5 ms·

I try to work in the game industry when possible. Unions on the game industry would never work, reason why game industry is so abusive is two fold: 1. A lot o

I try to work in the game industry when possible. Unions on the game industry would never work, reason why game industry is so abusive is two fold: 1. A lot of young people believe working with games is only fun, providing endless bodies to be hired and replace the previous young that realized how much it suck that they quit. 2. Games market follow a very strong winner takes all model, a few games have all profits, literally thousands games are released yearly that nobody ever heard of or bought. As such here is the situation: 1. Very few companies (because of previous point 2) can afford to pay good wages and benefits. 2. The few companies that actually are wealthy, get so much applicants that every year starry eyed talented newbies will join for shit pay. Hell, when I had my own company people wanted to work for free even! 3. If a union starts to form, the company will just get rid of it somehow, even if is extremely bad PR, because people will still willingly throw themselves at such jobs thinking "EA Spouse" description of crunch time is a dream, not a nightmare. Note: currently unemployed again. I am in love enough with games to want to brave all its shittyness, but I don't have my hopes up that I will get a game job, because my wife is pregnant and I need wages that allow me to take care of 3 people now, and I know in the game industry this is very unlikely. When I first finished university nongames companies offered me usually at least 3x what game industry did for same positions. My first job ended with me getting 5x the highest offer I got from game industry. I accepted it because the game industry offer was lower than my student debt repayments for my Game Design and Production degree...

thfuran 4y ago
>Very few companies (because of previous point 2) can afford to pay good wages and benefits. Well, it's not ideal, but it's fine if only a few companies can afford to operate in a given field.
advisedwang 4y ago
> 1. A lot of young people believe working with games is only fun, providing endless bodies to be hired and replace the previous young that realized how much it suck that they quit. > 2. Games market follow a very strong winner takes all model, a few games have all profits, literally thousands games are released yearly that nobody ever heard of or bought. These are both true of movies, but that is a heavily unionized industry.
- derefr 4y ago
  The film industry has a lot of young talent trying to break into the industry, but the industry is mostly composed of older people with better sense of their own worth. The games industry has almost no old talent. There are many non-trivially-sized game studios where nobody working there is over 30. Presumably, on the film-industry side, this is in part a work of the unions, acting as barriers-to-entry to the industry and thereby limiting the supply of (⇒ increasing the demand for) their existing membership. Not knowing much about the history of film, I would guess that film-industry unions — besides the blue-collar labor unions, that likely arose organically just as they did everywhere — originally arose out mostly from the natural limited supply of "famous actors" who thus already formed an implicit power bloc within the industry. The games industry really doesn't have a natural power bloc equivalent to "famous actors." There are some famous directors, but they just go found their own studios if they don't like working conditions elsewhere (since business/people management is already their comparative advantage.)
  - advisedwang 4y ago
    Unions create a wage floor and standards of working conditions which eliminates the main benefit of churning though young and optimistic people trying to break into the industry. That's another reason (besides barriers to entry) that unions are responsible for why the film industry has more "old" talent than games.
    - klyrs 4y ago
      Ehhh... the "wage floor" in the film industry is nothing to strive for. https://www.thelightleaks.com/think-pieces/reality-of-unpaid-hollywood-internships https://www.thelightleaks.com/think-pieces/reality-of-unpaid...
  - pixl97 4y ago
    >The games industry has almost no old talent. Guess I need to tell all the older people in the game industry I know they need to quit.
derefr 4y ago
Perhaps we need a different revenue model for games. Book publishing was pretty winner-take-all, until Kindle Unlimited (and its close relative, the many serial-fiction "unlock new chapters with coins" websites and apps) came along, and basically changed everything for many indie authors. Before, you needed to woo a publisher, because you needed to be in bookstores, because you needed a certain threshold of word-of-mouth to be stirred up around your releases, in order to get sales that would let you make enough to cover your own advances. But with the Kindle Unlimited model (users pay a flat subscription fee; authors get paid per page read) it's now practical to earn a living just by writing and maybe talking your book up on your own personal social media — no need to find a publisher, no need to make it into bookstores, no need to advertise heavily, no need to make big-hit releases, etc. Just pump out a constant stream of stuff that some people like enough, and you get money. Could there be a Kindle Unlimited for games? All games are free under subscription; devs get paid proportional to play time? A quick Google suggests that Apple Arcade might actually be doing this, but Apple Arcade devs are apparently under NDA not to talk about the revenue model. (Maybe because Apple doesn't want the other bigcorps realizing this is working well and being a fast-follower?)
- govg 4y ago
  Gamepass is probably a better model in terms of utility to people playing games as well as exposure. Apple is not really a big part of traditional gaming, only has a presence in mobile (which is the biggest segment, but not related to the discussion here).
thebradbain 4y ago
I live in Los Angeles, surrounded by people who work in entertainment. There's also a very heavy gaming company presence here. A lot of the companies will cross-hire, in fact, because there's a lot of overlap (voice-work, art, cgi+vfx, post-production, editing, etc). Every time, if someone in gaming has the opportunity to take a gig in entertainment, they will choose the entertainment gig. The industries are very similar, but due to how they evolved they are each a mirror image of the other had each taken a different path to labor organizing. Hollywood was (and in many ways still is) THE most exploitative industry when it came to profit sharing, dangerous+stressful+long working conditions, etc. But at least the unions guarantee certain things like breaks and time off, healthy pay floors (e.g. an entry level writer on a tv show will make $120k that year if they work 8 months, $70k if they work 6 months, etc), health insurance between gigs, a pension, etc, even to their minimum wage workers. Gaming workers can have this too if they realize the profitable game studios literally cannot make a profit without their labor, and organize en masse accordingly.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > But at least the unions guarantee certain things like Except in VFX which is as young as gaming industry and suffers from the same problems.
  - thebradbain 4y ago
    Well, unfortunately the major VFX houses today are not unionized. There used to be some, but Marvel opened the floodgates to contracting out major VFK work to non-union companies. I imagine this will be added to the list of grievances animators historically have had with the lack of union protections in recent years, and used as a negotiation chip in the next round of strikes. After all, union films and tv shows cannot use non-union actors or crews in most cases. I imagine there will be a similar rule made that union productions cannot work with non-union vfx agencies, eventually.
arsenide 4y ago
I work in the slot gaming industry. A lot of ex-video game developers end up coming over. May be worth looking into.

