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Game developers let themselves be exploited with low pay and unpaid overtime. They should grow a spine and say no to ridiculous work conditions. I am tired of h

Game developers let themselves be exploited with low pay and unpaid overtime. They should grow a spine and say no to ridiculous work conditions. I am tired of hearing about it. They don’t need to unionize, they need to realize that they have a unique and valuable skill set. If we are talking specifically about programmers, we have the fortunate leverage to tell our employers to go piss up a rope with the weekly job offers we get. Edit: grammar

mailslot 8y ago
Every game development job I’ve had has been terrible by any measure... but I still crave to go back. It’s easy to put in long hours when everyone else does and you genuinely enjoy their company. It’s easy to forgo pay, when you have equity. You’re just never going to get the opportunity to work creatively with a talented team at Wells Fargo. It’s a totally different experience. If you’re concerned about a work/life balance or compensation, it’s not for you. I’d hate if game development turned into a typical corporate 9-5, and was inclusive of all skill levels. Pay is decent, if you’re established and are at the top of your game.
- moate 8y ago
  >>I’d hate if game development turned into a typical corporate 9-5, and was inclusive of all skill levels. Why? If the quality of the games stays the same, what benefit is there for the employees to work 20 hour days during crunch? How is that inherently "good"? How would you make it better than "terrible by any measure"?
  - mailslot 8y ago
    How would gamers feel with 2x longer release cycles and higher cost and/or less features? Lower profit and higher expenses is the only way, but given the risks of any ambitious title, small studios are nearly always flirting with bankruptcy as it is. There’s no easy answer, but time to market and risk will suffer.
sageabilly 8y ago
If every single employer has the same work conditions, then what? If the state of the industry as a whole is low pay and unpaid overtime, then it's not like a developer can just go to a better job.
- lovetocode 8y ago
  A developer can go make crud web applications like the rest of us. There are options to get out of it they just don’t want to take them. I don’t know if this rings true for graphics artists, game designers, etc. But a programmer who develops game code can probably write a web app too without too much struggle
  - ed312 8y ago
    I did exactly what you described. Unfortunately there is an endless supply of fresh grads (and even very talented amateurs with no schooling) willing to work absolutely slave-like conditions to "live the dream".
    - lovetocode 8y ago
      Fair enough and 100% true. It almost feels like we need to police up the expectations of junior developers and teach them proper work life balance. But they are going to do what they are going to do I suppose.
      - CodeCube 8y ago
        This should absolutely be an expectation set early on ... I often wish that our industry had an apprenticeship model, so that our senior talent would invest in training newcomers. Coming from the IC level would remove a perverse incentive for employers who offer on-the-job training to teach them to be compliant early on.
    - iguy 8y ago
      This is also why being an aspiring actor comes with terrible pay, hours, conditions. And it doesn't seem likely to change. There's a long line of people who dream of trying, and they bid down the price at the auction.
Pfhreak 8y ago
Having worked in the industry they believe it's necessary. I got yoked into a mandated long weekend and was laughed out of the room when I demanded a retrospective. Long hours is a failure, we should know what failed so it doesn't happen again. Their response? That's just the way it is in games. Absolutely zero desire or acknowledgement that it should be different.
- lovetocode 8y ago
  It’s toxic culture at the leadership level. When my employer asks for some outrageous development on a compressed time schedule I speak my mind. Maybe that’s why most AAA games suck these days.
  - krageon 8y ago
    If you can still compensate or halt it by speaking your mind, your leadership still has a long way to slide down the toxicity scale.
    - lovetocode 8y ago
      You are right. And to be clear my current work environment is not toxic which is why I can do this as you said.
  - Pfhreak 8y ago
    In my experience it was the ic level. Leadership would say, what's a reasonable timeline for feature x. The engineers would spend two hours arguing that estimates are bullshit, then give a trivially small (and obviously wrong) estimate. Leadership would say, are you sure? Engineers would basically flip them the bird and say yes. Then inevitably be late. I get it, estimating is inexact. But there's a clear difference between "I broke this down into little tasks, and I think we're looking at x" and "implement multiplayer? Four days."
    - whatshisface 8y ago
      Why wouldn't they give a trivially large (and very safe) estimate? Telling someone you will be finished tomorrow puts the onus on you to explain why your estimate was wrong.
kabacha 8y ago
While you come off a bit rough on victim blaming you do have a point. Video-game developers should have formed a union long time ago but here we are. I somewhat lack sympathy when the industry is clear as water about abuse like this yet people still go into it without precaution.
- lovetocode 8y ago
  Fair enough and you are probably right. I come from the position that you can only beat a dog so long before it bites back. But I feel like this could have been prevented if developers weren’t so enamored with the idea of developing games. Yeah it’s cool but it’s not cool enough to throw your dignity away.
  - hannasanarion 8y ago
    And so you kill the dog and get another. People who want to make games are not in short supply.
    - lovetocode 8y ago
      Can’t argue with that.
    - kabacha 8y ago
      Software engineering for video games is pretty darn complicated. Surely it must be hard to get hold of the next John Carmack or at least someone remotely close to that. Is demand for good talent really filled here?
      - TimothyBJacobs 8y ago
        Game studios aren't filled with and don't need to be filled with hundreds of John Carmacks.
      - hannasanarion 8y ago
