9 ms·

I think the video game industry is literally run like the movie industry except there is no union to help the people who make the actual magic happen unlike say

I think the video game industry is literally run like the movie industry except there is no union to help the people who make the actual magic happen unlike say the entertainment industry. I realize that some hate unions but some things on this world literally could not happen unless we respect people, their time, and their families. Some things are worth more than money and I"m grateful for the games I get to play. I wish there was a way to say give people in the gaming industry money, say grants, and artistic investment - I bet there are some great ideas out there that some burned out artist or developer will never get to realize because he got burned by a company who wants super solder 17... I see these games coming out of other countries that are amazing and these studios seemed to have got grants and investment from the government i.e. HellBlade, , . Do we not do that here stateside? It's also unfortunate some of the most talented dev's I've met even quit CS field entirely after doing game development. Do video game creators get the same mental health services those in the entertainment unions get?

jadei 8y ago
Re: grants and investment from the government, after the debacle with 38 studios funded from Rhode Island I am sure many are very wary now.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
greggman 8y ago
Is it run like the movie industry? AFAIK in the movie industry few publishers and or studios actually have any production staff on hand. Instead what happens is a core team write and pitch a movie idea. Only after they've gotten funding and done preproduction then they hire contractors short term (1-3 months) to make the movie. In games most studios hire all the staff. They then have the issue that between projects 90-95% of the staff have nothing to do. There's no income and the company is burning money. Unions may or may not help those movie contractors get a good price for their services but they don't guarantee jobs any more than the game industry AFAIK. Should video games be run more like the movie industry? As for your idea of "getting burned" because a company wants to make a different game, I have a game designer friend who used to think that way. He seemed to forget he was being paid $80k a year for his game ideas regardless of if they got used or not. If he wanted to profit from his own ideas he needed top stop selling them for salary to his employer.
- corysama 8y ago
  It’s not run like the movie industry yet. But, gamedev managers have been trying to push it that way for well over a decade for exactly the reason you mentioned: It’s really hard to keep a large team busy enough to pay their own salaries all the time. Many people’s jobs are focused on early or late in the process (ex: concept art vs testers). Pipelining multiple games is the obvious solution, but keeping everything lined up is much, much easier said than done in such a chaotic industry. However, the conversion to Hollywood-style waves of contractors hasn’t happened in games largely because the workers aren’t as interchangeable as they are in movies. Game pipelines have been very custom and quirky. It takes a long time to ramp up and get effective at a particular studio. That makes hiring and releasing a whole team for a single project very inefficient. Or, at least it has been that way. All this is a big reason why Unity and Unreal Engine have become so popular. By becoming standardized pipelines, they “make hiring much easier” because new hires can show up already familiar with the engine. Give it another decade and the Hollywoodization of gamedev may yet happen.
  - meheleventyone 8y ago
    Also companies have seen what has happened to contract VFX houses who have experienced an enormous race to the bottom and where the situation is even more exploitative than games. Which is not to say this won’t happen in games but that if it does it will more closely resemble that situation than more traditional movie roles protected by strong unions.
- azernik 8y ago
  The situation now is more like the old studio system - they broke down in the 60s or so, partly because of government anti-trust action (studios also owning theaters, etc.) and partly because of increasing unionization (that model makes it quite hard to switch jobs for better pay, especially when there are very few players). I don't think the video game studio system is under that kind of pressure, but it also allows independent studios to function. (I find the modern movie and TV industry similar to the tech world, where each movie is a startup. That's even how a lot of the business are structured - directors and writers put together a pitch, sell investors or production companies on it, and then form a company to produce the film.)
wpietri 8y ago
