Blizzard executive asks employees to “consider the consequences” of union card

> Or, alternatively, just don't work for companies that treat their employees like shit.

Hmm... interesting advice, I wonder why people getting treated like shit by their employers never thought of that.

Gamers themselves do not understand the dichotomy of game development. All changes good or bad are at the behest of the "game devs". Everyone gets lumped into a single category. If you're making a game engine like Sony did for GOW, I don't think you're a content producer, you're a hardcore engineer milking every bit of the playstation so that artists and content producers can make there visions a reality. I guess what I'm really trying to say is that devs get a bad rep in gaming based on decisions they're likely not making themselves or may even be against making.

Yeah I have to say working on character or environment design is much more fulfilling than working on designing store-brand K-Cup packaging. (Where the packaging has to match the shitty branding of all the other products so there's no creativity allowed whatsoever).

Same.

It's great. Most game companies are very comfortable. Nice offices with free food, good pay, flexible hours, remote friendly, full benefits. Crunch is rare these days. This is all true of Blizzard, btw.

The vocal minority on twitter are trading in outrage; the currency of social media. And there's a distinct lack of perspective. Have they ever worked on a farm? A restaurant kitchen? A construction site? A warehouse? Or anywhere outside of an Aeron chair? Mostly no. This doesn't mean it's perfect or can't be improved, but it's really nice compared to most and this gets lost in the noise. I often visit poor neighborhoods and poor countries and read history and thank my lucky stars.

And yes, you can get even better pay in the financial services industry. If that's what you want, please, go work there. No one's stopping you.

“Artist” as in game media assets or as in a romanticized version of “software engineering”?

I think therein may lie the difference.

The bad conditions are caused in part due to excess supply, so companies have their pick of desperate/abuse-tolerant employees. Having less workers would force companies to compete on working conditions.

I worked in games for a few years. For a good company, whose games sold well. With good leaders in charge.

It still sucked compared to industry positions I took later. There’s a lot more pressure to ship for Christmas, to demo for E3, etc. New consoles invariably have terrible documentation (“it can never not be forgotten to fail to initialize the blah”), and in general the game (and entertainment broadly) industry is less linear/more hit-driven than others.

I also hated that it broke my enjoyment of playing games if I got distracted wondering how they did some effect or why their renderer had a certain glitch.

100% anecdotal, but I left games a little less than 2 years ago (after being in them for 12 years or so) to work on cloud computing for accounting solutions. While I'll admit the jokes are a little different, but the people are nice and the working conditions are great. They believe in the clock, dude. They live by that thing. OT has to be accounted for and approved, and they don't really care for it when estimates aren't met. It's a little pressure, but it's nice. And they pay better.

It's great. I'm really enjoying it. I snipe people from my old work (who are willing to leave games) whenever I see an opening.

It entirely depends on what type of game you enjoy. Triple AAA MMOs and movie tie ins? They'd likely become worse, or just boilerplate drop-in graphics to WoW into Star Wars or Star Trek or whatever.

Or some of the extremely high quality indie games?

I'd take many of the indie games over WoW or CoD any day of the week. I don't need MMOs to enjoy a well written game.

No. The problem is: there are too many people willing to work in game development in bad conditions. If supply dwindled, the game companies will have to improve working conditions or face huge delays in delivering their next cash cow.

Unlike large immovable factories, or big supply chain companies - game companies rise and fall in a market that is kill or be-killed.

Any game company that unionizes will, in my opinion, have those studios shut down, and new ones open up in non-union environments.

To be honest, even if Blizzard doesn't unionize, I imagine that the parent company is going to wind down the employees in the studio and move content elsewhere.

That’s exactly what I was thinking. This sounds more like an opportunity to finally make gamedev an appealing job.

Working in games isn't courageous. As GP said, there's a glut of people who want to do it. It's oversupplied, and the lower wages reflect the lower marginal utility to society for engineers to work in games over other kinds of software.

Being more charitable to GP's point, I didn't read it as "don't try to improve conditions". I read it as "vote with your feet".

> you know that the best can happen that the result of your work is going to make people spend time on video games instead of doing something better.

You could say the same thing about any hobby activity. Playing games isn't inherently bad just like drinking alcohol isn't inherently bad, its how much you let it consume your life (and in my personal opinion and experience, if you binge something its usually to fill some hole in your life, eg loneliness, and removing the thing to binge doesn't solve it and will simply get replaced with something else. The underlying issue needs to be addressed)

There's a name for this phenomena: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensating_differential

I don't necessarily agree with calling this a "choice" because that implies accountability that isn't really there, and more importantly, removes said accountability from the people running these hellhole work environments.

It's the responsibility of management to provide a healthy working environment. This isn't just a moral obligation, but a creative one as well - businesses that operate like large-scale game developers or Japanese[0] animation studios will ultimately produce uninspired work that people will stop buying.

On the worker's end, there doesn't necessarily have to be a choice to work in the same industry forever, either. Most of these companies have dangerously high employee churn. The company doesn't have to convince people to stay forever, they just need to replace people faster then they burn them out. For the past few decades, they've been able to do that by managing their image and hiding public awareness of their working conditions.

In other words, management can choose to operate their company like a KyoAni or like an A-1 Pictures. They can choose to be a Valve[1] or an Ubisoft[2].

[0] Technically speaking a lot of tween work gets outsourced to lower-COL countries in east Asia, but those studios are often run just as bad as domestic animation studios in Japan.

[1] Hedging my bets: if a bunch of shit comes out of Valve about horrible working conditions please note that this comment was written before that came to light.

