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GTA 6 Developers Unionize
- aeternum 5mo agoLol, GTA 6 is destined to be the next Duke Nukem 2
- AndrewKemendo 5mo agoOn Thursday, the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB) and Rockstar staff members announced the Rockstar Game Workers Union. This union will be part of the IWGB. The reveal came in the form of an informative video which delves into their motives and what we should be looking out for in the future.
- Refreeze5224 5mo agoSolidarity forever! Game devs eat a a lot of crap, so I'm glad they are banding together to bargain collectively.
- WarmWash 5mo agoCan anyone comment on why "big video game" dev pay has lagged "big tech" pay so badly? Ostensibly they are doing remarkably similar engineering problem solving, so why is there such a disparity?
- majorchord 5mo agoBecause they put up with it.
- jrmeyer2 5mo agoSupply and demand would suggest that there's more supply of those willing to be paid less to work in entertainment 'on games' to meet the demand. Would be cool to see actual economics on it though.
- bananabiscuit 5mo agoPassion tax.
- SuddsMcDuff 5mo agoIndividuals making choices.
- throwawaysoxjje 5mo agoAnd companies using the many individuals to magnify their leverage.
- basisword 5mo agoHas it? A lot of 'big tech pay' is based on US salaries which are astronomical compared with all of Western Europe. And big game companies are lot more spread out globally. For example, in this case they're in the UK so how do their salaries compare with UK dev salaries?
- connicpu 5mo agoEven in the US, game developer positions tend to pay much lower than the same skills can get you at a "big tech" company.
- whywhywhywhy 5mo agoI mean it’s not just tech ALL salaries in the US make Europe look a joke.
- zipy124 5mo agoThey pay slightly above market rate compared to standard software in the UK, but below London/FAANG wages.
- ryandrake 5mo agoIs it as simple as supply/demand? People love games and game-loving developers are willing to take lower compensation to be in the industry? As a former obsessed gamer, I remember in my 20s I almost would have been willing to work at iD Software without pay if they let me.
- agentgt 5mo agoI think it is mostly just margins. Sure there are lots of people willing to work for no very little money for game dev but I would say there are tons of people willing to work for very little money for FAANG companies because they want that on their resume. In fact since we are on hackernews that is kind of thing people wanting to be entrepreneurs do. Work at recognizable big tech company for a few years. Leave to be a founder of a startup. Investors ... well that guy came from google they must know what they are doing etc (the irony is they probably have less of the skills to start a company going that path).
- yCombLinks 5mo agoThey want it on their resume primarily to make more money and have a better career in terms of getting hired, etc. Very different motivation. They'd only work at a FAANG for free long enough to get that bump. Game devs however would work for many years underpaid because they like what they're creating.
- agentgt 5mo ago~~Perhaps now especially since these companies are predominately hiring oversees contractors but circa 2009-2015 when I was around entrepreneurs and startups this was discussed.~~ ~~Ultimately the goal is the same: make more money. So I disagree the motivation is "very different" its just a lot harder now to do a startup.~~ You kept editing your comment so disregard the above. I misread it the first time and then it changed. I left my response thats makes no sense now.
- yCombLinks 5mo ago
- HugoTea 5mo agoI think a never-ending pool of young, fresh, and naïve graduates happy to sell their soul to make video games has been a strong contributor for low wages for a while. Any time someone gets too senior, just replace them with another graduate. Naturally, the product quality and timescale suffers too.
- doublerabbit 5mo agoYep, 0-day contracts. Don't like it? Move on and we'll hire another set of university grads. That's how most studios work.
- ZivenChang 5mo agoCan AI replace game developers now?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- flohofwoe 5mo agoModern AAA video game development has much more in common with a traditional factory assembly line than a typical tech startup (for better or worse) - or maybe movie production is an even better comparison (especially now where most of the production seems to happen 'in post'). Also VC doesn't seem to be all that interested in investing into game dev companies, I guess because it's such an extreme hit-and-miss business (e.g. even when a game-dev company lands a massive hit, the next attempt may be a massive flop and sink the whole company). > Ostensibly they are doing remarkable similar engineering problem solving The engineering problems have been mostly outsourced to Unity and Epic Games (e.g. Unreal Engine)
- LPisGood 5mo agoThat’s only true in some instances. Do most AAA titles like Call of Duty, GTA, etc use Unity or Unreal?
- DrBenCarson 5mo agoMost massive studios have their own which they use across a bunch of titles
- flohofwoe 5mo agoIn the last few years the pendulum has been swinging back from inhouse engine to Unreal Engine. There are a couple of holdouts, but my guess is that the majority of AAA games currently released are back on UE - at least it feels that way ;) And Unity always ruled supreme for AA and mobile games.
- jdw64 5mo agoI heard a great perspective on this from a Chinese developer. The reliance on outsourced engines like Unity or Unreal isn't just driven by the high costs of in-house development and yearly upgrades. The real issue is career mobility. Knowledge of a proprietary engine is completely locked to that specific company. They pointed out that Unity and Unreal became industry standards simply because of the dynamics of changing jobs. I fully agree with that assessment.
- neilv 5mo agoI think the usual theory is: So many of us got into computers because we loved playing video games, and wanted to make them, and then loved making games. So the game companies that will pay you money to make games (even if there's a lot of non-fun to it) don't have to pay as much as, say, a surveillance capitalism company of sharp-elbowed careerists. IIUC, the majority of FAANG is people who are there, first and foremost, for the paycheck. (And then maybe they get interested in the work, especially if it seems like progress towards a promotion for more money, or because it gave them skills or resume keywords that they can then use to get more money elsewhere. It's the money/career that's interesting first -- craft and product are only a consequence of wanting the money.)