One other parallel that interests me comes up in this article. Frank D’Angelo got into games because he loved them as a kid. And that's ultimately what guaranteed that he'd be treated poorly: so many people want to get into games that there's always another sucker to take his place. It's the same thing with acting. The number of people who want to be Hollywood actors is much smaller than the number of people who end up succeeding. So LA is full of would-be stars waiting tables looking for their big break. That makes it easy for exploitative jerks like Harvey Weinstein, so much so that "casting couch" is a common metaphor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casting_couch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casting_couch
- pandaman 8y ago
  This comparison goes further - the vast majority of people who want to be actors suck at being one. Or musicians. Or writers. Or any other artists. Few who have talent/luck/x-factor get money and fame, the rest wash out. Yet, somehow, it's believed that games are completely different and everyone who wants to make games is good enough to be able make living off it.
  - dpwm 8y ago
    > the vast majority of people who want to be actors suck at being one. It's difficult to reduce the dimensionality of people down to one continuous variable, let alone one binary variable; though some actors, I will concede, could almost manage this. There's few objective criteria we can actually define a good/suck scale on. Acting quality is very subjective. I tend to find unknown European actors far more convincing than many big name US actors who are chosen to play basically the same character over and over again and perform the same limited two-or-three facial expressions from the set of {happy, sad, angry, confused}. As we've come to learn recently through scandal, performance on screen may not always be the first consideration of some studio execs. If you're talking financially, that's great: we have an objective measure. If the whole point of being an actor is to make money for themselves, then I can tell you who the great ones are. To the studios though, perhaps it's the actors that will pull in the crowds but not cost too much that are the best. In other words, the amount of money they are expected to make for the studio. Let's look at the games industry. To be a successful games developer we think we can probably agree on what is good. But to a manager I should imagine a good games developer is someone who helps ship on time and doesn't come to their door telling them what nobody else dares tell them that the bugs that QA found are deep, hard to fix and morale is low. Again, if we define by earnings tor the individual I'm not even sure where pays well. If we define developers by money they are expected to make for the studio, I'd imagine EA and King employees must be pretty high up.
brownbat 8y ago
> I realize that some hate unions but some things on this world literally could not happen unless we respect people, their time, and their families. The cornerstone of the case against unions isn't that we should stop respecting people, it's that unions are often no longer the best way to accomplish that goal. Not to detract from early labor movements, the fights for basic workplace safety and overtime in the twentieth century and those people standing up to violence and harassment for basic human rights were heroic. I'm glad we had unions, but they also have a dark side, where they can function more like a corrupt cartel over time. Even without Hoffa-style criminality, they can become unintentionally, institutionally abusive. I've worked blue collar jobs in the rural US and had coworkers rant about their family getting eaten alive by the system. They'd explain how the unions would abuse their new probationary employees by making them work triple shifts in order to drive them away from the profession. I've known career extras desperate for a SAG card basically excluded from doing what they love because the slots are capped, and they're aging out of their passion while they wait their turn. Paying your dues can have a few meanings for people in those jobs. That's even setting aside how it creates steep power differentials that become a magnet for predatory gatekeepers like Weinstein. I don't feel like typical pro or anti union positions do justice to the complexity here. I think you have to acknowledge that unions have put a spotlight on massive social failings. But I think we also need to recognize their pathologies as well. Generally we need to move those solutions into less partial laws and courts, instead of creating another unchecked center of power over workers.
- astronautjones 8y ago
