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Game Developers Unionize?
Gamasutra.com has a look at the reasons, both pro and con, for unionization of the folks behind the entertainment software industry. From the article: "Many industry observers see close parallels between the gripes of today's game developers and those of workers in the movie industry in the 1930s and '40s, particularly in the animation segment. The difference is that Hollywood unionized, and the game industry is still only talking about it."
The sound of Electronic Arts fat-cats screaming "NOOOOOOOOOO!" echoes through the night...
The difference is outsourcing. The game industry can pretty much outsource everyone. Hollywood can't: if they outsourced everything, it would become Bollywood, and there is already a Bollywood.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I wonder if video game developers will be infiltrated by communist sympathizers. Maybe we will see a new publisher open up that denounces the bourgeois trappings of saving "princesses" that represent oppression of the proletariat. The People's Games will feature themes of hard work and equality, while still somehow making the members of the Party (the developers) more equal than the game players themselves. Anyone pointing out that the act of selling the games is counter to the Party's teachings will be sent to the gulag for reeducation.
Don't want to totally diss this idea, but I wanted to point out a couple of problems I see with it: Unions have the potential to stifle creativity. If union rules require that everything gets made with union workers, suddenly it becomes a lot harder for low-budget, independent studios to operate. There's also the fact that unions tend to enforce seniority a little too much. I realize it might seem silly to talk about at a time when people are quitting before they get old enough to be fired for being paid too much, but if that were to change, you suddenly have the issue of age being weighted over merit in company hierarchies.
But the backlash is that although outsourcing can stem rising wage costs, you need to keep that group in jobs to buy the shit your company churns out. As a whole, the greed is simply going to voerpower the likes of EA, etc., .
Now, I'm not even in America so my knowledge of US workers is based solely on Slashdot and The Onion, but even I can see that perhaps nationally agreed minimum contracts negotitated by unions for various professions like games programmers, etc., would help.
They can outsource some of the people some of the time, but they can't outsource *all* the people *all* the time. WOuld they simply be prepared to shut up shop and move base to Mumbai? I don't think the corporate big wigs would appreciate that one bit.
Acting stupid isn't much fun when there's someone around who knows better
Actually, I think the end result will be new developments in RPG-style fantasy games. You will go into a dungeon and find Teamsters-member goblins lounging against the walls, refusing to lift a finger to fight you. Entire levels of games will be replaced with big red "UNFAIR! ON STRIKE" messages blocking entry. Fighting the boss of a level will become even more fun: no more swords and shark guns. Now, you will fight the boss through mass demonstration and labor action.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
They're probably more likely screaming "OOOOUUUTSOURCING!!!".
As an artist in the industry, this is both scary and sad.
People have come to this comclusion many times before, it's time somebody actually starts acting.
Don't fear outsourcing. Saying "we can't demand better work conditions because they'd outsource us" makes you a slave at the mercy of your master. Fact is that your work conditions are so bad they almost violate international right, if you believe you'll lose your job if you try to improve them you'll work at those inhuman conditions until you die or get outsourced anyway. The whole fear thing is exploited by companies which is a reason I demand anyone who wants to abolish job security is considered a public enemy. Job security is the only thing stopping corporations from blackmailing their employees into working inhuman hours in order to keep their jobs (or even falsify timesheets!). Unions provide job security since they counteract the idea that you can replace anyone demanding humane treatment with a new drone that won't complain for a few years.
As long as someone is willing to do the job there will be work. Even if all dev houses outsource to India or Russia you'll see new devs using local devs pop up. Since the big studios would no longer be siphoning up the best workers and the smaller companies will more likely attemp to fight with innovative ideas and fresh games instead of trying to make graphics that can compete with some 200MUSD game we might even see the rebirth of the industry. But seriously, it won't come that far.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
It's not necessarily that simple unless you're independently wealthy. What'll happen is you'll talk to your coworkers, they'll love the idea, but you'll find they love being able to feed their wives and children more.
It's not an easy thing, as a relatively unknown quantity, to get financial support to run your own game studio and produce a quality game. If you can do it, likely you'll be beholden to a game publisher, and the deadlines and restrictions they're going to impose put you back in a boat pretty close to the one you left.
I say we all go on strike until these demands are met. Gamers of the world, UNITE!
I'm a huge fan of unionizing in many areas but this doesn't seem like one of them.