        If your "about-to-release crunch" involves building an entire engine from scratch with no help John Carmack style, you have much bigger problems.
lvturner 8y ago
Very easy to say, a lot harder to do Equally, finally leaving the games industry was one of the better things I did.
- CodeCube 8y ago
  same, unfortunately ... I loved my time in the game industry, but I also loved spending time (and more money achieved elsewhere) on my family.
- armagon 8y ago
  What is the best way to leave? I look at the experience required on the 'Who is Hiring' threads and sigh -- how am I supposed to get two years' professional experience using a technology that has nothing to do with games, or, how do I pick which tech to invest my time in, given that everything seems to be changing so quickly?
  - CydeWeys 8y ago
    If you're a good developer, and it seems like a lot of people leaving the games industry are, it's not hard. Study up on your Cracking the Coding Interview, HackerRank, Leetcode, and similar stuff, and then just interview for Software Engineer positions. On your resume, list your previous experience as something like "Software Engineer, EA Games, 2016-present" (and include the names of any big games you worked on that people might know and be impressed by).
    - ggregoire 8y ago
      This is necessary only if you apply to Google and co. Most companies will never ask you to reverse a binary tree. Especially if the company is not in the US.
  - umanwizard 8y ago
    Apply for a generalist position at a company that doesn’t hire for specific technologies (there are lots and lots of these, basically any of the big famous companies and a lot of smaller ones too).
maxehmookau 8y ago
>They should grow a spine and say no to ridiculous work conditions. YES! You're absolutely right! > They don’t need to unionize. Err... Why on earth not? That would literally be the definition of growing a spine and saying no to ridiculous work conditions but also having it be effective.
- lovetocode 8y ago
  I probably jumped the gun on the unionization part. I don’t know a lot about it but my impression of unions is not so bright. Maybe my ignorance is showing with that regard
  - glitchc 8y ago
    It's all the propaganda corporations have been feeding you about how evil unions are. The wage stagnation of employees and stratospheric rise in senior management pay can be directly correlated to the decline of unions in North America.
    - WillPostForFood 8y ago
      How can you tell you haven't been fooled by all the union propaganda about evil corporations are? Maybe the truth is in the middle? Unions died in the US by a mix of suicide and overreach. Unions are still glorified to kids as saving us from child labor (which they did!). The bulk of the negativity around unions comes from people old enough to observer the decline of the manufacturing industry. The unions weren't the cause but helped accelerate the decline.
  - maxehmookau 8y ago
    My knowledge of unions is based entirely on the UK. They allow groups of employees who are subject to poor conditions to group together and participate in collective bargaining. Most programmers in the UK are not a member of a union as pay is fairly high and conditions relatively good, but the majority of public-sector and a lot of private-sector workers are. Unionising would be an excellent first step for employees fighting back. I see a lot of anti-union talk on HN, I don't think a lot of the criticism of unions I see here is fair.
EliRivers 8y ago
they need to realize that they have a unique and valuable skill set The competition to be a low-paid drone in game development is huge; significantly more than in non game dev. The games industry is powered by huge numbers of low-experience software engineers. They get paid in glamour and the thrill of being able to tell their friends they work in games. They could leave and go somewhere else for more money, but they don't want more money as much as they want that glamour. I've seen it myself; people take low-paid QA jobs at games companies for the love of spending 12 hours a day following mind-numbing instructions, repetitively playtesting a greyscale wireframe without sound or graphics assets. For the glamour of it. These people have skill sets that are unusual amongst the general population, but not in the realms of software engineering job candidates and even less so in games, where strongly talented people take Godawful jobs for the glamour of it. Yes, there are highly skilled, experienced software engineers in the industry too, but they're not the ones being fucked over in huge numbers on a daily basis.
- Veen 8y ago
  > The competition to be a low-paid drone in game development is huge. That's precisely why unionization is the best course of action. Game development companies aren't threatened if individual developers demand better treatment because they can be replaced by the next starry-eyed young dev seeking prestige and glamour. But if enough of them unionize and collectively bargain for better conditions, the industry has to listen.
  - EliRivers 8y ago
    In the absence of other protections (and frankly, even in the presence of other protections), I'm a fan of unionisation, but I am from outside the USA; I understand people inside the USA commonly have different opinions about unions.
- gowld 8y ago
  People say that, but what's the glamour? Do you have friends in AAA gamedev? Do you think that's cool? Do their parents? Their little brothers? You know who is cool? the 2-3 people who designed and built Pac-Mac, or Legend of Zelda, or Braid, or Papers Please. Not the people making guns for Call of War 7 that's a clone of a dozen other AAA games.
madshiva 8y ago
In all working aera the fault is not on the employees but on the compagny period. The fault is also on users that buy crap video game and make theses big compagny following this scheme you big win like Minecraft of work for nothing. Same apply for movie/music industry. This are not there fault. If maybe you stop paying Apple for running a streming service and talking all the cake. Users are more to be blammed than game developers.
georgeecollins 8y ago
