First Unionized Game Company declared Bankruptcy
(web.archive.org)
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Good riddance. Death to labor racketeering.
lul
shitty artstyle non-binary furry game character
Because it can't just be regular garbage. You have to really heap it on to stand out.
If unions have a place anywhere, it's in the video game industry - especially with the 'crunch' where employees are treated like total crap.
Ever notice that the complaints about “crunch” just so happened to coincide with the “diversification” of development staff and a massive falloff in quality?
Crunch happens naturally, but complaints of it happen from people.
And crunch happens on a wide scale: Obviously if there's no crunch, you vastly over-allocated time to development, which is lost money for the business, but if you allocate it properly, in theory crunch should be minimal. Of course, allocation requires an accurate assessment of the work ethic of everyone there.
Anyone posting on twitter on work hours, who isn't a PR person, should probably be fired immediately, since they're going to be making crunch time worse, as what they're NOT doing now, they must do later. But we see that happen all the time.
They slack, and then they complain later that crunch time is so tough... Using valuable crunch time to make that complaint.
I'd say the problem is deadlines, but Duke Nukem Forever exists as a very compelling counter argument.
But are the complaints justified? It's not as if straight white men are fond of never seeing their families and sleeping at the office.
A lot of these companies lure in people who are passionate about gaming, and then mercilessly exploit them.
So they exploit the staff, deliver the product and get shit canned any. Develepors like EA and Ubisoft need to burn down
They're free to quit at any time
Nah, complaints about crunch in videogame development predate the current DIE wave by a significant amount. The famous "EA Spouse" letter is from 2004. https://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html
They didn't gatekeep against political activists, and then the political activists activated in 2020. Real shame, that.
I'm not against unions unconditionally, but you'd be hard pressed to find one that exists to protect the working conditions of its members and not to advance leftist causes. Find me a union that openly abhors Marxists as the enemies of the working class they are, and I'll believe they're on the right track.
I don't understand why unions collect exorbitant fees in this day and age.
A union needs to be able to coordinate strikes and reach consensus on what they demand from their employers.
With modern communications being what they are, why the hell does a union need money? Why the hell does it need bosses with salaries? It doesn't!
Because it's legal and their status is protected. In a free market there'd be a market for unions too.
Effectively the fees are an insurance payment.
Many big unions have strike pay, in order to give more tooth to the strike threat, otherwise the company could just wait two weeks for the people to go broke. You could argue that people could just save money, but the same can be said of health insurance, yet that too is a business model.
You pay money in, and if you ever actually strike, you take money out from the pool made by you and a thousand other businesses. It also pays lawyers to make sure that strike operation is perfectly on the level and legal, and has no one arrested.
As for the salaried bosses... Someone is a representative of the union. If an employee gets a complaint from management, some union person needs to assess if the union of employees will protect them or not. That is an additional responsibility, and additional responsibilities should be paid for. Same with wage/benefit negotiations.
That does not mean unions are a good or a bad thing, just that their business model has been tried and tested, and evolved from older models into the one we see today because a union, like anything in this world, is a product to be sold, and they do cater to their consumers, but do need to be paid for their product.
Good and bad union environments exist. They're a lot like governments: Good and bad exist, and the best ones are the ones whose touch is felt the least by all the good members of its society.
Solidarity. But point taken. Yes, most modern-day unions are absolutely useless at best.
They always have been useless. The first ever act of a union I'm North America was a lynching, the second was a child kidnapping. They're nothing more than a mafia.
Unions were infamous for being mob controlled.
These days they're controlled by extremists.
Wait, what were these?
You've got it backwards. If unions are needed, it's at places hiring replaceable people who are making widgets or following a standardized cookie-cutter process. Those laborers need their job, are cheap to train, and easy to exploit. Unions are NOT needed in more creative areas staffed by white collar professionals who can move freely between companies.
Obviously there is some overlap here, where some professionals are more replaceable than others, depending on the profession. Artists certainly form guilds when they think it will help them. With game companies, there may be exploitation (corporate AAA studios have turned games development into a cookie-cutter process), but that's because the employees wanted to work in the games industry no matter what the cost. They could get an easier job at some other software house. They'd rather work at EA. It's their choice. 🤷♂️
See, I'm happy I posted that, because it provoked thoughtful responses like yours.
You have a good point, but I still think that working conditions in the gaming industry are abysmal.
Lmao!
Not soon enough