Employees at Bethesda Game Studios Unionize | Hacker News Reader

Employees at Bethesda Game Studios Unionize

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35 pointsajford11 comments

I imagine that the closing of Arkane studios Austin was a big motivator for worker's to unionize. They created successful games and Microsoft shut them down for pretty much no reason. I am kinda on the periphery of the gaming scene in Austin and that was a huge deal when it happened.

IIRC previous Arkane Austin titles are Dishonored 2 and Prey which were great games, but Redfall was definitely not so well received. I wouldn’t necessarily agree they were closed for “pretty much no reason,” but should one big flop mean a studio gets the axe?

With how expensive AAA development has gotten maybe that’s the stakes now, and a reason so many are taking the modern Hollywood playbook of churning out sequels and remasters.

The really egregious “no reason” closure was Tango Gameworks, makers of Hi-Fi Rush.

> With how expensive AAA development has gotten maybe that’s the stakes now, and a reason so many are taking the modern Hollywood playbook of churning out sequels and remasters.

The studio was owned by M$ though. There's no reason they couldn't have kept all those people in-house and just moved them on to some game with a tried and true IP attached to it.

Is there "no reason"?

I want to steelman microsoft's position here, and I can find many reasons:

1. The financial loss of the product (Redfall) was large enough that keeping that business unit itself was a risk. They need to show wallstreet that something is being done.

2. While there are talented people at the studio, they are unable as a corporation to be able to figure out what went wrong, ie who do they need to fire and who can they keep.

3. Their current business model precludes just moving people to other products for some reason, they don't want to disrupt those other products with a reorganization, this just isn't how they run studios, they want the teams to be colocated, etc.

While sure its bad that the studio lost its job I really don't think it's no reason.

I'm honestly surprised at how well 1. works. Like if you told me as a company you spent over a million dollars hiring a ton of people and can't figure out what to do with them that you're just going to fire them I'd see that as a failing of management.

Even worse if you give them severance for like 6+ months of wages. Like you couldn't figure out how to reassign them with that long of a timespan?

2. From what I understand most of the talented people left during redfall's development.

Maybe "no reason" was a bad word choice. I would say that regardless of the reason, it doesn't matter to workers. What matters to workers is to have as much power as possible over their own situation. The simple calculus is that if you see another studio closing, for any reason, you recognize that this will be used as a cudgel by management and executives to work you and your colleagues even harder. When the true nature of the relationship between employee and worker is revealed, unionization is the obvious response.

>I imagine that the closing of Arkane studios Austin was a big motivator for worker's to unionize. They created successful games and Microsoft shut them down for pretty much no reason.

And how would it be different with a union? Hold a strike to force the company to keep the studio open?

Its a messy process cause no one has/gets time to come up with something more imaginative (ironic I know cause this is supposed to be a creative class).

Thanks to globalization, ever changing regional differences in interest rates, corporate taxes, forex, labor costs, real estate prices, govt freebies/subsidies/laws etc etc, companies make decisions that have nothing to do with product produced yday or its quality.

In corporate wonderland, execs aren't trained (or given the time and resources) to use their imagination or think too deeply about how to respond to All these external forces. They are expected to avoid complex or unpredictable solutions and React as quickly as possible before the competition takes advantage of the external changes. Its automatic and highly predictable behavior how execs will respond.

The only way to slow the instant (bordering on mindless) reactions down, is to add Delay. Which buys people time on both sides of the equation to think. Now obviously its hit or miss whether any thinking happens and creative solutions are found. But its a starting point in having some sort of say in a process people on all sides have lost control over, due to global not local changes.

If one studio closes you can imagine the screws are tightening at the others. Unionization arguably wouldn't help for studios closing, but it would help push back against crunch and other labor abuses.

If video game devs were paid as much, and worked as much, as regular software engineers, the whole industry would implode.

That being said, I think unionization would be the best thing that’s ever happened to this industry. Video game development sounds like hell.

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