- para_parolu 5mo agoI work in tech. I would be happy to work on gta 6 for 30% of my current income.
- SuddsMcDuff 5mo agoSeconday question, for how long do you think you would be happy with that arrangement?
- stevekemp 5mo agoIn addition to low salary, and crunchtime, the other big downside in the gaming industry is frequently layoffs, and studioes going bust. You can't ride on a single game for long, and if the next one goes badly half the company will get fired. Not true of the bigger studios, but of course not everybody works in those. I have friends who work in gaming, and it's a regular thing for studios to form with a great game, go bust a year or three later, and then a new studio get formed with largely similar staff. Developers move between the same companies around and around again. The lack of stability is a real problem, especially with increasing use of "AI".
- asdff 5mo agoShit can hit the fan with bigger studios when Microsoft or Sony acquire them.
- diath 5mo agoIt has not lagged behind depending on how you look at it, video game development can be split into engine programming and gameplay programming. For engine programming, you only need a handful of senior engineers specializing in low level details of a video game engine, and these will get paid high appropriate wages that match industry standard salaries. For the gameplay programmers, they just seek the cheapest labor that can do "quantity over quality" type of work to pump out content and there's a large pool of juniors/interns that will accept these low wages just because they want to be a part of something popular.
- rowanG077 5mo agoBut don't bad gameplay programmers implement gameplay badly? If that is truly the state of the industry that explains all the modern games with extremely mushy controls.
- IshKebab 5mo agoI assume by gameplay he means stuff like in game scripting - when you walk here it triggers this. Mushy controls would be down to the engine developers.
- charcircuit 5mo agoCustomers don't care about the code. They just care that the gameplay is fun.
- rowanG077 5mo agoAre you implying the only differentiator between good and bad developers is the aesthetic of the code itself? And not the actual computation the code does? Wild take honestly.
- Xirdus 5mo agoAs counterintuitive as it sounds, it turns out video game consumers don't care much about the actual computation either. Most games are riddled with bugs, and it has next to no impact on sales. Rather, having weird, even embarrassing bugs can make players look at the game more fondly. Skyrim is one of the best selling games ever. Ostensibly it's about fighting dragons. But "Skyrim moment" does not mean an epic battle with a dragon. It means said dragon flying through a goddamn castle, then getting stuck on a single tree and disappearing into the ground, and still hitting you with fire breath somehow.
- moooo99 5mo agoBecause pay is not directly correlated to technical finesse. It is primarily dictated by how much money a company can expect to make. And Advertising (FAANG) is insanely profitable, while doing software in other difficult fields (firmware in automotive or embedded, etc) may be technically challenging, but the margin is is only like 6-10% max
- bwestergard 5mo agoI am a unionized software developer in media, not games. I helped the game workers at Blizzard unionize and they all spoke of the "passion tax". One reason the "passion tax" is possible for employers is that there seems to be a degree of labor monopsony for the kind of development done by AAA game studios. In this respect it's quite a bit like Hollywood film production in its heyday.
- ygouzerh 5mo agoThanks, you taught me a new concept, monopsony today, I didn't knew it got a name!
- darknavi 5mo ago> monopsony I had to look it up as well. I assumed it was a play on words about Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony (the three big video game console players).
- lesuorac 5mo agoFor future people to look it up. Monopoly is a single seller. Monopsony is a single buyer.
- lesuorac 5mo agoGiven how popular this has gotten I guess I should point out that it's wrong. There isn't a single seller so the proper ones are Oligopoly - Market with few sellers Oligopsony - Market with few buyers "few" really meaning that they have pricing power as opposed to 3 companies.
- bko 5mo agoSuppose you double their pay, make them more in line with other tech workers. How should you allocate these highly coveted game dev jobs? The supply of jobs won't magically increase (it would likely decrease with higher wages), and the number of people interested in working there would grow as well. Do you just have a lottery? Now rather than being a relatively underpaid worker in an industry you're passionate about, you don't have the opportunity to work there.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- fidotron 5mo agoSupply/demand. For example, GPU shader programming is something people will practically fight over doing because it's so non obviously utterly addictive. I would say dev roles in tech in general that lack an operational component also lag in pay, and much of gamedev is pure dev in a sense the wider tech industry has since largely forgotten exists. On the art side it's even more extreme.
- smartties 5mo agoGPU programming has to be one of the highest paying jobs in the game industry, and it can transition quite easily into other industries as well. Mostly because it’s not an entry-level position. On top of being a solid C++ developer, you need to understand the entire hardware stack and be able to optimize shaders at the instruction level while juggling things like occupancy, memory coalescing, and other low level performance concerns.
- fidotron 5mo agoMy experience of it, which is quite substantial both as dev and overseeing whole teams at it, is people do not pay for GPU programming, they do pay for integrating it into their framework, optimizing what the artists did already, and developing profiling tools, but the only part of that remotely competitive with ops related roles is "We didn't think we needed developers so our art team made an inefficient mess in Unreal and we're desperate to release the game on time and are throwing money around to make sure it actually runs on remotely normal hardware", after which they will sit around complaining about how expensive it was and the amount of damage that was done to their artistic vision in the process.
- manas96 5mo agoI agree, low-level highly specialized technology roles within game companies do pay well.