  > I'm glad we had unions, but they also have a dark side, where they can function more like a corrupt cartel over time. someone standing up for your rights and asking for compensation to do it is a lot more than any kind of ridiculous disruption mode you can imagine. so much of the next generation is being told coding is the only job skill they'll need, what do you think will happen when they've flooded the market? we live in a plutocracy waging a war on workers rights, we are gonna need unions and we're gonna need them immediately.
  - ggg9990 8y ago
golergka 8y ago
I work in the game development all my life, and I will fight against unionizing with all that I have. Unions, above all, help those on the lower part of the bell curve. They commoditize labor, introduce standard metrics, push towards mediocrity and destroy competition between individual contributors. I am now on a third week of crunch, without weekends, all to make it to the Steam sale; something that a union would fight against. But it's a crunch I'm highly motivated for, and one I will personally benefit from; a union would limit my ability to push forward and advance my career. I can also negotiate quite well on my own behalf with employees. If I was in a union, I would, through involvement in collective negotiation, effectively share my strong negotiation position with other developers in the industry, bringing them forward and print me back. Why the hell would I do that?
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  " I am now on a third week of crunch, without weekends, all to make it to the Steam sale; something that a union would fight against." No, a union would just make sure you're actually paid for it, instead of being coerced into giving away your life for absolutely nothing. "I can also negotiate quite well on my own behalf with employees. If I was in a union, I would, through involvement in collective negotiation, effectively share my strong negotiation position with other developers in the industry, bringing them forward and print me back. Why the hell would I do that?" So "fuck you, I've got mine".
  - stevenwoo 8y ago
    I was in the game industry for twelve years and the GP's comments illustrate why it would be so difficult for unions to form, especially if it included software developers - so many think they are the ne plus ultra of developer but somehow they are not John Carmack famous or giving away the source code to previous game engines for people to learn from because they write something revolutionary every few years ala Carmack.
ekianjo 8y ago
> there is no union to help the people who make the actual magic happen Seeing the number of turds that Hollywood produces continuously, I fail to see the promised "magic" that unions help create.
- snoman 8y ago
  It's a good thing your taste in art & entertainment isn't the bar by which the medium is measured then.
nradov 8y ago
Are you seriously suggesting government funding for video game development? There's no way I'd be willing to have my tax dollars wasted on that.
- snoman 8y ago
  Is VFX any different? You'd be amazed that a majority of it is government/state funded. Good podcast on it here: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/no-hollywood-ending-visual-effects-industry/ http://freakonomics.com/podcast/no-hollywood-ending-visual-e...
- kraig911 8y ago
  Yes. Are you not aware now that kids are more likely to play video games than watch television yet we pay into PBS. Are you not aware that much of what we enjoy and work for in life was because of the awareness brought by an artists passion. Arts are just as important to fund as research. Otherwise life is not worth living.
  - nradov 8y ago
    Life can be lived just fine without video games. Anyone can enjoy public art without needing access to a particular type of device. Gamers seem to have a growing sense of entitlement.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- mywittyname 8y ago
  The military has been involved in back-channel funding of video game development for 10-15 years now. Every triple-a shooter title out there has a team of active duty military members in the credits. They make for excellent recruitment tools. For better or worse, entertainment shapes public policy. So it's no surprise that the government gets involved.
Gibbon1 8y ago
> I think the video game industry is literally run like the movie industry except there is no union to help the people who make the actual magic happen unlike say the entertainment industry. I know people in both industries and guess what. You are so utterly correct.
tim333 8y ago
>got grants and investment from the government i.e. HellBlade Googling that it seems to be a little more interesting: >Biomedical research charity Wellcome Trust gave Ninja Theory a $395,000 grant to do research on mental illness, and that helped Ninja Theory make such an ambitious and research-based game on its own as an independent studio. Wellcome Trust isn't a government organisation - it was set up by Sir Henry Wellcome who made a fortune in phrama. Also Ninja Theory's history is pretty messy with bankruptcies, layoffs and deals gone wrong.

