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Comment by metadat | Hacker News Reader

This makes me sad, R* has made some of my most favorite games, especially Red Dead Redemption 2.

They make so much money, why can't they play nice and treat their employees like human beings?

I don't recall reports of Valve (Steam, also super profitable) stooping. Is Rockstar a genetic relative of GAFA, because this is more like what I've come to expect from Amazon.

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Valve is a "flat" organization, where your compensation is determined based on peer review.

Rockstar, and owner Take-Two (largely owned by institutional investors--well known for their historical championing of workers rights and fondness of unions), both seem to have your typical corporate hierarchies, where executives are fairly and correctly compensated for being more productive than over 200 software engineers combined.

If you think one person can be as productive as 200, you're sniffing glue, my friend.

Executives make more money because they are the only ones with the power to set wages. Workers do not have the power to set wages.

Oh, I don't, I was being very sarcastic, but I appreciate that your response was so measured under the assumption that I was serious, haha.

Because no amount of profit is ever enough for the stock market, everything must perpetually grow.

That’s a very reductionist take on what happened here. I don’t think increased profit is likely to result from these firings. How would it?

Profit = revenue - expenses.

Firings reduce expenses, the equation above explains the rest. Of course, that's only in the short term, but that's what exec bonuses are given out on!

Firings in this case were for union busting. Illegal union busting is profitable - that's why business owners do it. Because it's illegal, they will make up a different excuse for why the workers were fired. They will never admit to illegal union busting. So you should not take their statements as good faith.

It may sound simplistic but its the truth and there are plenty of other examples and history around this - Starbucks recently. 30 employees unionizing may not have any significant impact on their profits, but if they let that union grow it would have a lot more members demanding better working hours or wages over time. A strong union also generally leads to a loss of control by management where they have to negotiate more with workers which they don't like. Why do you think they were fired?

This is also true if humans in general, at all stations in life, including union members and union leaders. Is there any offer a union would refuse on the grounds that’s too much?

Is that true? Feels like you are begging a huge question and also assuming everyone has to exist in a capitalist society forever.

It will still be true under not-capitalism. Perhaps it won’t be measured with money but it will exist.

People like getting more money, but they don't die without it. You can get a job that pays just enough to pay your bills and work at it until you die. Companies can't do that under capitalism. They take on debt and require growth to pay back their investors, or they don't take on debt and get undercut by a competitor who does.

And yet Costco still does just fine.

Costco might not be your intended example. It has amazing revenue growth:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/COST/costco/revenu...

While simultaneously growing profit margin:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/COST/costco/profit...

Hence growing annual net income from $2.3B to $8B in the last 10 years.

I imagine the GP was referring to the fact that Costco experiences that kind of growth while giving their employees excellent pay and benefits. Even low-level store employees typically make $20-30 an hour.

Correct

If only we had more of this. Why is it so rare?

Do they have a benevolent dictator? Is this a temporary glitch that will be "corrected" when profits aren't looking as good? Are they a monopoly?

I'm genuinely curious.

It’s because they don’t sell everything, and the things they do sell, they sell to the top 50%.

They also did have benevolent dictators who spent decades building up good will, but supposedly the new bosses as of a few years ago are not so benevolent anymore.

> They make so much money, why can't they play nice and treat their employees like human beings?

Because they can.

In the gaming industry the biggest studios get away with running sweat shops because there's endless hordes of brilliant engineers and artists who had always dreamed to make videogames and need a huge name on the CV to move to better places.

>They make so much money

Their 10-Ks show they lost a lot of money.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TTWO/take-two-inte...

2025 $-4.479B

2024 $-3.744B

2023 $-1.125B

The meager earnings in years previous to that are beyond wiped out. In fact, expect a lot more squeeze if you work at Take Two or a lot more rent seeking if you are a customer, because based on the stock price movement, the market is expecting a lot more net income.

Edit: looks like they set a ton of money on fire by overpaying for Zynga a few years ago. Customers and employees are going to be paying for that bad decision for a long time.

It's true that Take Two lost money but it's also true that Rockstar makes them tremendous amounts of money. Lifetime revenues from GTA5 are estimated to be near or exceeding 10 billion USD.

Managing to lose money on those kinds of profits is arguably further evidence that leadership there is overpaid.

Businesses desire growth, not conservation or charity. And that desire is frequently achieved through illegal means. Wage theft for instance is a far greater sum than the total of robbery in the US. The criminality is rampant!

Meta is also in the news today for making 10% of its revenue from scams, as well as for having codified policy that scammers representing at least 0.15% of their revenue must be protected from any moderation.

Business thrives on illegality.

It's almost as if capitalism was a deeply messed up system that brings out and celebrates the very worst in humanity.

You think the administrators of a socialist, communist or other collectivist society would not face the same temptation and respond similarly?

At least under liberal capitalism I have the option of not buying games and of making my own.

Well you’re onto something re: authority and hierarchy…

Systems need to be managed. If you cook with high temperatures and let your attention wander then the food burns. If you drive fast with bald tires then you may fly off the road. We know that strong regulation on industry, especially monopolies, high taxes on the wealthy, and powerful unions can keep Capitalism in balance, but we have chosen not to use these mechanisms. Is that Capitalism being flawed or is it us as custodians failing in our basic duties?

Crony capitalism is capitalism. How do you know it can be kept in balance if it is not?

We've been through this before. As recently as the 1930s the Capitalist economy tried to eat itself and had to be stopped. That is historical and everything changes, but the basic principles are the same. Find out where things are going wrong and address that with some basic controls and limits.

If a system leads to catastrophic failure on a regular basis, maybe it's just a bad system? See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit...

Capitalism is based on/grew out of the Norman feudalism, where lords were foreign conquerors who cared nothing about the locals, local land, local societal norms. They only cared about rent extraction for themselves (todays C suit class) and to pay the nobles above them (the market). They simply removed themselves one step, created corporations to remove all personal liability, and ramped up the profit extraction to a global scale. Just look at the first large scale joint stock company, the East India Company. Could corporatism have had a worse/more evil progenitor?

> They make so much money, why can't they play nice and treat their employees like human beings?

Because they want to make great games. It's sad but we've never figure out how to replicate the creative output that crunch and stress triggers. I don't understand it and frankly I couldn't stand it so I left the industry but I won't pretend that we have a solution too the problem.

I call BS.

There's a big difference between people putting extra effort due to real external factors (e.g. company running out of money) and artificial pressure while executives enjoy their yachts.

This is a myth and plenty of amazing games were made without treating people like trash.

People who are nice and treat their employees like human beings are not allowed to become CEOs.

This would be less of an issue if game companies operated as co-ops.

Isn't that what indy game developers are, why can't both exist? You don't have to play GTA.

> They make so much money, why can't they play nice and treat their employees like human beings?

That's not how human nature works. Greed doesn't lead to idealism or altruism, it invariably leads to entitlement and more greed. The rich are never satisfied with hundreds of billions, they insist upon trillions.

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