- rayiner 5mo agoSupply and demand. There's a high supply of people who want to work in video game development, which drives down the price of labor. It's the same reason why nearly all actors work for a pittance.
- tripleee 5mo agoPeople are willing to work for less because they enjoy the work more. Also wouldn't be surprised if the gaming industry trends younger, so less experience negotiating.
- DrBenCarson 5mo agoVideo game development is largely grunt work outside of the engine
- jhatemyjob 5mo agoThis, and also, if you just take a step back and think of the bigger picture, the work isn't valuable. There's a lot more value in pushing ads, a CRM, an email app, etc than keeping a 14 year old kid entertained. I don't really buy the supply/demand argument everyone else is saying here. The end product just doesn't provide value to people's lives. The amount of effort you'd need to put in to provide value to someone's life through a video game is way higher than the effort you'd need to put into a productivity tool. In fact, more often than not, video games provide negative value to people's lives. They're usually a waste of time at best. And at worst, addictive and carpal tunnel inducing.
- abnercoimbre 5mo agoThis is a crazy worldview to hold when looking at the annual revenue of just a single IP like Pokemon? Video games surpassed Hollywood years ago! If we want to measure value differently, I already treat certain games with the same reverence as literary classics, and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone.
- jhatemyjob 5mo agoFunny you mention Pokemon. Have you been to a Pokemon regional championships recently? Take a good look at the average Pokemon player. You really think that hobby is adding value to their life?
- abnercoimbre 5mo agoI've met people whose lives were almost destroyed due to games. This is true. I've also met those whose lives were transformed positively by it (no, not Pokemon.) They run the whole gamut. I'll concede an email app doesn't produce that kind of wide-ranging effect on humans.
- jmyeet 5mo agoIt's really the same in any creative industry. Employers exploit you through this combination of factors: 1. You love the area and are willing to take a cut to work in that area, particularly when the alternative is working on CRMs for a PBM; 2. Demand for these jobs still exceeds supply; and 3. The very top of this pyramid makes a shitload of money. If you get to like a Lead Engineer type position, you might be making points on unit sales. And for a big hit that can be big money; and 4. Historically, indie development wasn't a viable route to making a living but it suffers from the same distortions too. For every Notch or ConcernedApe, there are thousands of pepole who below the poverty line. Look at something as widely regarded (but niche) like Dwarf Fortress. They made bank (and deserved it) from the Steam release but they spent 10+ years making a couple of thousand of dollars a month between the two of them. Just look at the music industry. There are artists and bands who are trying to make it, training for years and making $50 to play some local venue and they're just hoping to get noticed. In years gone by that was a record contract. Nowadays, there are alternate routes. Justin Bieber was a Youtube breakout. Fun fact: the first artist to have a #1 single without a record contract was Lisa Loeb for Stay in the early 1990s because it was picked up for the sound track (those used to be a big deal) for Reality Bites.
- Thaxll 5mo agoMajor studio pay the same as in tech for the base salary, the big difference is in bonus/stock.
- dyauspitr 5mo agoToo many people are willing to do it for low pay and long hours because of their passion for it. Also most games are not guaranteed clients and thus profits like with large corporate software.
- simonjgreen 5mo agoYou could invert this question and it would be equally valid. The question is why the gulf, rather than why the lag. Why is big tech pay so high? When you compare it to other trades and industries video game dev pay is much more “normal”
- psvv 5mo agoFlipping the question like this was my instinct as well. I think the passion tax and supply and demand are definitely factors, but the real reason for the gap is that big tech has gotten increasingly exploitative and monopolistic, leading to larger margins and higher competition for talent.
- victorbjorklund 5mo agoMore people dream about building the next game than building another CRM system.
- tyleo 5mo agoI'm actually in the industry. I don't think it's as much about supply and demand as it is about expected value of the product. Most games are expensive to make and most of them fail. Way more than normal software which doesn't have ultra-high marketing costs or diverse staffing needs (Art, QA, game design, etc).
- saadn92 5mo agomy guess is: the ENGINEERING problems they solve are harder, but they're still just video games at the end of the day, compared to something that solves an actual business need.
- Jare 5mo agoThe business need of the games industry is making money selling games and content and ads, just like the business need of Netflix or Spotify is making money via ads and subscriptions for music or movies or etc. It's a consumer business much like any other. Just like most startups and major companies, they are not necessary for the world in the way utilities for example are. The problem of videogames compared to startups and SV tech is that the long-term money potential is very limited at best, and rapidly becomes very brittle. Most startups pay bigger salaries for much easier work, because they burn the money investors are betting hoping the company will crack a new long-term market, not because they make money themselves. There's very little games market to crack, very little chance to turn your product into a long-lived platform to built on top of, meanwhile the upfront investment is huge.
- oreally 5mo agoThis is correct. Market economics doesn't care how hard/deep you worked on something, just how much value it can get for cheap.
- swatcoder 5mo agoThere are more silos in the software engineering industry than you might expect as a "Big Tech" kind of engineer (assuming that's where you're speaking from). Gaming, embedded, audio, aviation, defense, automotive, medtech and pharmacy, deep enterprise, finance, etc. Those silos maintain different processes and workflows, different company cultures, different skill specializations, etc and jumping around between them in mid-career or senior can be very challenging. So they tend to have their own org chart shapes and salary/benefit norms. When a Big Tech company moves into or absorbs one of those silos, or emerges from one of those silos, it can shake up what the people within them get paid (and thereby have big knock-on effects for legacy employers), but otherwise it's just it's own little bubble in a lot of ways. People can share stories and ideas across the siloes in venues like HN, but many of the "what are you even talking about" reactions that happen on here often occur when people from these different silos stumble into what are sometimes deep differences in what they do and what their work experience is like.
