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Comment by dtagames | Hacker News Reader

This is fantastic news and something we need very much!

When my studio was closed and 36 of us fired without notice 7 months ago, I poked around at union options and was shocked to find they were only inside individual studios, not even across whole companies, much less across the industry.

The games industry is 100 years behind film and music in standardizing contracts, roles, and rights (including IP rights for failed projects). This initiative gives us a chance to fix it!

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The churn rate in the gaming studios is usually abnormally high. Most key talent often breaks off into their own indie studios, and while budgets wont be spectacular AAA level... the content usually offers better quality fun, and the artists aren't burned out in 6 months.

The film and TV production situation is nothing to aspire toward... especially if you are a contractor. It never lead to more stable work for the crews, and became a feast or famine type seasonal working arrangement for many.

Unions are better than none, as at least your crew actually gets paid by some rat-fink production manager that often disappeared on wrap.

Best of luck, and some of the best talent I've met was shafted by a AAA studio at least once in their career (often for some really bizarre reasons.) =3

How is this fantastic news in an industry that is on fire and collapsing?

The US (and more generally Western) gaming industry is getting obliterated by Asian studios. I doubt a union (pre-supposing this is a union, which it is not) would help US studios be more competitive.

A union doesn't help you if your company, or entire industry, goes bankrupt.

The US game industry seems to be collapsing because they do not offer the customers what they want.

Treating employees in the industry fair might not change this, but should be beneficial to them regardless, unless it would make the misalignment of the product offer even worse which is entirely possible.

it doesn’t give consumers what they want—it just targets a small subset willing to spend the most money.

unions aren't directly about consumers. Why argue this angle? Consumers don't get games if devs don't exist.

>it just targets a small subset willing to spend the most money.

people with money aren't worried about getting laid off. Quite the contrary.

The big studios aren't suffering in the same way the laid off employees are. Their numbers aren't rising at pandemic level and they decide to panic. They aren't shuttering anytime soon.

Asia isn't really booming either. At least if you compare to western studios. Japan had decades of a stangant economy and are coming out of a recession. Any kind of growth is a gold mine for them. China is a minefield as well economically.

> I doubt a union (pre-supposing this is a union, which it is not) would help US studios be more competitive.

It's not about competition, it's about protecting your livliehood so you don't get sacked to make an earnings call look a smidgen better.

Europe seems to be doing alright with the likes of Warhorse, CDPR, Rockstar North, Paradox Interactive etc.

The salaries here are far lower than in the USA which probably helps a bit, that's not good for the workers though of course.

I don't understand. If a company closes, how is a union supposed to help?

Can a union force a company to continue a project if the company decides to cancel it?

Yes. But it can more reasonably force the company to retain the employees of said project, and move them to other projects instead of firing them.

Unions are a bargaining tool that can theoretically advocate for anything - it's more useful generally to talk about what they usually do. Generally unions focus on employee rights and will only organize for specific business policies if it is causing obvious harm to the company and employees. I'd only expect a union to force a project to be continued if it was being canceled for silly reasons (internal company politics and similar) but usually simply moving the workforce to another project would be sufficient.

Ideally the union wants to deal with the larger entity that controls the studio. Presumably, the studio did not go out of business; rather, it was shut down by its parent company.

One of the benefits to having a labor representative in top-level planning is as a sanity check. Harder to tank your own company if you have feedback loops in place.

That does depend on laws in your particular country.

In the UK, you can be join the national union even if you are the only one in your workplace. Typically union recognition within a particular workplace comes later after sufficient numbers join.

companies with unions are a hundred years behind companies that run efficiently and do what they are supposed to instead of acting as a playing piece in the game of politics and union corruption. nobody ever talks about the fact that unions in america are corrupt… unions in germany aren't corrupt and germans can build bridges still. we can barely manage it without hiring foreign firms… stop worshiping unions its part of the problem

Unions and the labor laws they helped create save American lives. Unfortunately American companies have been upset about this for decades and fight it at every level. Including lobbying laws into places preventing industry strikes. Thus leaving us far behind countries with properly working unions like Germany as you mentioned.

Yes, unions at video game studios are bound to save so many lives.

In other words your comment is hyperbolic and does not apply to the topic at hand.

Given the pattern of video game studios unceremoniously laying off people the second a game is complete and how health care in the US is overwhelmingly tied to employment, it's extremely plausible that somebody somewhere has died from lack of collective bargaining power. If it hasn't happened, that's most likely because people just leave the video game industry before they actually need those health care benefits.

>Yes, unions at video game studios are bound to save so many lives.

Stress & constant overtime crunch culture will absolutely be a detriment on the health and wellbeing of workers in any industry.

Again, labor laws saved lives in the past, they can save and/or benefit lives today.

>In other words your comment is hyperbolic and does not apply to the topic at hand.

Welcome to the topic at hand.

>Again, labor laws saved lives in the past, they can save and/or benefit lives today.

They can, but game dev is not a critical national industry that politicians are gonna fight for with laws to protect labor. Otherwise we could have had unionized clothes making union but what saw instead was the entire textile industry shipped oversees. Game dev will follow a similar fate.

You can unionize if you want, but unless you're guarantee to have a blockbuster IP on your hands capable of raking in billions, you won't be able to compete with game devs from lower CoL countries.

In a globalized free market with no tariffs, high CoL labor can't compete with low CoL labor making commodity goods, which a a lot of games are nowadays. Unions won't fix this, but accelerate offshoring at the expense of the local industry.

> you won't be able to compete with game devs from lower CoL countries.

I mean, those devs might unionize as well. Certainly would've helped both the ZA/UM and CD Projekt Red devs, for different reasons.

>I mean, those devs might unionize as well.

The word "might" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. If unionization in Asia was so easy we would have seen it happen a long time ago, but what we saw instead was suicide nets on buildings.

That caricature was so long ago a new caricature (from seven years ago) has emerged to lampoon it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpB9Aeq8lUA

Granted, I have no doubt that the work culture is much tougher than in North America. But even the Chinese government has recognized 996 and taken steps to address it.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/east-asia/china-neijuan-invo...

Also, Foxconn manufacturing isn't exactly the same thing as NetEase video game development, even if they both exist within the same labor environment.

>That caricature

Foxconn workers killing themselves by jumping off their office budling is a caricature to you? How out of touch can you be?

Those tragedies largely ended after 2011. One would assume things have changed since then.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012...

https://www.foxbusiness.com/features/apple-foxconn-factory-c...

Most of the problems with US unions can be traced back to anti-union legislation that used the promises of entrenching current unions as a carrot to get the laws passed to suppress new unions. New unions are much harder to create today, even more so if there is an existing union that covers similiar employees to your own. And old established unions are hard to get rid of even if the majority of employees are unhappy with it and would rather it was either gone or replaced with a different union with different rules and leaders. And an old entrenched bureaucratic political position is an easy target for corruption.

America talks often about union corruption. In fact, it does this to the point of crowding out any productive discussion - because Americans are often quite resistant to looking at other countries and understanding what approaches they take to certain social issues.

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