Who cares? A union doesn't stop the fact that high budget games just kinda suck. Layoffs happen because these games bomb over and over and over and money runs out.
Or, they ensures you're credited regardless if you left before the game shipped (because it is a form of portfolio for your career).
And lastly, a union means you cannot be exploited hard, like a lot of wanabe game programmers and artists are wont to be.
But.. the core problem was the schedule for development was bunk. If the schedule was right you wouldn't need crazy long hours.
Unless you're making the next GTA6 for which the customer is willing to wait forever, if you increase the schedule so that everyone works fewer hours, then you'll get outcompeted in the free market by game devs from China, Korea and Japan where long hours are not an issue and can get games much quicker to market on lower budgets, putting you out of business.
Games also aren't zero sum either. Turns out consumers can buy more than 1 game a year.
And those are what's available as work these days, but has increasingly been outsourced to cheaper locations. Good riddence, but it also means lost jobs.
Yes it is if you're EA, Ubisoft, Microsoft, Sony, etc. The executives there run the game making like factories.
>Studios can try, but no one is going to make Elder Scrolls VI feel like ES6 except Bethesda's team, design, and tech.
What Bethesda quality you mean? This? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0R_WcU-hsY
The original Bethesda staff that worked on your favorite franchises doesn't work there anymore, they all retired or moved on to greener pastures and the studio, just like EA, Ubisoft, etc is full of clueless underpaid and overworked juniors that don't have the skills or eye for detail the original staff had. Here the Chinese and Koreans will eat you alive.
>Games also aren't zero sum either.
No, but the hours in a days is a zero sum. People have the same free time after school/work to play games, this doesn't grow with the market. So they have to carefully pick what games they'll spend their time and money on. And if it's between some Western slop or an Asian game that's better and cheaper, they'll pick the latter. The more competitive the gaming market is by international players, the more western game studios will be squeezed out.
Of course, but workers in the west also have strong economy and a lot of other better choice than working in a sweatshop. Workers in Asia do not , that's why all offshoring goes there.
[1] https://www.crossrivertherapy.com/research/literacy-statisti...
I don't think that's quite true. Unions can definitely make a company less competitive, in addition to the usual headwinds they face.
Whether a company prospers or fails the employees working for that company will, in nearly all circumstances, have much better quality of employment while that company lasts. I'd argue that long term company health is supported by unionization but I understand that there is a massive entrenched cultural rejection of that notion.
This is too black and white. Unionization creates another power structure in a company, one that isn't particularly aligned with company health, but can be. It just depends on the people involved and how they use that power.
> but I understand that there is a massive entrenched cultural rejection of that notion.
I've no idea what you mean by a cultural rejection - which culture are you talking about?
this is basically a tautology so it's a useless statement. Water for a human can bring them back to life, drown them, or tear their body apart. of course context, intent, and factors matter.
But in general, unions are good for a traditional company health: happy workers -> more productivity -> better products. Us being in this turmoil where we aren't fousing on better products doesn't change that.
This is one of those things that's hard to spot from an un-unionised standpoint. You have hard-working, driven workers who sometimes suffer unfairnesses that a union would solve. So unions look good, because your workers are hard-working and driven, and it's all upside.
A decade of unionisation might look very different. For example, the UK in the 1970s briefly moved to a 3 day working week[0] because of coal miner strikes that meant there wasn't enough power in the country. Not all examples are this extreme, partly because we learned from that experience, it's worth thinking of things more objectively, outside of the current context, and analysing the pros and cons of both positions.
Eh, I grew up in the states and unions were heavily demonized there. I tend to couch my words quite defensively due to that - my apologies.
> This is too black and white. Unionization creates another power structure in a company, one that isn't particularly aligned with company health, but can be. It just depends on the people involved and how they use that power.
I agree that this isn't a guarantee, there are both bad unions and some good unions that do ill for what they perceive to be good reasons - however, generally speaking, increasing job security and tamping down on companies' instinct to turn to layoffs will usually benefit companies. My experience in the workforce is that larger companies use layoffs as a frequent tool for stock price manipulation when they're having a bad quarter to appear "lean" - and while the markets do respond positively to that it generally comes at the expense of long term company health.
This is definitely a case where both unions and companies can be in the wrong - but it seems that companies are much more often in the wrong. Long tenured employees are quite valuable and layoffs should be a tool used in the extremes to account for overgrowth and shouldn't be happening multiple times in the same decade unless a company is in severely poor health.
But then so has most of the industry, which has experienced growth year-on-year.
A profit does not prevent layoffs and no individual can 10X themselves to safety. There is a huge power and incentive disparity between the people with the power to initiate layoffs and the people who get laid off. There's a way to shrink the gap, but it means accepting you have more in common with your colleagues than your shareholders, then communicating it collectively.
ehh, I give it a week /s
But yes, i'm surprised people still fall into this notion that the last 3 years of layoffs falls into anything close to a just world. it's been clear that these tech cuts are not merit based for a while.
How many modern games are there on this list?
The most recent game on that list is from 2023, maybe it just takes time before a game end up on that list? Baldurs Gate 3 was beyond mainstream popular at one point, and surely will end up that list sooner or later, but maybe it's still too early?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_The_Elder_Scrol...