- Aurornis 5mo agoI've done some coaching work with college-age computer science majors. The answer is pretty obvious when you talk to enough of them: Most of them got into computers via video games. Many of them had phases where they worked on video game related code, like modding or trying to make their own games. Not many people get into computers because they dream about staring at a console to figure out why the kubernetes cluster is misbehaving again (though some do). Like another commenter said, it's the "passion tax": The more interesting a job, the more people seek it. The more people competing for a job, the lower the pay.
- sjtgraham 5mo agoHow can pay ostensibly be lagging behind big tech at Rockstar, yet GTA 6 allegedly has a budget of $3B? Granted not all of it will be allocated to development cost, but still.
- MagicMoonlight 5mo agoBecause building video games isn’t really work, it’s just fun. I’d do it for half of whatever these guys are being paid.
- whatever1 5mo agoBig video game industry never had to compete with META for top talent. Tangible example: Walmart labs had to quadruple the salaries once it realized they could not attract any scientists or top tier engineers.
- smsm42 5mo agoMaybe the skill set in game dev is less portable to other domains? I'm on backend side, and I interviewed a lot of people over my career, with all variety of backgrounds, and I can hardly recall anybody coming from the gaming industry for some reason. It seems to be somehow separate from other tech fields, not sure why. If that's true, then the cause is that the market is smaller, so the gaming studios have more power.
- bdcravens 5mo agoSexy rarely pays.
- ihaveajob 5mo agoIn my time I heard some people called this the "Tower Records effect". If the workplace is cool enough (record store, video game company, rock band), enough kids will want to work there that the employer can pay peanuts and won't run out of applicants.
- geriatricguy 5mo agoMy guess would be that game prices haven't dramatically changed in 20-30 years and development costs have skyrocketed. Easiest way to save money is on payroll.
- jampekka 5mo agoGame sales have skyrocketed though. Inflation corrected revenue has increased something like 5x in the past 30 years. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/video-game-industry-revenues-by-platform/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/video-game-industry-revenue...
- lrae 5mo agoWhere are you seeing a 5x there? I see a 2x over the last 30 years for PC & Console - which are the expensive platforms to develop for. (If you're AA(A).)
- asdff 5mo agoThis forgets about microtransactions.
- Sevii 5mo agoEmployee pay depends on the margins of the industry. High margin industries can afford to pay high wages. Game publishers have nowhere near the margins of Google.
- sonzohan 5mo agoGame dev here, have worked on AAA and indie. First off let me get on my high horse and say the engineering in video gaming is generally more complex than the engineering I've done working in big tech. You need a lot more creativity and ingenuity to solve the unusual problems you run into in gaming. From there, as others have said, it's a simple supply and demand issue. Nowadays I am a university professor, nearly every student who comes in wants to pursue one of the three fields: cybersecurity, video gaming, or recently ML/AI. This shouldn't come as a surprise, they want to work on the things that influenced them and shaped their experiences so far. There's an absolute over supply of students who want to make video games. Gaming, like most of entertainment, is a passion-driven industry. You trade good salary for your name in the credits. You trade nights, hobbies, marriages, and your health for this opportunity. That is unless you reach that lofty 1% of developers who are too valuable to be fired. Not all areas of gaming are like this. Gambling, like working on slot/pachinko machines, pays very well and has pretty realistic work-life balance. However every student I've talked to about this has universally said "no I don't want to make slot machines. I only want to work on GTA/Stardew Valley/Hollow Knight/Fortnite." There's seriously no shortage of starry-eyed students who are willing to accept minimum wage to solve SDE3 level problems. I was one of them once.
- cheeze 5mo agoI'm the opposite. BigCorp distributed systems guy. I'd agree with all of this from what I've seen though. The problems that some of my buddies solved straight out of college, while very different than 'hard problems' at bigcorp, are... hard. One buddy ended up moving to the worst of both worlds... backend infra for a large video game and ended up getting video game salary for bigcorp distributed systems problems.
- al_borland 5mo agoDo you tend to see a high drop out rate or general dissatisfaction from graduates when they come to the realization that making a game is a very different experience than playing the games?
- Scaled 5mo ago
- neya 5mo agoHistorically it has always been a bottom tier paying industry. Same like animation and VFX. On top of this, now you have AI and almost anyone can create some impressive games using stuff like Claude code. So, I foresee it will only get worse from here.
- whywhywhywhy 5mo ago“Working on GTA 6” is a dream job for many millions of young people and there is only one rockstar north, if you quit the line of people willing to replace you for minimum wage would be thousands long, the number willing to do it for free would be hundreds long. “Writing react components” “deploying a database” “debugging the Android build” are not dream jobs and you can do it at hundreds of companies
- jackmott42 5mo agosupply and demand as always
- RicoElectrico 5mo agoIt is a tax on dreams.