> they have a unique and valuable skill set. They have a valuable skill set, but making big games takes large groups of testers, tool programmers, texture artists, etc. Who are talented but not unique. Like movie productions, games depend on a lot of skilled labor. And like movie productions, they tend not to be steady employers. So like film production in the US, it makes a lot of sense to have guilds or unions to protect work situations. Maybe also to create a framework for long term benefits, though I guess that is more debatable.
Veen 8y ago
Collective bargaining is the most effective way of "saying no to ridiculous work conditions". Unions are as imperfect as any human institution, but they serve a purpose.
Cthulhu_ 8y ago
The main problem with the game industry - I believe - is that for a lot of people it's a dream job, which means the supply for people to work in the industry far outweights that of the demand - meaning, if you're not doing crunch time, there's ten others waiting in line to take over. This is I think the problem in a lot of big employers with dubious worker practices - think Amazon, Uber, etc. They get away with it because the people are easily replaced. They can just fire any Amazon worker who even thinks about joining a union. In the gaming industry, they can - and will, and have - replace a voice actor with one that isn't unionized. Because they can. Because if not everyone is in the union, it is powerless. Because if they can offer a job to someone not in the union, who is willing to get underpaid to just have a job, they will.
- jamestenglish 8y ago
  This was my thought exactly! It is awfully pretentious to tell someone else what their "dream job" is. People value different things and there are a ton of people who value the ability to work on a game over better working conditions. As a society we do want to protect people from exploitation, but a game developer is significantly different from the other 2 examples you used: amazon (I assume you meant warehouse) worker and uber driver. Those are low skill jobs so employers have all the leverage, I don't think many of them want to be an uber driver or warehouse worker. Contrast that with a game dev, which is a very high skill job. They can take those skills into many other fields and make money, but they don't want to. Is that exploitation? I don't know, but it doesn't feel like it is to me.
_bxg1 8y ago
You know what happens when you're in a saturated job market and you "grow a spine and say no to ridiculous work conditions" without a union? You get fired.
djsumdog 8y ago
I was fired from a shop that made a game backend and asked workers to continually crunch, work long hours on salary with no overtime. There were some big bonuses, but it didn't make up for the bad planning and management. I refused to work over 45 hours a week. I worked one 13 hour Sunday and said no to the 2nd one and was fired. Another dev/ops person left two weeks later. The others: almost all of the team is still there, working over a year later, with the same crazy hours (80+ for 6~8 weeks at a time) and same constant crunch. I really really really wish I had at least used the word "union" in a meeting or e-mail while there, so I could claim I was fired based on trying to organize. I've even considered taking a day or two off, standing in front of the building and handing out unionization pamphlets, just to see if I could help make a change for the people left there. Everyone else let themselves and continue to let themselves be exploited. I honestly don't understand why many of them haven't gotten new jobs yet. Do they not realize that type of work isn't normal? I've worked at a lot of places and maybe I can just see bad management when others can't?
- lovetocode 8y ago
  I love your story! There is always a risk standing up for what you believe in. The fact they fired you over this shows their lack of respect for their employees. How long did it take you to find work after being fired?
  - djsumdog 8y ago
    I honestly didn't try very hard at first and I was trying to avoid job recruiters. I took two months off before even looking, so in total, I was out of work for five month.
- usefulcat 8y ago
  > Do they not realize that type of work isn't normal? I've worked at a lot of places and maybe I can just see bad management when others can't? As you can tell from the fact that they have chosen to stay there and keep doing it, they apparently don't mind it that much. Certainly not enough to leave anyway.
platz 8y ago
As long as individuals try to out-compete each other for desired positions, they won't form a block, in the form of a union, to achieve a common goal. It's prisoner's dilemma.
coldtea 8y ago
>They don’t need to unionize, they need to realize that they have a unique and valuable skill set. Without unionizing, even if all of current employed and poorly paid game developers realized this, there would be no shortage of people coming in to undercut them.
- hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
  Yeah, I'm surprised the parent comment is upvoted so highly. If they had a unique skill set they would be paid more. Supply is just greater than the demand, simple as that.
- lotu 8y ago
  This is effectively how the game industry works. Young idealistic people get hired and work for a few years; and eventually realize this is shit deal burn out, quit and get replaced.
Scuds 8y ago
A union can protect against scenarios where a studio hires a bunch of people, the publisher pulls funding, and they're all laid off several months later with no severance or healthcare or assistance. Movie crews are constantly rolling on and off projects and are unionized. This is hardly a foreign concept.
organizenow 8y ago
No, they need a union. Leverage only works if everyone uses it, and collective bargaining is how that happens. If the word “union” bothers you then call it something else. Otherwise you get what we have now: highly mobile individuals able to pull themselves out of bad jobs as individuals, but otherwise unable to affect the industry as a whole.
SonnyWortzik 8y ago
In this highly competitive industry, you cannot expect someone to just stand up and demand to not be exploited when they can be simply fired and replaced within minutes. So no, it is not as simple as just growing a spine.
hellllllllooo 8y ago
You don't seem to understand what a union is. It's a group of people getting together to "say no to ridiculous work conditions". A union is literally how you join together to say no when you don't have individual power. The level of straight up anti-union rethoric on here without really understanding what a good union does is revealing.