The young artists releasing their first game from their basement and moving on to become their own boss seems much more plausible.
Trying to start a game company becomes much more difficult when you have to hire unionized labour instead of going directly online and searching for people with common interest.
Once you get artists moving from title to title non-stop with no care about the product yea you'll need unions and publishers but I'd rather not see the "industry" go that direction.
BTW, the laziness you cite is common throughout the industry, it's just anti-union kooks notice it more with unionized companies. One of the most absurdly anti-union companies in the US at the moment is Wal*Mart.
Tell us what you think about the average Wal*Mart employee's attitude to work.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Sure, lets have the unions do for software industry what they did for the American auto, steel, & textile industries.
Aren't we outsourcing enough jobs?
If you're a programmer, no matter how good a programmer, and don't have the business acumen to start your own business, it's YOUR moral failing.
If you haven't already saved enough money to feed your family while you endure the hardships of startup, or don't have some property with a lot of equity that you can mortgage, it's YOUR moral failing.
Oh, don't forget that something like 9 of 10 businesses fail within 5 years, but I guess that's due to moral failing, especially if through their previous moral failings they haven't saved enough to survive several business startup attempts.
So wealth has nothing to do with it, it's a moral issue. After all, one-in-a-million in the US has been able to move from pretty much nothing to be a billionaire, so that establishes an existence theorem. Therefore we ALL can do it, it's our moral failing when we don't, and we deserve to be wage slaves.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
In real practice, however, unions reduce job security. When the company has to pay everyone more, they have to get rid of workers to make up for it (the money has to come from somewhere), and the company's workforce undergoes reduction.
A good example of this is the famous Teamster's strike at UPS just a few years ago. The Teamsters won their wage demands, and the size of the UPS workforce was reduced in order to pay it.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Unionizing might be jumping the gun. The video game industry is very young. It'll be better for management to be a little wiser than to have employees unionize. Bad working conditions and un-wise managment are the result of a industry that hasn't grown up yet and is expected to make titles that cost 25 million.
The level of graphical detail that is expected out of development studios has progressed far faster than the video game industry has matured. We can partially thank ATI and nVidia's competition for that (releasing significantly more advanced cards less than a year apart). All it takes is one studio to spend 10mil on a project and now that's what is expected out of everyone else. Yeah, people say graphics isn't everything but if your game doesn't look as good as the best, you've just lost sales.
It was said at GDC that the industry really needs to learn from other industries when it comes to management. This is a really good idea. Although all this talk about working conditions and unionizing is good and healthy, I don't think unionizing is going to happen any time soon. And if that does happen, labor costs for games will go up. Period. With all this talk about the increased cost for next-generation games, just think about who that is scaring.
Quite honestly, I think the managers will do a better job. Making video games is never going to be a comfortable job even if they do unionize. Better planning and organized production will go a long way in a large scale project, and a union won't help there.
I've spent a significant part of my career working in HR Policy, albeit outside the IT sector and in the UK. This has given me a lot of exposure to Trade Unions, from the "management" side. I must say I've got very mixed feelings about them.
There are undoubtedly some positives. Unions can be pretty tenacious in defending individuals who have been genuinely wronged by their employer or their immediate manager. In cases of disputes between individual employees (eg. grievance proceedings), the Union can provide a decent independent arbiter. Where Unions have good relationships with management, they can genuinely help improve an organisations effectiveness, by identifying and helping to resolve issues that are having a significant negative impact on morale.
However, these are matched by, and perhaps even outweighed by, a significant number of negatives. The biggest problem is that a lot of Unions tend to get hijacked very quickly by radical left-wingers of often uncertain sanity, whose goal often seems to be nothing more than to ruin generally benevolent employers. There are some Unions which understand the give and take of negotiations with management and there are others which see strike action as the first and only resort whenever management try to stake out some principles of their own. When this happens, it's not just management who lose out. Employees often suffer the most serious privitations. Business partners of the employer are also affected, as are their employees. Customers likewise suffer and if the employer is providing an essential service, the consequences can be very serious indeed. We've seen where this leads fairly recently in the UK, when the Fire Brigade union walked out on Strike. The general public support for the employees evaporated overnight once the strike started and the employees ended up significantly worse off then they would have been with sane representatives, who were more interested in employee wellbeing than advancing a political agenda.