- gambiting 5mo agoSo I can comment on this as someone who has worked in video games for 15 years now, for 3 of the biggest publishers. To start with, I've been at Ubisoft for 10 years - and the pay was famously abysmal. Like you could go and work at a supermarket and earn more, without joking. And every time I tried to argue about it the counter argument was 1) we pay low but you get to work on cool stuff 2) there is an infinite number of people interested in working here 3) if you don't like it, then leave And you know what....as much as I absolutely hate to admit it, there was a nugget of truth to that. I was paid like shit, but I got to work on games which sold 30-40 million copies and were enjoyed by a lot of people. Nothing makes me happier than meeting people saying they played one of the games I worked on and they loved or they have fond memories of it. I don't think that justifies the poor pay, but all of my friends in IT were paid a lot more but worked on some software they hated and no one remembers it. I mean there are exceptions to this, but in general, I really enjoyed my time at Ubisoft, the problems were interesting and everyone who worked there really wanted to be there. Incredibly skilled and passionate people. BUT I've since moved to one of the other largest publishers in video games and basically had the same position but doubled my salary. Then couple years later I moved to another big publisher and I got a crazy pay bump, basically in line with what people I know at "big tech" are being paid. And I took a step down from a tech lead to senior engineer to be here. So I think some parts of the industry are definitely paying top money for people to work for them. When I was looking for jobs I had several offers from big companies in video games at similar pay too, so they weren't alone in this. I think the industry has just changed from what it used to be. At least afaik programmers are being paid much better than they used to be. But that's just my personal experience.
- maldev 5mo agoIt's so bad man. I'm pretty specialized in Windows antivirus/malware dev. Big AAA company leading their anticheats? ~200 and that's PUSHING the band. Generic midsize company doing half the work, 300+, at the big names? 700 TC. Remote, game companies want in person 5 days a week, half the pay, and don't have proper interview timelines. And this is for a really niche skillset, my friend with 7 years experience at 2k is making 120k as a C dev. Now part of it, is they don't believe they can literally just double their salary AND do a fourth of the work by getting out of that horrible industry.
- asdff 5mo agoSeems like game studios are distributed too where you just don't benefit in any way shape or form of economies of scale and agglomeration for the worker. Activition in Santa monica lays you off, where do you go now? Raytheon probably doesn't want you given how many actual aerospace people they can pick from and they all know the secret fire of software engineering too. Google in Playa vista would probably want more pure CS experience not someone pigeonholed into gamedev. Got to pack up your life and go somewhere else in all likelihood.
- abcd_f 5mo agoWay outdated info, but back in mid '00s when I was interviewing with EA, the recruiter guy who happened to like me said - "be careful when entering gamedev domain, because it's very hard to exit it once in." Not in a sense that it's so good so you don't want to leave, but that other companies are leery of hiring people with the gamedev experience. Make what you will out of that remark.
- Scaled 5mo agoNot true. Regularly had FAANG want to double/triple my salary to leave games.
- wnevets 5mo ago> Can anyone comment on why "big video game" dev pay has lagged "big tech" pay so badly? I believe its game developers are more easily exploited is because typically they really want to work in the game industry.
- ninth_ant 5mo agoEveryone says supply and demand and then explains labour supply. Which is an important piece. But the labour demand half is important too. Bigtech makes so much money (or is so well financed) that competing on top talent is more feasible when compared to the boom/bust nature of the games industry.
- forrestthewoods 5mo agoBecause “big video game” revenue did continue to grow exponentially. Big Tech has infinite money from ads to spend on whatever. Video games do not.
- jayd16 5mo agoSupply of folks who want to work on a game is higher so wages suffer. Pay is not influenced by talent or merit alone. That and they used to be able to waive a mythical shipping bonus but if it was ever true, I don't think its really something to count on these days.
- Nifty3929 5mo agoBasically - building video games is (or seems from the outside) fun and cool, and so there are lots of people who want to do it. In effect, people are willing to be paid in fun, rather than in money. Also, games just generate a lot less revenue overall than boring, run-of-the-mill, dime-a-dozen SaaS apps. By a wide mile. When you look at these SaaS companies they're generating maybe $1M/yr in revenue per employee (not just developer). Some blockbuster games can achieve that, but not many. So basically, high supply of labor and relatively lower demand for it in games than in boring business/SaaS software.
- deaux 5mo ago99.99% of SaaS could only dream of the revenue of GTA5, and this post is about GTA6. It generates more revenue than famous SaaS unicorns like Notion and Figma.
- claysmithr 5mo agoI imagine it is because people who aspire to work in gaming will also aspire to lower pay for the prestige, even if in reality the work is equally boring.
- justinhj 5mo agoA lot of game development is not technically sophisticated, especially when the engine is bought or developed already. The other factors are the hit driven nature of the business, meaning you can spend years building a game that flops, and the fact that many people want to make games which drives down salaries. In my opinion game developers should work like movie staff; mid level wages but the ability to earn residuals from all their games. It means a secure life if you have enough hits.
- somedude895 5mo agoMost industries or companies that have a brand or make something people are passionate about, get away with paying lower salaries since they'll attract workers who want to work specifically at that company or in that industry. Companies that do boring things have to compete harder for workers.
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- HugoTea 5mo agoThis is great news, unions not only improve working conditions, but also improve the final product by not having underpaid stressed staff with high turn-over. It's a good sign for the future product quality of any company to see workers unionise.
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- amazingamazing 5mo agoReally? American cars suck compared to japanese and chinese which are not unionized. What’s an example of a unionized vs non unionized group producing the same thing where unionized is better?
- squigz 5mo agoIs there any reason to believe North American cars wouldn't be even worse if there weren't unions?
- SV_BubbleTime 5mo agoHello, long-time automotive EE here… The absolute insanity I’ve seen from the UAW would make your fucking head spin right off. It took me a LONG time to accept it. Ignore my first hand experience with your political ideology, it doesn’t bother me. But, I’ll tell you I’ve been at on-site RVs and BBQs with dozens of on the clock workers. I know a guy making 80/hr to nap and watch TV in his RV for six of his eight hour shift, and this was not uncommon. I know him, because he is THE GUY that can get a vital operation checked out and no one else. I’m not debating history or ideology. Just experience of a long time working adjacent to UAW. When I go to on-site to Mexico it’s like an entirely different industry.