mailslot 8y ago

Every game development job I’ve had has been terrible by any measure... but I still crave to go back. It’s easy to put in long hours when everyone else does and you genuinely enjoy their company. It’s easy to forgo pay, when you have equity. You’re just never going to get the opportunity to work creatively with a talented team at Wells Fargo. It’s a totally different experience. If you’re concerned about a work/life balance or compensation, it’s not for you. I’d hate if game development turned into a typical corporate 9-5, and was inclusive of all skill levels. Pay is decent, if you’re established and are at the top of your game.

moate 8y ago
>>I’d hate if game development turned into a typical corporate 9-5, and was inclusive of all skill levels. Why? If the quality of the games stays the same, what benefit is there for the employees to work 20 hour days during crunch? How is that inherently "good"? How would you make it better than "terrible by any measure"?
- mailslot 8y ago
  How would gamers feel with 2x longer release cycles and higher cost and/or less features? Lower profit and higher expenses is the only way, but given the risks of any ambitious title, small studios are nearly always flirting with bankruptcy as it is. There’s no easy answer, but time to market and risk will suffer.

sageabilly 8y ago

If every single employer has the same work conditions, then what? If the state of the industry as a whole is low pay and unpaid overtime, then it's not like a developer can just go to a better job.

lovetocode 8y ago
A developer can go make crud web applications like the rest of us. There are options to get out of it they just don’t want to take them. I don’t know if this rings true for graphics artists, game designers, etc. But a programmer who develops game code can probably write a web app too without too much struggle
- ed312 8y ago
  I did exactly what you described. Unfortunately there is an endless supply of fresh grads (and even very talented amateurs with no schooling) willing to work absolutely slave-like conditions to "live the dream".
  - lovetocode 8y ago
    Fair enough and 100% true. It almost feels like we need to police up the expectations of junior developers and teach them proper work life balance. But they are going to do what they are going to do I suppose.
    - CodeCube 8y ago
      This should absolutely be an expectation set early on ... I often wish that our industry had an apprenticeship model, so that our senior talent would invest in training newcomers. Coming from the IC level would remove a perverse incentive for employers who offer on-the-job training to teach them to be compliant early on.
  - iguy 8y ago
    This is also why being an aspiring actor comes with terrible pay, hours, conditions. And it doesn't seem likely to change. There's a long line of people who dream of trying, and they bid down the price at the auction.

