4 ms·

> Employees usually receive shares as comp, don't they? Non-voting shares, yes. Voting shares are usually only given to very senior people, if ever, and not ne

> Employees usually receive shares as comp, don't they? Non-voting shares, yes. Voting shares are usually only given to very senior people, if ever, and not nearly enough to form anything close to a controlling ownership of the company. > I will say that the horror stories and bad press coming out of the video gaming industry will possibly have a chilling effect for new grads who would otherwise jump straight into it. Eventually management will run out of non-union workers to hire. Or the non-union workers themselves will demand better treatment. Decades of game development suggests otherwise. Like acting, it's people's dream job. And when the supply of labor exceeds the demand workers do not have leverage.

Apocryphon 7y ago
For decades there was no interest nor action towards unionizing in game development. Greater scrutiny into the industry from modern game journalism, and perhaps worsening experiences as the industry heads towards Hollywood-like AAA titles produced by monolithic studios, is surely causing something to change.
- manfredo 7y ago
  Game developers' experiencing the misery of crunch time and layoffs is something I've heard about firsthand since the early 2000s at the latest. Reading accounts from earlier games' development cycles suggests that this has been common for even longer than that. Game development has always had cyclical labor demands and tight deadlines. I think you need to qualify the claim that these experiences are worsening. In fact, from most of the veteran developers I've talked to report the opposite: before the proliferation of the internet crunch time was way more serious since patching was not a viable option. Nowadays it's pretty much the norm that games have significant bugs for the first week or two and still need to mature after release. This creates greater room for error and less pressure to fix every bug before release.
  - Apocryphon 7y ago
    That's fair, perhaps conditions haven't been substantially worse than in previous console generations. But it sounds like there's something driving the push towards unionizing/organizing, whatever it is. And it sounds like the general public is more aware it being a brutal industry.
    - manfredo 7y ago
      Just because you're seeing more news stories about unionization or organizing, doesn't actually mean that there's more interest in unionizing and organizing. It just means that people producing news are writing more stories covering unionization and organizing. Take this story for example. Linkedin lists Glitch's size as 11-50. The highest employee count I've found claims 120. This is small fish in a very large pond. This press release name drops Google, but these companies are three orders of magnitude apart in terms of size.
      - Apocryphon 7y ago
        Prior to this, and at Kickstarter, there were no high-profile tech unions. Now there is at least two. Now you might not consider that substantially more, but that's still definitely more.
        manfredo 7y ago
        There still aren't any high profile tech unions. Glitch is 120 people with the highest estimates. Kickstarter is 258 as of March 2020 [1]. These are small companies - medium at best. By comparison there are over a million software developers in the US [2]. And that's just one of many "tech" jobs ("Computer Systems Analyst" has another 600k, "Computer Programmer has 250k). Even if we assume that every employee at these companies work in tech roles, these companies represent less than 0.02% of the tech workforce. 1. https://craft.co/kickstarter https://craft.co/kickstarter 2. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
        7y ago

Apocryphon 7y ago

For decades there was no interest nor action towards unionizing in game development. Greater scrutiny into the industry from modern game journalism, and perhaps worsening experiences as the industry heads towards Hollywood-like AAA titles produced by monolithic studios, is surely causing something to change.

manfredo 7y ago
Game developers' experiencing the misery of crunch time and layoffs is something I've heard about firsthand since the early 2000s at the latest. Reading accounts from earlier games' development cycles suggests that this has been common for even longer than that. Game development has always had cyclical labor demands and tight deadlines. I think you need to qualify the claim that these experiences are worsening. In fact, from most of the veteran developers I've talked to report the opposite: before the proliferation of the internet crunch time was way more serious since patching was not a viable option. Nowadays it's pretty much the norm that games have significant bugs for the first week or two and still need to mature after release. This creates greater room for error and less pressure to fix every bug before release.
- Apocryphon 7y ago
  That's fair, perhaps conditions haven't been substantially worse than in previous console generations. But it sounds like there's something driving the push towards unionizing/organizing, whatever it is. And it sounds like the general public is more aware it being a brutal industry.
  - manfredo 7y ago
    Just because you're seeing more news stories about unionization or organizing, doesn't actually mean that there's more interest in unionizing and organizing. It just means that people producing news are writing more stories covering unionization and organizing. Take this story for example. Linkedin lists Glitch's size as 11-50. The highest employee count I've found claims 120. This is small fish in a very large pond. This press release name drops Google, but these companies are three orders of magnitude apart in terms of size.
    - Apocryphon 7y ago
      Prior to this, and at Kickstarter, there were no high-profile tech unions. Now there is at least two. Now you might not consider that substantially more, but that's still definitely more.
      - manfredo 7y ago
        There still aren't any high profile tech unions. Glitch is 120 people with the highest estimates. Kickstarter is 258 as of March 2020 [1]. These are small companies - medium at best. By comparison there are over a million software developers in the US [2]. And that's just one of many "tech" jobs ("Computer Systems Analyst" has another 600k, "Computer Programmer has 250k). Even if we assume that every employee at these companies work in tech roles, these companies represent less than 0.02% of the tech workforce. 1. https://craft.co/kickstarter https://craft.co/kickstarter 2. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
        7y ago