- kotaKat 5mo agoDon't forget all the guys that got caught by Rob Wolchek on a Fox investigative news report down on their break at the Jeep plant drinking beer and smoking pot in a park then hopping back in their Chrysler products to scamper back to the plant to build some more sloppy Jeeps... apparently a crooked enough arbitrator said that wasn't enough evidence and forced their jobs back. The UAW does nothing good. Looking at my 2018 Mexican-built Ford Fusion I've had no major defects. Looking at our 2020 UAW-built Ford Escape was nothing but quality issue after quality issue. When the trim literally falls off the windows, you know we've screwed the pooch. There were moments I genuinely wish I could have driven it back to Kentucky to go make some slovenly fuck repair what they didn't put on the thing right the first time. Quality is no longer "job 1".
- smcl 5mo agoHell yeah
- ShinyLeftPad 5mo agoWho would have thought we'll get programmer unions before GTA 6!
- joshu 5mo agowe're probably going to have AGI before GTA 6
- nazgulsenpai 5mo agoNot sure why downvoted because that got a chuckle out of me
- tosti 5mo agoWell obviously, if you want to play GTA you're gonna have to steal it.
- debo_ 5mo agoI searched for this comment.
- animanoir 5mo ago[dead]
- yieldcrv 5mo agoI always see the same thing: “employer seen as blocking union effort” I’m wondering if that’s simply a rational thing available to do as opposed to an actual opinion about collective representation whether thats bargaining or something else “hey, here’s this regulatory overhead you can completely avoid by merely being present, unless people interested in the regulatory overhead are more persistent. just don't fire them though”
- dude250711 5mo agoIf companies do not like this, paying a percent of profit instead of salaries is always an option. (ah s** here we go again by the way).
- maipen 5mo ago> paying a percent of profit instead of salaries is always an option lol no.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- zamadatix 5mo ago"Pay transparency" is only 1 of the 3 main initial changes the workers mention, and the amount they take home is only part of that. Besides, with schemes like % of profit there is a peculiar tendency for profit to disappear as revenue goes up (e.g. "hollywood accounting" type things).
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- seydor 5mo agoThey should call it a cartel
- sgarrity 5mo agoOne of these days I'm going to see an article here about how the sex worker characters in GTA 6 have unionized.
- chasd00 5mo agoWhat is the career ladder like for game devs? In a union, the only way up is seniority or, in other words, the amount of money you've paid in dues over the years. A great developer isn't going to get rewarded with higher pay or a better role unless they've spent enough time/money as a union member.
- flohofwoe 5mo agoThe typical carreer ladder for most people on a game dev team is basically to get fired when a game project ends and trying to get hired by another game company that's just starting a new project ;) Maybe exaggerating a bit, but that's the reality in many game dev shops, especially when a game doesn't immediately sell in great numbers.
- dude250711 5mo ago"...when a game project ends..." ...regardless of whether the game is successful or not. On the upside, you get freedom to create stuff like Concord and Highguard.
- wasabi991011 5mo ago> In a union, the only way up is seniority This isn't a strict requirement of unions though, right? As a trivial example grad student unions have no real career ladder, though the union negotiates a minimum pay and amount of work for everyone.
- criddell 5mo ago> the only way up is seniority That’s not true at all. Look at professional athletes. The starting pitchers in a baseball game are the best pitchers. Or consider WGA screenwriters in Hollywood. Their ability to make money doesn’t depend in seniority.
- MagicMoonlight 5mo agoUnions have nothing to do with career progression…
- ionwake 5mo agoIsnt management at Rockstar the same poeple who: A) Allowed a bug in the code make all GTA5 Load times on every single copy on every platform take exponential times longer to load, for YEARS, unchecked or investigated, until some random kid FIXED IT by reverse engineering compiled code? B) The bug was a simple and unneeded look up for SHOP items C) The never rewarded the kid, with say a job or something worthwhile for him like 100k ( when they earn billions ). I mean even this decision ALONE is such terrible optics clearly mgmt were AFK. D) They then came onto HN to argue with me in the comments about how " its not nice to say mgmt responsible should have been fired over this" I mean Ive had my share of almost blinding incompetence, but the one that really bothers my crumpet, is when they come on here and start denying things. Im for the union, Rockstar North made one of the greatest games of all time. It will probably result in an inferior product but crunch is unethical and always due to poor management. Ironically it was probably mgmts' own incompetent hiring policies that resulted in a union being formed. PS - I got a bit heated and have edited this comment so its readable apologies. PS - All of this can be verified in previous posts on HN regarding both the bug and replies PS - And to whoever is downvoting me, feel free to reply and tell me what I am wrong about
- flohofwoe 5mo agoThis JSON-parsing problem is the least of Rockstars problems I think. But I bet it happened like this: - when the game was still in active development, it was maybe anticipated that the shop might have a couple dozen items, no problem even when the JSON parsing is extremely slow - game is released, a separate maintenance team takes over, online mode is running for several years - over time more and more items are added to the shop, and now maybe there are a thousands of items in that JSON file - ...and when there's some 'accidental exponential' code in the JSON loader/parser the loading time gets worse and worse, what once was a few milliseconds is now minutes, but there was never a sudden regression after an update, just every week a little bit slower - depending on the churn on the maintenance team, the current people on the team probably don't even notice an increase in loading time until they leave again for greener pastures, e.g. for them "it has always been that slow" - management probably first read about the problem in the news ;) (which of course is a problem on its own - but as long as the money keeps flowing and the curves in Tableau go up and up, why should they even care... players apparently also endured it without bringing out the pitchforks)
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- standardly 5mo agohappy for them but uh.. 2028 release confirmed lol
- OsrsNeedsf2P 5mo agoGood. I want them to take their time, pour their craft and passion into it, and release something amazing.