jadei 8y ago

Re: grants and investment from the government, after the debacle with 38 studios funded from Rhode Island I am sure many are very wary now.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

greggman 8y ago

Is it run like the movie industry? AFAIK in the movie industry few publishers and or studios actually have any production staff on hand. Instead what happens is a core team write and pitch a movie idea. Only after they've gotten funding and done preproduction then they hire contractors short term (1-3 months) to make the movie. In games most studios hire all the staff. They then have the issue that between projects 90-95% of the staff have nothing to do. There's no income and the company is burning money. Unions may or may not help those movie contractors get a good price for their services but they don't guarantee jobs any more than the game industry AFAIK. Should video games be run more like the movie industry? As for your idea of "getting burned" because a company wants to make a different game, I have a game designer friend who used to think that way. He seemed to forget he was being paid $80k a year for his game ideas regardless of if they got used or not. If he wanted to profit from his own ideas he needed top stop selling them for salary to his employer.

corysama 8y ago
It’s not run like the movie industry yet. But, gamedev managers have been trying to push it that way for well over a decade for exactly the reason you mentioned: It’s really hard to keep a large team busy enough to pay their own salaries all the time. Many people’s jobs are focused on early or late in the process (ex: concept art vs testers). Pipelining multiple games is the obvious solution, but keeping everything lined up is much, much easier said than done in such a chaotic industry. However, the conversion to Hollywood-style waves of contractors hasn’t happened in games largely because the workers aren’t as interchangeable as they are in movies. Game pipelines have been very custom and quirky. It takes a long time to ramp up and get effective at a particular studio. That makes hiring and releasing a whole team for a single project very inefficient. Or, at least it has been that way. All this is a big reason why Unity and Unreal Engine have become so popular. By becoming standardized pipelines, they “make hiring much easier” because new hires can show up already familiar with the engine. Give it another decade and the Hollywoodization of gamedev may yet happen.
- meheleventyone 8y ago
  Also companies have seen what has happened to contract VFX houses who have experienced an enormous race to the bottom and where the situation is even more exploitative than games. Which is not to say this won’t happen in games but that if it does it will more closely resemble that situation than more traditional movie roles protected by strong unions.
azernik 8y ago
The situation now is more like the old studio system - they broke down in the 60s or so, partly because of government anti-trust action (studios also owning theaters, etc.) and partly because of increasing unionization (that model makes it quite hard to switch jobs for better pay, especially when there are very few players). I don't think the video game studio system is under that kind of pressure, but it also allows independent studios to function. (I find the modern movie and TV industry similar to the tech world, where each movie is a startup. That's even how a lot of the business are structured - directors and writers put together a pitch, sell investors or production companies on it, and then form a company to produce the film.)

wpietri 8y ago

One other parallel that interests me comes up in this article. Frank D’Angelo got into games because he loved them as a kid. And that's ultimately what guaranteed that he'd be treated poorly: so many people want to get into games that there's always another sucker to take his place. It's the same thing with acting. The number of people who want to be Hollywood actors is much smaller than the number of people who end up succeeding. So LA is full of would-be stars waiting tables looking for their big break. That makes it easy for exploitative jerks like Harvey Weinstein, so much so that "casting couch" is a common metaphor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casting_couch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casting_couch

pandaman 8y ago
This comparison goes further - the vast majority of people who want to be actors suck at being one. Or musicians. Or writers. Or any other artists. Few who have talent/luck/x-factor get money and fame, the rest wash out. Yet, somehow, it's believed that games are completely different and everyone who wants to make games is good enough to be able make living off it.
- dpwm 8y ago
  > the vast majority of people who want to be actors suck at being one. It's difficult to reduce the dimensionality of people down to one continuous variable, let alone one binary variable; though some actors, I will concede, could almost manage this. There's few objective criteria we can actually define a good/suck scale on. Acting quality is very subjective. I tend to find unknown European actors far more convincing than many big name US actors who are chosen to play basically the same character over and over again and perform the same limited two-or-three facial expressions from the set of {happy, sad, angry, confused}. As we've come to learn recently through scandal, performance on screen may not always be the first consideration of some studio execs. If you're talking financially, that's great: we have an objective measure. If the whole point of being an actor is to make money for themselves, then I can tell you who the great ones are. To the studios though, perhaps it's the actors that will pull in the crowds but not cost too much that are the best. In other words, the amount of money they are expected to make for the studio. Let's look at the games industry. To be a successful games developer we think we can probably agree on what is good. But to a manager I should imagine a good games developer is someone who helps ship on time and doesn't come to their door telling them what nobody else dares tell them that the bugs that QA found are deep, hard to fix and morale is low. Again, if we define by earnings tor the individual I'm not even sure where pays well. If we define developers by money they are expected to make for the studio, I'd imagine EA and King employees must be pretty high up.

brownbat 8y ago

> I realize that some hate unions but some things on this world literally could not happen unless we respect people, their time, and their families. The cornerstone of the case against unions isn't that we should stop respecting people, it's that unions are often no longer the best way to accomplish that goal. Not to detract from early labor movements, the fights for basic workplace safety and overtime in the twentieth century and those people standing up to violence and harassment for basic human rights were heroic. I'm glad we had unions, but they also have a dark side, where they can function more like a corrupt cartel over time. Even without Hoffa-style criminality, they can become unintentionally, institutionally abusive. I've worked blue collar jobs in the rural US and had coworkers rant about their family getting eaten alive by the system. They'd explain how the unions would abuse their new probationary employees by making them work triple shifts in order to drive them away from the profession. I've known career extras desperate for a SAG card basically excluded from doing what they love because the slots are capped, and they're aging out of their passion while they wait their turn. Paying your dues can have a few meanings for people in those jobs. That's even setting aside how it creates steep power differentials that become a magnet for predatory gatekeepers like Weinstein. I don't feel like typical pro or anti union positions do justice to the complexity here. I think you have to acknowledge that unions have put a spotlight on massive social failings. But I think we also need to recognize their pathologies as well. Generally we need to move those solutions into less partial laws and courts, instead of creating another unchecked center of power over workers.

