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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

What is the distribution bottleneck that keeps artists from self organising?

Sort of the same problem as game testers.

If there are so many people willing to work for pennies _for the sake of working there_ that even a significant fraction of you organizing a stop-work won't make a dent other than a one-off blip if you arrange so much disruption it hiccups production visibly, there's only so much leverage to exert, since you have nothing they can't just source elsewhere.

> there's only so much leverage to exert, since you have nothing they can't just source elsewhere

That they’re making peanuts is unsurprising. That someone else isn’t, is. My question is what value the executives provide. In gaming, it’s distribution expertise—a random band of artists probably can’t negotiate distribution on a major console.

Anime is much the same. Licensing into the west only started in earnest in the last 10-15 years, which late by a lot of standards. I'm sure there are still a small slice of folks who can ink these deals, therefore giving anyone a job at all.

Also let's be real - most 'animators' are just tracing masters into different scenes. There's a small subset of them that are highly skilled, especially on non-original shows that use source material. I'd support paying true character artists and scene artists well, but not copy-pasters which seems like busy-work.

Any kind of media production involves a lot of grunt work. In general, you don't get anywhere in the arts without putting in a lot of hours on that sort of thing, during which you still need to eat and pay rent. Critiquing the production process over which they have no control to justify paying subpar wages is pretty mean-spirited.

Oh, man...spot on. We have a friend who was a senior game tester on a Very Big Francise(tm). He regularly worked twice as long every week than I did, made a fraction of the scratch and always said he did it because he loved the gaming biz. OK...I'm down with that...but maybe all of those stress-related health issues might be telling you something. Then he packed up everything and moved north because some assclown ex-ball player conned a ton of people into letting him cosplay being a game studio owner and our friend was one of many who got left holding the bag when that inevitably took a dump. He's still trying to fully recover. Definitely put the industry on the Nope list for me.

Ah 38 Studios :)

It's too bad about that one, fun game for what it was.

What I have noticed is that very often the problem with these "fun" jobs isn't that there is limited demand for them on the employer's side, rather the problem is that the profession of a game tester requires game developers. Some of the jobs are more popular than others. If you need two testers for every software developer working on a game and game testing is far more popular than game development, then game testing becomes a sweatshop activity because there aren't enough game developers to absorb all the people willing to become game testers.

Just based on my own experience and knowledge of the animation industry, it seems to be more of a risk-aversion/lack-of-imagination problem. It is true that getting onto major streaming platforms requires insider knowledge/connections, but there sure are a lot of people using free platforms that anyone can upload to, like YouTube.

What prevents any group of workers from self organizing?

> What prevents any group of workers from self organizing?

Some combination of skill, capital and ambition. Running a company is hard, and a specialised skill. Just look at restaurants to see how unevenly distributed administrative skills are.

rent

Burning passion?

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