- standardly 5mo agoYeah, same. I'd rather wait for a better game made by happier devs. The studio is just notorious for crunch and failing to adhere to release dates, so i was just stating the obvious
- bonoboTP 5mo agoWe already have enough good GTA games, 3, VC, SA. I'm fine without GTA6 ever getting released. It's unlikely to be as good as SA anyway, so whatever.
- wonkyfruit 5mo agoAt this point, we get everything before GTA6. Unions, AGI, Life on Mars.
- whywhywhywhy 5mo agoDon’t expect any sympathy from the general public or your customers when the 1 year late game devs are complaining about crunch, ultimately they’re gonna get dragged for this and the gaming community will cheer if they manage to remove the union individuals. That’s the industry you’re in unfortunately.
- vortegne 5mo agoAny and all discussions about unions on HN sadly just shows how the supposedly smart people can be extremely misinformed and propagandized. Not even really worth engaging in the discussions when it seems like any compassion has been beaten out of the (mostly USA-based, which explains a lot) audience here. Happy for the devs, more power to them! For the sake of workers everywhere, I hope the US also catches up one day in empathy and rational thinking, when it comes to labor laws and rights.
- guywithahat 5mo agoI think anti-union sentiment comes from the practical reality which is if you go to union-towns, they often look bombed out and horrible. The UAW, arguably the largest private union in the US, was founded in Flint, Michigan. The union didn't care about the city or its future, it simply sucked money out of the economy until there was nothing left, and then they ran off to DC. Conversely, industry towns without unions are usually nice places to live as the companies continue to invest money in them to attract more employees. This is a pattern we see over and over again, and in my opinion has led to the strong anti-union sentiment we see all over the midwest rust belt.
- zamadatix 5mo agoGrew up in the rust belt of Michigan, but not with parents holding unionized jobs, and still live elsewhere in it (also without a unionized job). Can't say I've seen the same sentiments or patterns be as common as presented. Of course I've always leaned towards supporting unions so that colors the perspective a bit too, but, in general, approval of unions in the US has actually been in an upswell https://news.gallup.com/poll/694472/labor-union-approval-relatively-steady.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/694472/labor-union-approval-rel... There are obviously areas with decline for sure, e.g. the auto industry, but unions are usually seen as lessening the impact of that on the workers rather than the source of blame (not that everyone holds a single view). E.g., for the most part, people don't blame the union (or non-unionized industry) for the problems in Flint as neither is meant to privately fund e.g. the water pipes. They blame the downturn of the auto industry, which then gets into whatever reasons one prefers to assign. For some that's unions, but it's not actually been a very big mind changer on that aspect.
- rolifromhermes 5mo agoDamn we had unionized GTA6 devs before we have GTA6. Wild.
- aubanel 5mo agoCheat code to get >5 stars in GTA6 instantly: type "sizes the means of production" in chat
- dyauspitr 5mo agoSeems like a bad time for rockstar for this to happen. Can’t fire everyone now.
- __natty__ 5mo ago> Together, we are organising around the things we want to change. Starting with: Pay transparency Flexible working An end to crunch That’s a lot of demands, what next? Competitive salary?! /sarcasm I hope more people will start fighting together for better work conditions. Company owners have money and lawyers so workers must unite to fight them back. I’m saying this as employer.
- toomuchtodo 5mo agoUnions are the only legal way for workers to improve their situation around compensation and working conditions. Support for them is at a historical high, especially amongst younger cohorts. https://news.gallup.com/poll/694472/labor-union-approval-relatively-steady.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/694472/labor-union-approval-rel... https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/27/majorities-of-adults-see-decline-of-union-membership-as-bad-for-the-us-and-working-people/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/27/majoritie... https://www.epi.org/blog/americans-favor-labor-unions-over-big-business-now-more-than-ever/ https://www.epi.org/blog/americans-favor-labor-unions-over-b...
- shric 5mo ago> Unions are the only legal way for workers to improve their situation around compensation and working conditions. How about going to work somewhere with better compensation and working conditions?
- toomuchtodo 5mo agoIndividual exit is a short-term solution to a systemic problem. Unions raise the floor, and you have no power otherwise. “Be lucky” is not a strategy that scales. If workers could easily find jobs where employers aren’t maxing extraction at the lowest cost possible, your proposal might be realistic. In this timeline, it is a suboptimal proposal. > Today, the US Treasury Department released a first-of-its-kind report on labor unions, highlighting the evidence that unions serve to strengthen the middle class and grow the economy at large. Over the last half century, middle-class households have experienced stagnating wages, rising income volatility, and reduced intergenerational mobility, even as the economy as a whole has prospered. Unions can improve the well-being of middle-class workers in ways that directly combat these negative trends. Pro-union policy can make a real difference to middle-class households by raising their incomes, improving their work environments, and boosting their job satisfaction. In doing so, unions can help to make the economy more equitable and robust. https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/labor-unions-and-the-us-economy https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/labor-unions... https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/Labor-Unions-And-The-Middle-Class.pdf https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/Labor-Unions-And-... (“if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together”)
- 5701652400 5mo agomaybe Google, Meta, Anthropic, MSFT, and every single tech company should unionise.