astronautjones 8y ago
> I'm glad we had unions, but they also have a dark side, where they can function more like a corrupt cartel over time. someone standing up for your rights and asking for compensation to do it is a lot more than any kind of ridiculous disruption mode you can imagine. so much of the next generation is being told coding is the only job skill they'll need, what do you think will happen when they've flooded the market? we live in a plutocracy waging a war on workers rights, we are gonna need unions and we're gonna need them immediately.
- ggg9990 8y ago

golergka 8y ago

I work in the game development all my life, and I will fight against unionizing with all that I have. Unions, above all, help those on the lower part of the bell curve. They commoditize labor, introduce standard metrics, push towards mediocrity and destroy competition between individual contributors. I am now on a third week of crunch, without weekends, all to make it to the Steam sale; something that a union would fight against. But it's a crunch I'm highly motivated for, and one I will personally benefit from; a union would limit my ability to push forward and advance my career. I can also negotiate quite well on my own behalf with employees. If I was in a union, I would, through involvement in collective negotiation, effectively share my strong negotiation position with other developers in the industry, bringing them forward and print me back. Why the hell would I do that?

s73v3r_ 8y ago
" I am now on a third week of crunch, without weekends, all to make it to the Steam sale; something that a union would fight against." No, a union would just make sure you're actually paid for it, instead of being coerced into giving away your life for absolutely nothing. "I can also negotiate quite well on my own behalf with employees. If I was in a union, I would, through involvement in collective negotiation, effectively share my strong negotiation position with other developers in the industry, bringing them forward and print me back. Why the hell would I do that?" So "fuck you, I've got mine".
- stevenwoo 8y ago
  I was in the game industry for twelve years and the GP's comments illustrate why it would be so difficult for unions to form, especially if it included software developers - so many think they are the ne plus ultra of developer but somehow they are not John Carmack famous or giving away the source code to previous game engines for people to learn from because they write something revolutionary every few years ala Carmack.

ekianjo 8y ago

> there is no union to help the people who make the actual magic happen Seeing the number of turds that Hollywood produces continuously, I fail to see the promised "magic" that unions help create.

snoman 8y ago
It's a good thing your taste in art & entertainment isn't the bar by which the medium is measured then.

nradov 8y ago

Are you seriously suggesting government funding for video game development? There's no way I'd be willing to have my tax dollars wasted on that.

snoman 8y ago
Is VFX any different? You'd be amazed that a majority of it is government/state funded. Good podcast on it here: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/no-hollywood-ending-visual-effects-industry/ http://freakonomics.com/podcast/no-hollywood-ending-visual-e...
kraig911 8y ago
Yes. Are you not aware now that kids are more likely to play video games than watch television yet we pay into PBS. Are you not aware that much of what we enjoy and work for in life was because of the awareness brought by an artists passion. Arts are just as important to fund as research. Otherwise life is not worth living.
- nradov 8y ago
  Life can be lived just fine without video games. Anyone can enjoy public art without needing access to a particular type of device. Gamers seem to have a growing sense of entitlement.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
mywittyname 8y ago
The military has been involved in back-channel funding of video game development for 10-15 years now. Every triple-a shooter title out there has a team of active duty military members in the credits. They make for excellent recruitment tools. For better or worse, entertainment shapes public policy. So it's no surprise that the government gets involved.

Gibbon1 8y ago

> I think the video game industry is literally run like the movie industry except there is no union to help the people who make the actual magic happen unlike say the entertainment industry. I know people in both industries and guess what. You are so utterly correct.

tim333 8y ago

>got grants and investment from the government i.e. HellBlade Googling that it seems to be a little more interesting: >Biomedical research charity Wellcome Trust gave Ninja Theory a $395,000 grant to do research on mental illness, and that helped Ninja Theory make such an ambitious and research-based game on its own as an independent studio. Wellcome Trust isn't a government organisation - it was set up by Sir Henry Wellcome who made a fortune in phrama. Also Ninja Theory's history is pretty messy with bankruptcies, layoffs and deals gone wrong.