[2] A lot of stuff has come out about Activision-Blizzard-King, but let's not forget that Ubisoft is still worse - they actively shuffled sexual predators around their organization, Vatican-style, to keep them on their payroll. The only reason why we're talking about ABK is that the dueling EEOC/CFEH investigations have basically exposed everything.

>I'm very happy that they can make this choice.

...and pay the associated costs for it. Alternatively, I'm happy that people churning out enterprise CRUD apps are well rewarded for working in a boring field.

First, size matters. Google and Facebook probably do not have a "family" feeling because they're huge. Growing a company to that size almost always means losing that feeling, as well as adding a host of inefficiencies.

Second, society has this strange idea that unions are for blue collar jobs. People think that, if you have a university degree, you don't need a union to represent you. White collar salaries have remained stagnant as a result, and white collar employees may lack avenues to address abuses, such as what occurred at Blizzard, that blue collar workers represented by a union may have.

It seems as though people are abandoning this prejudice. Perhaps, once a company is big enough and has a track record of not treating employees well, unionization should be the natural course for its workers, no matter what colour their collars may be.

Unions do have a bad reputation for inefficiency, but with remuneration falling behind the pace of inflation while productivity soars ever upwards, is it surprising that workers are starting to feel unions are worth embracing?

If Blizzard's employees unionize, you're going to see serious push back against some of the basic facts of game developer life. e.g. Crunch-time. I don't blame Blizzard's execs for being scared right now. They screwed up bad and now they're facing epic consequences.

Unions are throwing shade on not unionising by pointing out only the potential positive side of unions.

I don’t see how it’s a “threat” or anywhere near a threat. Many people will sign a document because someone else says, “it’s good for you”. It’s good to know that you’re signing a legally binding document.

>If folks fail to pass a unionization vote now, they probably can't just go and vote for it later, it doesn't work that way.

That’s besides the point. Should people sign a document without knowing it’s legally binding or understanding what it entails, simply because the union vote might not happen again later?

Btw your post makes it sound as if the company is inherently evil or trying to screw its workers. Many capitalist businesses don’t want a union. And many unions are actually not effective.

I’m not in favor nor against this unionization, but there’s a clear bias here and attempt to manufacture outrage.

It's not in the same universe as a threat! The only negative thing the letter says is that unionizing will mean the CWA has exclusive representation rights. They don't suggest that there will be any negative effects on wages or employment practices or retention.

I'm not sure what the "it" you're referring to is, but I'm pretty confident it's possible to continue a unionization drive indefinitely or drop it and restart it later. Restrictions come into play only at later steps in the process; until the CWA gets enough union authorization cards to petition for an election or ask for voluntary recognition, there's no deadlines or cooldown periods involved.

Hopefully everyone hesitates and reads legal contracts. Why is "hesitation" a bad thing here? Even if you fully agree with the sentiments of the goal, it's still obligatory to read the legalese in the damn thing and understand what it means for your life. I find all sorts of things in contracts I don't agree with, and they require careful reading and sometimes outside legal opinion. Had I not, I would have been barred from the niche industry I work in for 5 years after completing a contract job.

Many people will read it and hesitate, which is the purpose of the email.

Which still doesn't make it a threat. They're warning about something the piece of paper does, not something Blizzard might do (and employees actually signing up for the right reason - a belief that the CWA will negotiate much better terms than they've been able to negotiate themselves - should be able to dismiss that warning with the same eyeroll they dismiss all the fluff at the beginning about the things Blizzard does for its staff without a union).

It's "We think X wont help you in the way you think it might [although we're obviously biased here] but it's your decision and we couldn't stop you even if we wanted to" not "If X, the consequences will be punishment"

I'm sorry, you're take is that "Twitter takes must represent the actual desires of the people at Blizzard considering unionization"?

Sir, I have some things to explain to you about the internet...

Pretty sure this is sarcasm. Plus your math is wrong

> This is a negative stereotype of unions—based on some real-world examples, to be sure, but a stereotype all the same—that has been aggressively pushed as anti-union propaganda for decades.

It would be interesting to see examples of unions that aggressively promote performance based pay -- this is a genuine question. I think an objective view would show that the stereotype is broadly accurate, if not 100% accurate.

The reason for this is that we live in a world in which 20% of the people do 80% of the work, but only have 20% of the votes. That is why there is an inherent tension between democracy and fair pay. It's true that this has nothing to do with unions per se, except that unions are the ones to be in a position to vote on pay.

One could imagine a different situation, say where the number of votes you have is weighted by your salary when the union first forms, and have negotiations be for total labor expenditure rather than individual worker salaries. Then you can still have a union but it would resist the type of equalization forces by which the best people exit for higher pay outside the union, which ends up being a drag on both the union and the company and causes a lot of firms to oppose unions more than they otherwise would.

It's a factual representation with the clear effect of misleading people. I won't claim to know what the tweeter or submitter intended, but it's impossible to believe that this submission is sitting at the top of HN just because people think "consider" is a neat word. We're all here because we read the title and thought it meant the Blizzard executive was threatening employees.

You should generally not believe uncorroborated accusations by random people on Twitter leveled immediately after their target is in the news. This could be true, but there are also clear incentives to make it up or exaggerate it for clicks; if you don't know this person, how can you evaluate their/his credibility?

This tweet in particular seems very vulnerable to the same kind of distortion as in the original submission, where innocuous things from people you've resolved not to trust start being casted as threats.

the complete inability for Twitter threads (and replies) to convey nuance should be enough to meet criteria for flagging.

The key difference though is that statistically, unionized employees are paid more than non-unionized employees... so much so that the union dues are significantly less than the increased pay from collective bargaining.