- bozhark 5mo ago30 years late but oh so needed
- outlore 5mo agoAs GTA V before it, 6 probably has 20 years worth of content updates ahead. Might as well be well compensated for it.
- Helloworldboy 5mo ago[dead]
- fleroviumna 5mo ago[dead]
- vondur 5mo agoI think the easiest way to solve this is to change labor laws to say if you work over 8 hours a day or more than 40 hours a week then you get overtime. Most companies aren't willing to pay overtime and frankly whatever is going on at RockStar is a huge management issue, which making the labor far more expensive would solve.
- harddrivereque 5mo agoSo the tl;dr of this is that GTA 5 is indeed going to be the last and final GTA ?
- brap 5mo agoIf I learned anything from unionized companies is that we’re never getting GTA 6
- ernesto905 5mo ago> An end to crunch I was unaware of the crunch concept: "In the video game industry, crunch (or crunch culture) is compulsory overtime during the development of a game. Crunch is common in the industry and can lead to work weeks of 65–80 hours for extended periods of time, often uncompensated beyond the normal working hours" -- wikipedia Needless to say this seems extremely predatory.
- saltyoldman 5mo agowho is in hn these days, remember like 10/15 years ago everyone was just willingly working 65+ hours. now it's "extremely predatory".
- ZenoArrow 5mo agoIt is extremely predatory. Perhaps if you're a company founder you can try to glamourise this level of personal sacrifice, but for standard employees it's clearly an unhealthy level of work, and would have been seen so by most normal people 10/15 years ago too. Also, nobody is going to do their best work when they're having to work so many hours, it's highly likely you're not getting a lot of good work done if you push yourself that hard.
- bouncing_bolete 5mo agoImo it's fine to glorify the 65+ hour grind a founder takes on. The issue is trying to apply that logic to normal employees. The calculation of time v payoff is worlds different
- abustamam 5mo agoYeah you can't expect employees who maybe have a 0.1% stake in the company if they're lucky, to put in 65h+ a week.
- ZenoArrow 5mo ago> Imo it's fine to glorify the 65+ hour grind a founder takes on. While you're right that it's easier to try to justify this level of work for founders, the reality is that this level of work is not sustainable by anybody, and founders would risk damaging their physical and mental health and reducing the quality of their work the longer this went on just as much as anyone else. I'd also argue that it's largely unnecessary. There may be some periods of time when there are too many competing demands on your time and you just have to accept extended working hours to get through a week or two or even a month, but more often than not this situation comes about due to poor planning and/or poor working processes. Effective delegation and automation can greatly reduce the likelihood of having to work 65+ hour weeks, even for founders.
- brap 5mo agoThis is wonderful news, congratulations to Anthropic, OpenAI and Google!
- unselect5917 5mo agoI wish we had more (or maybe better yet one) software engineering union in America. The trouble seems to be that it's so easy to scab (outsource) or hire foreign competition (H1b et al) which is a pretty broken program even according to some of the people whom I've talked to who are on it. One multi-team architect I know working for a brand you've definitely heard of was making like $65K and doing a $250K job of it. Brilliant guy. The H1B program hurts everyone except employers' vast bank accounts and their shareholders.
- Izikiel43 5mo ago> hire foreign competition (H1b Not so much anymore, still a lot but much less than it used to be
- amazingamazing 5mo agoIronically even in the case here it is the outsourced people unionizing.
- gsnedders 5mo agoWho is outsourced here? It’s not immediately apparent from the article that people were being outsourced?
- insane_dreamer 5mo agoThe rollout of AI makes unionizing for knowledge workers more important than ever.
- guywithahat 5mo agoI don't want to make this a take on right vs left, but private unions in the US simply don't work. If unions work Flint wouldn't have had a water crisis, Detroit would still be a rich city, and the rust belt wouldn't exist. There's no reason to think after a hundred years of failed unions the guys at rockstar games suddenly figured it out, they'll just produce lower quality products until they either figure out a way around the union or go out of business.
- dark-star 5mo agoUnions are not there to protect companies from mismanagement or simply failing/going bancrupt.
- saint_yossarian 5mo agoThis is about their UK workers.
- georgefloid 5mo ago[flagged]
- user0648 5mo agoIs it time for us to join in?
- jpttsn 5mo agoThis is a funny self-own, what am I missing? Timing v. trends: - big game studios are already reviled as lazy, bloated - nimble indies are hitting a lot of records - gen. AI coming for many studio roles - employees have lower friction to be entrepreneurial It’s like if home cooking and self checkout were going really strong and then the restaurants workers picked that time to riot for higher wages
- zamadatix 5mo agoIf things are really on the downtrend for the business while the industry is in various uptrends (in reality, GTA V is doing as great as ever and the anticipation around the GTA VI release dominates the industry) it still makes sense to push for quality working conditions for however long it makes sense for the business to be hiring people the same as it does when the business is doing well. Pay related items also seem to be a small portion of what's being pushed for change.
- zthrowaway 5mo agoThis game is going to suck so much.
- rldjbpin 5mo agolooks like fate does not want this game to be released. i fear for a cyberpunk-like release after all this wait anyways. at least they are setting up a lot of things to blame.
- buildlogJohn 5mo agoHappy workers = better output.