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> "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.

You have a point, but I think what actually happens isn't so sure, because there are still market forces putting downward pressure on barriers to entry. So either:

(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.

The majority of development studios are relatively small and, if you follow industry news, bankruptcy is a routine occurrence; even some well known small and indie names are only one or two flops away from bankruptcy. Unions might be able to make headway against EA, Valve, or Activision but for the smaller studios, well, there is no surplus. You can't get blood from a stone no matter how hard you squeeze.

Yes, but why would a union negotiate a deal that bankrupts their small studio? That's against their own self-interest.

Why would a big union care about a small company?

If it can't afford to provide for its employees, why should a small company exist?

No game developer is living on starvation wages, it is just a question of how much they get. If a game company can provide for its people and offer enough incentives that its workers aren't fleeing to better jobs it deserves to exist.

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 it can't afford to provide for its employees, why should a small company exist?"

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.)

I think the question is "Is there a better deal that's possible without bankrupting the studio?" When it comes to it, a lot of game companies are essentially running like startups, but without the massive gluts of VC funding to give them runway. It's questionable how much small-to-mid-sized studios can increase costs without making it all the more risky that a single underperformance kills the studio.

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.

I think there are a lot of poor analogies and comparisons being made to Hollywood. AAA linear game development accompanied by massive sustained growth in production budgets has made some segments of games look like Hollywood.

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.

IMO this just feels wrong. If you're knowingly going into an industry with a bad rap where developers say they feel exploited then don't go into it. The studio has already given them a job, going into it and then complaining and demanding change seems a bit selfish, no?

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?

I see your point. But I think what you're taking for granted (tell me if I'm wrong) is that exploitation is somehow a necessary condition of making the game development industry work, and trying to improve it would destroy it.

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?

It's not wrong because all jobs are by mutual agreement. You aren't in it by the grace of the owner. You have come to an agreement with them to trade labour for pay. Therefore if you do know the working conditions in general there is nothing wrong with trying to renegotiate using your leverage to get better conditions. This is most obvious in trying to negotiate promotions and pay rises in peoples day to day lives. The biggest issue for most workers is that the company that employs you has a lot more leverage than you do as an individual.

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.

> If they do feel exploited, then the union will be a good thing.

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.

Do unions decrease employment? I wasn't aware of that.

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.

I didn't say that unions decrease employment. I did describe the mechanisms by which employment might be reduced due to increasing costs (regardless of the cause of the cost increases).

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.

If our only consideration for every decision is whether or not if it will increase cost for employers, then we would still have child labor and slavery. I don't believe this is a hyperbolic statement. The specter of increased costs is used to justify opposing everything from higher minimum wages to the 40-hour workweek.

You're missing the point.

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.

You’re missing the point, which is that failing to act for fear of “increased costs” is a poor justification for being satisfied with a status quo.

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.

I misspoke; I should have said, "you're missing my point". I think we may be talking past each other a bit.

> ..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?

> What barriers to entry do you foresee coming out of a union?

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).

Fair enough. I wasn't aware of those possibilities.

The employees at large companies like EA and Acti-Blizz and other big corps will join a union that will gain them more benefits at their day job. The feeder schools and universities will start getting all their students into union positions.

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.

As we've never seen any examples of tech sub-industry unionize before, this whole scenario is of dubious provenance. Especially since 21st history labor relations will unlikely to mirror what happened a century ago.