Pfhreak 8y ago

Having worked in the industry they believe it's necessary. I got yoked into a mandated long weekend and was laughed out of the room when I demanded a retrospective. Long hours is a failure, we should know what failed so it doesn't happen again. Their response? That's just the way it is in games. Absolutely zero desire or acknowledgement that it should be different.

lovetocode 8y ago
It’s toxic culture at the leadership level. When my employer asks for some outrageous development on a compressed time schedule I speak my mind. Maybe that’s why most AAA games suck these days.
- krageon 8y ago
  If you can still compensate or halt it by speaking your mind, your leadership still has a long way to slide down the toxicity scale.
  - lovetocode 8y ago
    You are right. And to be clear my current work environment is not toxic which is why I can do this as you said.
- Pfhreak 8y ago
  In my experience it was the ic level. Leadership would say, what's a reasonable timeline for feature x. The engineers would spend two hours arguing that estimates are bullshit, then give a trivially small (and obviously wrong) estimate. Leadership would say, are you sure? Engineers would basically flip them the bird and say yes. Then inevitably be late. I get it, estimating is inexact. But there's a clear difference between "I broke this down into little tasks, and I think we're looking at x" and "implement multiplayer? Four days."
  - whatshisface 8y ago
    Why wouldn't they give a trivially large (and very safe) estimate? Telling someone you will be finished tomorrow puts the onus on you to explain why your estimate was wrong.

kabacha 8y ago

While you come off a bit rough on victim blaming you do have a point. Video-game developers should have formed a union long time ago but here we are. I somewhat lack sympathy when the industry is clear as water about abuse like this yet people still go into it without precaution.

lovetocode 8y ago
Fair enough and you are probably right. I come from the position that you can only beat a dog so long before it bites back. But I feel like this could have been prevented if developers weren’t so enamored with the idea of developing games. Yeah it’s cool but it’s not cool enough to throw your dignity away.
- hannasanarion 8y ago
  And so you kill the dog and get another. People who want to make games are not in short supply.
  - lovetocode 8y ago
    Can’t argue with that.
  - kabacha 8y ago
    Software engineering for video games is pretty darn complicated. Surely it must be hard to get hold of the next John Carmack or at least someone remotely close to that. Is demand for good talent really filled here?
    - TimothyBJacobs 8y ago
      Game studios aren't filled with and don't need to be filled with hundreds of John Carmacks.
    - hannasanarion 8y ago
      If your "about-to-release crunch" involves building an entire engine from scratch with no help John Carmack style, you have much bigger problems.

lvturner 8y ago

Very easy to say, a lot harder to do Equally, finally leaving the games industry was one of the better things I did.

CodeCube 8y ago
same, unfortunately ... I loved my time in the game industry, but I also loved spending time (and more money achieved elsewhere) on my family.
armagon 8y ago
What is the best way to leave? I look at the experience required on the 'Who is Hiring' threads and sigh -- how am I supposed to get two years' professional experience using a technology that has nothing to do with games, or, how do I pick which tech to invest my time in, given that everything seems to be changing so quickly?
- CydeWeys 8y ago
  If you're a good developer, and it seems like a lot of people leaving the games industry are, it's not hard. Study up on your Cracking the Coding Interview, HackerRank, Leetcode, and similar stuff, and then just interview for Software Engineer positions. On your resume, list your previous experience as something like "Software Engineer, EA Games, 2016-present" (and include the names of any big games you worked on that people might know and be impressed by).
  - ggregoire 8y ago
    This is necessary only if you apply to Google and co. Most companies will never ask you to reverse a binary tree. Especially if the company is not in the US.
- umanwizard 8y ago
  Apply for a generalist position at a company that doesn’t hire for specific technologies (there are lots and lots of these, basically any of the big famous companies and a lot of smaller ones too).

