were to achieve the goals of better working conditions and/or higher pay, then one would expect demand for gamedev jobs to increase further, but certainly not to decrease.
Now perhaps you would argue that regardless of all the above, game developers shouldn't have to put up with those adverse conditions, that they should get to work in their field of choice without having to work long hours for relatively lower pay. I totally agree that that is a very fine goal. I simply ask you to consider that 1) unionization does not address the underlying cause, namely the surplus demand for gamedev jobs and 2) trying to force these changes via unionization will have unintended consequences, namely fewer jobs. The benefits (better working conditions) are obvious but the costs are much more diffuse and much less obvious.
In short, the best way to refute my concerns about the unintended consequence of lower SW dev employment in a post-unionization game industry would be to show that either a) it won't happen or b) the benefits for those who have a job outweigh the loss of jobs that would have existed but don't. Personally I think a is very unlikely to be true, so I think it's really down to b: is it better or worse (and for whom) to have fewer, better jobs?
You can just look at what unions have done to other industries to see.
As it relates to tech workers, there could be senority rules, qualification requirements (such as degrees, ect), and retaliation against people who are precieved as not having "paid their dues" yet (iE, they might try to stop the bootcampers from entering the industry).
The independent 20% will be muscled out of relevance as the union can simply ex-communicate members that break the rules and the employees will follow union rules. Independents will have to toe union rules to get anything done and not really be independent anymore, just a cache of jobs that the union is too big or risk averse to do.
An artist run game industry will die (like United Artists used to be in film) and you will see the game industry become a studio model and institutionalized like Disney.
Picking your random, above-99th-percentile literally-owns-multiple-Ferraris outlier and using him to discredit people who might be pulling $50K-$60K a year as line employees is downright disingenous.
(He's also a genius. And good for him for that. Most people aren't.)
It's possible that iD was well-run when he was there. (And, from what I've anecdotally heard, that's probably true--Todd Hollenshead gets a lot of respect from folks I know!) That doesn't mean other studios are run so well and it doesn't mean that Carmack's anecdotes cancel out, or even meaningfully put into question, those of people not in his rarefied circles. There are a lot of game developers out there and most don't have nearly the funding or the schedule luxuries that iD always did pre-Bethesda, when Carmack was most involved.
Why are you bad-faithing your way around this entire discussion?
Edit: Since you probably missed it, the question where how unions would prevent John Carmack from existing as he does now. John Carmack entered the gaming industry as a low skilled cheap abused worker, if he couldn't have done that at a young age chances are he would never have started his company and so on. Being able to work for 3 years instead of finishing your degree is an option unions likely would close.
Carmack would have never met Romero or the others, who first worked for SoftDisk, and were later allowed to cherry pick “cool” kids willing to work crazy overtime and spin out their own business unit called Gamers Edge, much to the dismay of the senior developers. That’s where they made Keen originally. According to the story, the rest of the developers actually did “organize” and threatened to quit en masse because they were jealous of the special treatment that Carmack and Romero were getting. The owner had to tell them, like it or not, Gamers Edge was what was paying their salaries and he had no choice.
iD would not have existed without Gamers Edge, and Gamers Edge would not have existed without SoftDisk.
Wolf3d and Doom would not have existed without both of them. And the world would be very different without those.
Carmack is smart and might have done something else cool, perhaps in a different industry with a different group, but it wouldn’t have been Wolfenstein or Doom. He would have been unemployable because he could not stand college, and he would likely not have started his own company, because business and management was what he detested and relied on his partners for.
The race-to-the-bottom pricing effect is not one caused by line developers and it's not caused by customers buying the games. It's caused by management and executives eating the seed corn. It's going to have to stop.
There are countless games and films at every level of investment that come out too late to be relevant, Jodi Foster suffered from that fate not too long ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TSB5YQqDiY
"Unionization, Steady Careers, and Generations of Games Culture" by Super Bunnyhop
03:15 Game Workers Unite: Who, what, why?
14:11 Anonymous on the disposability of QA staffers
18:11 Testimonies on crunch
24:01 History of unionization in Hollywood
33:39 The potential downsides of unionization
37:39 Ageism vs. future generations