thfuran 4y ago

>Very few companies (because of previous point 2) can afford to pay good wages and benefits. Well, it's not ideal, but it's fine if only a few companies can afford to operate in a given field.

advisedwang 4y ago

> 1. A lot of young people believe working with games is only fun, providing endless bodies to be hired and replace the previous young that realized how much it suck that they quit. > 2. Games market follow a very strong winner takes all model, a few games have all profits, literally thousands games are released yearly that nobody ever heard of or bought. These are both true of movies, but that is a heavily unionized industry.

derefr 4y ago
The film industry has a lot of young talent trying to break into the industry, but the industry is mostly composed of older people with better sense of their own worth. The games industry has almost no old talent. There are many non-trivially-sized game studios where nobody working there is over 30. Presumably, on the film-industry side, this is in part a work of the unions, acting as barriers-to-entry to the industry and thereby limiting the supply of (⇒ increasing the demand for) their existing membership. Not knowing much about the history of film, I would guess that film-industry unions — besides the blue-collar labor unions, that likely arose organically just as they did everywhere — originally arose out mostly from the natural limited supply of "famous actors" who thus already formed an implicit power bloc within the industry. The games industry really doesn't have a natural power bloc equivalent to "famous actors." There are some famous directors, but they just go found their own studios if they don't like working conditions elsewhere (since business/people management is already their comparative advantage.)
- advisedwang 4y ago
  Unions create a wage floor and standards of working conditions which eliminates the main benefit of churning though young and optimistic people trying to break into the industry. That's another reason (besides barriers to entry) that unions are responsible for why the film industry has more "old" talent than games.
  - klyrs 4y ago
    Ehhh... the "wage floor" in the film industry is nothing to strive for. https://www.thelightleaks.com/think-pieces/reality-of-unpaid-hollywood-internships https://www.thelightleaks.com/think-pieces/reality-of-unpaid...
- pixl97 4y ago
  >The games industry has almost no old talent. Guess I need to tell all the older people in the game industry I know they need to quit.

derefr 4y ago

Perhaps we need a different revenue model for games. Book publishing was pretty winner-take-all, until Kindle Unlimited (and its close relative, the many serial-fiction "unlock new chapters with coins" websites and apps) came along, and basically changed everything for many indie authors. Before, you needed to woo a publisher, because you needed to be in bookstores, because you needed a certain threshold of word-of-mouth to be stirred up around your releases, in order to get sales that would let you make enough to cover your own advances. But with the Kindle Unlimited model (users pay a flat subscription fee; authors get paid per page read) it's now practical to earn a living just by writing and maybe talking your book up on your own personal social media — no need to find a publisher, no need to make it into bookstores, no need to advertise heavily, no need to make big-hit releases, etc. Just pump out a constant stream of stuff that some people like enough, and you get money. Could there be a Kindle Unlimited for games? All games are free under subscription; devs get paid proportional to play time? A quick Google suggests that Apple Arcade might actually be doing this, but Apple Arcade devs are apparently under NDA not to talk about the revenue model. (Maybe because Apple doesn't want the other bigcorps realizing this is working well and being a fast-follower?)

govg 4y ago
Gamepass is probably a better model in terms of utility to people playing games as well as exposure. Apple is not really a big part of traditional gaming, only has a presence in mobile (which is the biggest segment, but not related to the discussion here).

thebradbain 4y ago

I live in Los Angeles, surrounded by people who work in entertainment. There's also a very heavy gaming company presence here. A lot of the companies will cross-hire, in fact, because there's a lot of overlap (voice-work, art, cgi+vfx, post-production, editing, etc). Every time, if someone in gaming has the opportunity to take a gig in entertainment, they will choose the entertainment gig. The industries are very similar, but due to how they evolved they are each a mirror image of the other had each taken a different path to labor organizing. Hollywood was (and in many ways still is) THE most exploitative industry when it came to profit sharing, dangerous+stressful+long working conditions, etc. But at least the unions guarantee certain things like breaks and time off, healthy pay floors (e.g. an entry level writer on a tv show will make $120k that year if they work 8 months, $70k if they work 6 months, etc), health insurance between gigs, a pension, etc, even to their minimum wage workers. Gaming workers can have this too if they realize the profitable game studios literally cannot make a profit without their labor, and organize en masse accordingly.

dmitriid 4y ago
> But at least the unions guarantee certain things like Except in VFX which is as young as gaming industry and suffers from the same problems.
- thebradbain 4y ago
  Well, unfortunately the major VFX houses today are not unionized. There used to be some, but Marvel opened the floodgates to contracting out major VFK work to non-union companies. I imagine this will be added to the list of grievances animators historically have had with the lack of union protections in recent years, and used as a negotiation chip in the next round of strikes. After all, union films and tv shows cannot use non-union actors or crews in most cases. I imagine there will be a similar rule made that union productions cannot work with non-union vfx agencies, eventually.

arsenide 4y ago

I work in the slot gaming industry. A lot of ex-video game developers end up coming over. May be worth looking into.