maxehmookau 8y ago

>They should grow a spine and say no to ridiculous work conditions. YES! You're absolutely right! > They don’t need to unionize. Err... Why on earth not? That would literally be the definition of growing a spine and saying no to ridiculous work conditions but also having it be effective.

lovetocode 8y ago
I probably jumped the gun on the unionization part. I don’t know a lot about it but my impression of unions is not so bright. Maybe my ignorance is showing with that regard
- glitchc 8y ago
  It's all the propaganda corporations have been feeding you about how evil unions are. The wage stagnation of employees and stratospheric rise in senior management pay can be directly correlated to the decline of unions in North America.
  - WillPostForFood 8y ago
    How can you tell you haven't been fooled by all the union propaganda about evil corporations are? Maybe the truth is in the middle? Unions died in the US by a mix of suicide and overreach. Unions are still glorified to kids as saving us from child labor (which they did!). The bulk of the negativity around unions comes from people old enough to observer the decline of the manufacturing industry. The unions weren't the cause but helped accelerate the decline.
- maxehmookau 8y ago
  My knowledge of unions is based entirely on the UK. They allow groups of employees who are subject to poor conditions to group together and participate in collective bargaining. Most programmers in the UK are not a member of a union as pay is fairly high and conditions relatively good, but the majority of public-sector and a lot of private-sector workers are. Unionising would be an excellent first step for employees fighting back. I see a lot of anti-union talk on HN, I don't think a lot of the criticism of unions I see here is fair.

EliRivers 8y ago

they need to realize that they have a unique and valuable skill set The competition to be a low-paid drone in game development is huge; significantly more than in non game dev. The games industry is powered by huge numbers of low-experience software engineers. They get paid in glamour and the thrill of being able to tell their friends they work in games. They could leave and go somewhere else for more money, but they don't want more money as much as they want that glamour. I've seen it myself; people take low-paid QA jobs at games companies for the love of spending 12 hours a day following mind-numbing instructions, repetitively playtesting a greyscale wireframe without sound or graphics assets. For the glamour of it. These people have skill sets that are unusual amongst the general population, but not in the realms of software engineering job candidates and even less so in games, where strongly talented people take Godawful jobs for the glamour of it. Yes, there are highly skilled, experienced software engineers in the industry too, but they're not the ones being fucked over in huge numbers on a daily basis.

Veen 8y ago
> The competition to be a low-paid drone in game development is huge. That's precisely why unionization is the best course of action. Game development companies aren't threatened if individual developers demand better treatment because they can be replaced by the next starry-eyed young dev seeking prestige and glamour. But if enough of them unionize and collectively bargain for better conditions, the industry has to listen.
- EliRivers 8y ago
  In the absence of other protections (and frankly, even in the presence of other protections), I'm a fan of unionisation, but I am from outside the USA; I understand people inside the USA commonly have different opinions about unions.
gowld 8y ago
People say that, but what's the glamour? Do you have friends in AAA gamedev? Do you think that's cool? Do their parents? Their little brothers? You know who is cool? the 2-3 people who designed and built Pac-Mac, or Legend of Zelda, or Braid, or Papers Please. Not the people making guns for Call of War 7 that's a clone of a dozen other AAA games.

madshiva 8y ago

In all working aera the fault is not on the employees but on the compagny period. The fault is also on users that buy crap video game and make theses big compagny following this scheme you big win like Minecraft of work for nothing. Same apply for movie/music industry. This are not there fault. If maybe you stop paying Apple for running a streming service and talking all the cake. Users are more to be blammed than game developers.

georgeecollins 8y ago

> they have a unique and valuable skill set. They have a valuable skill set, but making big games takes large groups of testers, tool programmers, texture artists, etc. Who are talented but not unique. Like movie productions, games depend on a lot of skilled labor. And like movie productions, they tend not to be steady employers. So like film production in the US, it makes a lot of sense to have guilds or unions to protect work situations. Maybe also to create a framework for long term benefits, though I guess that is more debatable.

Veen 8y ago

Collective bargaining is the most effective way of "saying no to ridiculous work conditions". Unions are as imperfect as any human institution, but they serve a purpose.