This is the turning point where the industry began to change from selling products to selling services. Expansion packs existed before then, but they were sold as complete experiences, essentially mini-sequels sold at a discount because they reused the same engine. The horse armor was something different and controversial at the time.
I would probably say the OP was commenting more on Western gaming, as that's the pattern (see UbiSoft's consecutive string of failures, for example). Games like Elden Ring, Animal Crossing, and Cyberpunk came out of popular non-Western gaming.
The only Western games in that list for the last 6 years are Call of Duty games and Hogwarts Legacy, which was good, although from what I remember vilified by Western media for helping enrich JK Rowling.
I wasn't.
> And how does this relate to unions?
I was replying to the comment above, not a different comment.
That itself is fairly damning but what puts it over the top is that there are wayyyy more gamers nowadays than there were 16 years ago.
Modern AAA stuff is just simply pretty bad. Games made on a conveyor belt just don't work, at least beyond a point - and that point, wherever it may be, is well behind us for just about all AAA studios.
>Modern AAA stuff is just simply pretty bad
1. your conclusion doesnt match your premise. what does sales have to do with quality?
2. this whole argument is just a useless tangent. If you want to look for games not on a conveyor belt, don't look at best selling lists. Especially for networked games continually updated for decades vs. hand crafted releases
The reason the reflects on AAA games is because AAA in modern times is much more about budget than depth or quality. AAA games are dumping massive amounts of money on titles with the hope of a quick turn-around, but sales for these games are increasingly meh, because the games are increasingly meh.
Even the same studios do a poor job of rehashing stuff. There are currently something like 10x as many players playing Skyrim as Starfield. It's quite pathetic.
But also, note that many of the games--especially the ones near the top--also double- and triple-count their numbers by doing rereleases and special editions and whatnot that all get to count for the "same" game.
Next, note that already 10% of the list came out since the COVID-19 pandemic started--is that not modern enough for you?
Finally, several of these games are continually being worked on and receiving content updates. Minecraft and The Sims 4 may be over a decade old, but they both received updates within the past several months, and their players fully expect more updates in the next several months. Does that mean they aren't modern?
And I see a handful of games released since 2020 on that list.
It also only deals with games that are sold. Whereas games like Genshin Impact have a massive worldwide audience and yet aren't going to show up on that list.
It's hard for a game released in the past year to make it onto a top ten list full of games like GTA5 that have been consistently selling copies for over a decade.
You had an opinion, it was neiter right nor wrong. I was a teenager and watched Juno, 300, Bay's Transformers, And Pirates of the Carribean 3. I thought it was a renaissance. It's all based on personal experience.
> things are not the same regardless of how much you want to believe that
So how is this related to a union in 2025?
Halo 3 seems to also be very popular only in the U.S., while Baldur's Gate 3 is more recognized internationally.
Closest I can get to an objective answer would be Fortnite (since you aren't really specifying the kind of cultral impact). and that's "only" 7 years old or so.
So it makes perfect sense that contemporary AAA devs would have no idea it even existed.
I guess I'm mostly just amused by the initial comment suggesting Halo 3 of all games as a super incredible cultural impact game. I just can't see it like that at all -- at the time it was just a capstone to what Halo 1 and 2 set up. And in modern times, Halo is so irrelevant that it's probably going to be on Sony's console.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reaXYMihM1Y
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_of_Halo_3
Halo 3 broke sales records at a time where you needed to buy physical copies.
It had a famous Superbowl ad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKDkKKt9Y7I
Perhaps I'm just missing your argument. Is your argument mostly about the immediate "pop" surrounding the launch, rather than any sort of longer term cultural impact? If so, then sure, I'll grant Halo 3 had one of and perhaps even the largest launch hype of all time from the physical release age. Still it's not like Halo 2 wasn't hugely popular at its launch too, though 3 was probably bigger. And of course the already mentioned Modern Warfare had a big launch, though by MW2 the whole culture of launch hype with midnight releases and camping out and so on was just about dead thanks to digital distribution and such. You had other games later on with crazy marketing too -- how are super bowl ads relevant? Dante's Inferno (2010) is a game I've never played but it also had a super bowl ad I've never seen until now. I'd dare say its impact is far less than Halo's, both at its launch (seems to be a God of War clone) and since.
But if you really are arguing that nothing has had a bigger long-term cultural impact since, the single counterexample of Minecraft is enough to stand against that. Speaking of God of War, there's another franchise that has probably by now out-shined the Halo series for cultural impact. (And maybe worth arguing that it probably contributed to Halo 4's dumb "Press button to beat the Didact" QTE?) I'd even put 2011's Dark Souls higher for birthing a new subgenre term, the "Soulslike", even if it took until Elden Ring for FromSoft themselves to hit the pinnacles of financial success and launch success with the formula. And so many other games.
USS Pillar of Autumn USS Long Night of Solace USS Spirit of Fire
I do not know of any series that has this level of cultural impact
Not quite. MW2 was the largest video game launch on record by pre-orders, revenue and units sold when it was released. Its release broke nearly all of Halo 3's release records. There was no digital release at launch. It also had a massive advertising campaign. There were large ads in every store with an electronics or games sections to an extent that I haven't seen since.
>Layoffs happen because these games bomb over and over and over and money runs out.
Not these days. How many layoffs have EA/Activision done now? 4 waves each?. Sony's been doing well but still laying off all the NA studios.