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Comment by leipie | Hacker News Reader

Any group of workers can be exploited by their employers. The gaming industry has shown time and time again it is a prime example of this.

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How do you define exploitation?

Being sold a job working for a specific salary at 40 hours a week, and then being told to work 80+ hours a week without overtime in order to keep your job, and having all trace of your work removed from the credits if you leave. That's how the games industry works.

If you don't like it, refuse to do it, and maybe they'll fire you. Or, if you're OK with it, then do it. I don't really see where the exploitation comes in.

Or you could get together with your colleagues - unionize - and leverage the threat of leaving work en masse to negotiate better working conditions.

Why should people just have to leave the industry they have trained for because of the pigheadedness of their wannabe employers?

Except everyone who going for a job in games industry knows about it. It's not like people going for those 40 hours and unknowingly getting into modern slavery in a basement with their documents taken away.

There just too many people who want to make games and budgets are limited while competition is high. There is very few companies that are highly profitable, but majority of people wouldn't want to work for them.

Is it still shitty offer? Yes, but it's people's choice to work there.

Why can't they also want to make conditions better? Why do people have to accept that conditions are bad, tough tits, deal with it? We would probably have not half the safety regulations we have today and people would be dying a lot more on the job.

Because game development is what's called "successful product industry" which means sometimes you have to make 10 failed games to finally release 1 successful. Majority of game studios don't make it and competition is very high which means game budgets is race to the bottom.

Also platforms like consoles and Steam take their 30% cut, then publisher / investor take their 30-60% cut and you also have to pay taxes on every step. Usual game studio that working using publisher or investor money only get 20-30% of gross sales.

Large companies are able to make conditions better and they actually have higher salaries and better work life balance whithin the market, but since for everyone else it's run to the bottom they have countless number of potential new employees.

PS: I am CTO of small game development company and to make games I have to be okay that I'll earn 3x less than I would as middle software engineer in fintech. Game dev is tough industry to work in, but it's always by choice.

Literally everyone who works in game dev are able to find better paid job elsewhere: gambling, marketing, fintech, etc. People just love making games and dont want to move elsewhere.

Unless you have shares - you are exploited for your surplus value.

This is true for any and all wage based labour.

Not really - if you are salaried worker - you get paid even if the project that you are working on fails. You trade potential profit for stability. But if you are a founder/investor who works on your own stuff then you will lose your own money if the project fails.

We are all risking our time on Earth, betting what we do with it will be a success that will help our descendants and other fellow humans.

Somebody wasting it by fucking up the project by mismanagement or misappropriation is a loss for us all.

Individualism sure is cancer.

No, if you don’t generate surplus value. You get fired. One project sure, maybe your ROI window for your employer is higher than that. But it still holds true.

Do you mean because the company values my labor more than they pay me, that's exploitation?

How about when I buy eggs from the grocery and value them more than they cost me, so that there is consumer surplus. Is that exploitation?

Exploiting an egg?

Having people produce something and not paying them what it is worth so someone else can profit - is exploitation.

Remove the prejudice from the word. Just like if you “exploit a coal seam” or “exploit sunlight to generate electricity”. You are deriving value from something where the benefit is more than the cost. When the exploitation crosses a human, it (rightly) takes on a negative connotation.

Exploiting the egg farmer, I suppose. Just seems nonsensical. Every trade benefits both parties more than the trade value. Otherwise the trade wouldn't happen.

there is both producer and consumer surplus, both supply and demand surplus. If there isn't, you're looking at abusive price discrimination.

When in the world will this meme end.

If I am paid to dig holes, then a hole is not worth anything to me except for what someone will pay for it.

I'm not going to stay at home and dig all these holes in my back yard and glimmer with glee at all this surplus value that I've kept to myself.

Code is the exact same. Me writing a python module to process a CSV file is not at all valuable to me, but the wage I'm paid for making it, is.

It's not exploitation. It's a very easy trade.

It’s not a meme. You do something that is sold for X and you are paid X-Y. y is your surplus value.

True you possibly couldn’t get that y on your own. But someone got it, and it wasn’t you.

> You do something that is sold for X and you are paid X-Y.

If my neighbor wants a new fence (the Y), offers me $50 to dig a hole (the X-Y) to put a fence pole in.

I dig a hole, i get $50. He gets closer to a fence. we have both profited, who is exploited?

Or if you want to go even more basic:

he wants a fence, he pays me $500 to build a fence, i build the fence and get $500. who is exploited?

Note these are real examples from real life that i deal with.

That’s not wage based labour. You are an owner/operator in that scenario, and you fully realised the value.

The value of the fence is X and you got X.

The value of the fence is different for different people.

For me it's $500, for my neighbour it's $5000 - because it stops rabbits from eating his garden and stray dogs or whatever.

If it's $5000 value to my neighbour, should I have charged more even though I would've accepted $500? Who would have been exploiting who then?

This is directly analogous to my employer as well, except replace "neighbour" with boss, and "fence" with code. It's still a voluntary trade.

No it’s not, because you are being paid for an outcome not time.

So yes, if it’s worth more and someone pays more then you get more. That’s not at all the point.

But if you are paid per hour and you produce many more fences than is required to pay your wage, you are being exploited.

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