Cthulhu_ 8y ago

The main problem with the game industry - I believe - is that for a lot of people it's a dream job, which means the supply for people to work in the industry far outweights that of the demand - meaning, if you're not doing crunch time, there's ten others waiting in line to take over. This is I think the problem in a lot of big employers with dubious worker practices - think Amazon, Uber, etc. They get away with it because the people are easily replaced. They can just fire any Amazon worker who even thinks about joining a union. In the gaming industry, they can - and will, and have - replace a voice actor with one that isn't unionized. Because they can. Because if not everyone is in the union, it is powerless. Because if they can offer a job to someone not in the union, who is willing to get underpaid to just have a job, they will.

jamestenglish 8y ago
This was my thought exactly! It is awfully pretentious to tell someone else what their "dream job" is. People value different things and there are a ton of people who value the ability to work on a game over better working conditions. As a society we do want to protect people from exploitation, but a game developer is significantly different from the other 2 examples you used: amazon (I assume you meant warehouse) worker and uber driver. Those are low skill jobs so employers have all the leverage, I don't think many of them want to be an uber driver or warehouse worker. Contrast that with a game dev, which is a very high skill job. They can take those skills into many other fields and make money, but they don't want to. Is that exploitation? I don't know, but it doesn't feel like it is to me.

_bxg1 8y ago

You know what happens when you're in a saturated job market and you "grow a spine and say no to ridiculous work conditions" without a union? You get fired.

djsumdog 8y ago

I was fired from a shop that made a game backend and asked workers to continually crunch, work long hours on salary with no overtime. There were some big bonuses, but it didn't make up for the bad planning and management. I refused to work over 45 hours a week. I worked one 13 hour Sunday and said no to the 2nd one and was fired. Another dev/ops person left two weeks later. The others: almost all of the team is still there, working over a year later, with the same crazy hours (80+ for 6~8 weeks at a time) and same constant crunch. I really really really wish I had at least used the word "union" in a meeting or e-mail while there, so I could claim I was fired based on trying to organize. I've even considered taking a day or two off, standing in front of the building and handing out unionization pamphlets, just to see if I could help make a change for the people left there. Everyone else let themselves and continue to let themselves be exploited. I honestly don't understand why many of them haven't gotten new jobs yet. Do they not realize that type of work isn't normal? I've worked at a lot of places and maybe I can just see bad management when others can't?

lovetocode 8y ago
I love your story! There is always a risk standing up for what you believe in. The fact they fired you over this shows their lack of respect for their employees. How long did it take you to find work after being fired?
- djsumdog 8y ago
  I honestly didn't try very hard at first and I was trying to avoid job recruiters. I took two months off before even looking, so in total, I was out of work for five month.
usefulcat 8y ago
> Do they not realize that type of work isn't normal? I've worked at a lot of places and maybe I can just see bad management when others can't? As you can tell from the fact that they have chosen to stay there and keep doing it, they apparently don't mind it that much. Certainly not enough to leave anyway.

platz 8y ago

As long as individuals try to out-compete each other for desired positions, they won't form a block, in the form of a union, to achieve a common goal. It's prisoner's dilemma.

coldtea 8y ago

>They don’t need to unionize, they need to realize that they have a unique and valuable skill set. Without unionizing, even if all of current employed and poorly paid game developers realized this, there would be no shortage of people coming in to undercut them.

hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
Yeah, I'm surprised the parent comment is upvoted so highly. If they had a unique skill set they would be paid more. Supply is just greater than the demand, simple as that.
lotu 8y ago
This is effectively how the game industry works. Young idealistic people get hired and work for a few years; and eventually realize this is shit deal burn out, quit and get replaced.

Scuds 8y ago

A union can protect against scenarios where a studio hires a bunch of people, the publisher pulls funding, and they're all laid off several months later with no severance or healthcare or assistance. Movie crews are constantly rolling on and off projects and are unionized. This is hardly a foreign concept.

organizenow 8y ago

No, they need a union. Leverage only works if everyone uses it, and collective bargaining is how that happens. If the word “union” bothers you then call it something else. Otherwise you get what we have now: highly mobile individuals able to pull themselves out of bad jobs as individuals, but otherwise unable to affect the industry as a whole.

SonnyWortzik 8y ago

In this highly competitive industry, you cannot expect someone to just stand up and demand to not be exploited when they can be simply fired and replaced within minutes. So no, it is not as simple as just growing a spine.

hellllllllooo 8y ago

You don't seem to understand what a union is. It's a group of people getting together to "say no to ridiculous work conditions". A union is literally how you join together to say no when you don't have individual power. The level of straight up anti-union rethoric on here without really understanding what a good union does is revealing.