Unions can also highly divisive and discriminatory among the workforce. Fortunately, the worst excesses of the Unions in this area were curbed during the 80s, so the situation is a lot better than it once was, but the most insular unions can really make life hell for their non-union co-workers.
Finally, there is the risk of out-sourcing. This isn't necessarily an inevitable consequence of Unionisation. However, it IS an inevitable consequence of combatative, militant, confrontational Unionisation in fields like IT. Most employers are actually more reasonable that slashdot readers are generally willing to give them credit for. I've only ever met one or two employers (out of dozens), who were not willing to entertain talks with Trade Union representatives and make reasonable adjustments to working practices where a business case could be demonstrated. However, if the Union plays it wrong and takes an overly aggressive line, Management are likely to panic and reach for the big Outsourcing Stick.
In short, Unionisation isn't necessarily the wrong decision here, but games developers need to be damned careful over who they let run their union if they decide to go for it.
With all due respect, you're talking about the shift to create a one-person indy computer game, which is a world of difference from what is produced by a full game dev team making a console game (which is more the kind of thing the article is talking about, and the kind of workers it muses about unionizing.)
The start of the discussion you proposed was about talking to your fellow game dev team and convincing them to jump ship to do it independently. That's not really what you're crunching the financials of.
Putting aside that, if you're in that industry, you almost certainly don't live in a low cost area, despite there being a couple exceptions to that rule...
A game as put out by a solo effort isn't really the same kind of thing that is put out by a team of mixed team of thirty or so game designers, creative designers, programmers, and so on. Telling someone they should give up the latter in favor of the former is like telling a guy who isn't happy working as an architect building houses that he should give it up and build doghouses in his backyard. It's just a totally different scale.
The one-man effort also requires that one person be able to wear ALL hats in the game development process. They need to be able to dream up a great idea for the game. They need to be able to do all involved artwork. They need to be able to do all of the programming. If they're not great at all of these things and more, they're probably not going to put out something people will want to play. They're definitely not going to be able to put out a console game that will get past Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft's approval process.
A game of this scope isn't made in a year and it's not made by one person. It generally requires an investment of piles of money and years of time before ANY profit is seen. These things aren't practical to do without financial backing.
I don't deny one person can go off and make a game and possibly make it good, but it's not the same kind of product as a professional console game is these days. That's not to say that it couldn't possibly be more fun or draw more players, but it's not the same kind of product. It's just not. There is always going to be the demand for the polish and depth of the professional version despite some indy game successes, and while that's true, there are going to be people doing it for a living.
I'm laughing my ass off at all the posters who claim Unionization would destroy the creative industries.
There are few industries as unionized as the Motion Picture Business. Yet, it seems to be responsive to market demands and changing technology, profitable, and a world leader in its field. And it remains headquartered in California.
Any by Unionized, I mean UNIONIZED. Pick any major Hollywood release at random. I would wager that:
- The writer is a union member (Writers Guild of America).
- The director is a union worker (Director's Guild of America).
- The stars and most of the actors are union members (Screen Actors Guild).
- The cinematographer is a union member (American Society of Cinematographers).
- All the electricians, carpenters, truckers, and other construction and transportation personnel are unionized.
- Stunt personnel are unionized.
Are there non-union productions? Yes, sometimes. But the understanding in the industry is that the majority of work goes to union members. The major players all deal with the unions.
BTW, guess which country has the strongest Auto Worker union. Yeah, Japan. Perhaps American auto companies are less competitive for other reasons.
However, in Québec, it's much easier to implement an union than elsewhere in North-America (that's because we're mostly french, and have been thoroughly screwed in the past by english companies so we eventually started to elect governments that would listen to the people rather than rich fuckers).
Using member money to influence congress? You mean like most large corporations, including ones dealing in software?
I've got news for you. Most larger companies either have their own lobbying group or band together to have enough clout to afford one. That, and less legal things, is their way to influence congressmen, governors, etc in order to get laws that are beneficial to the company.
Please tell me that you didn't think the legislators made those laws because they were bored.
It's about bloody well time that the workers were able to do much the same. Otherwise, they're just going to continue getting shafted with even longer hours, worse wages, and various other forms of "fun".
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
That is a big part of the problem. The wage should be for the real value of the work. Not for some arbitrary amount that someone has defined as a "living wage" which has nothing to do with the value of the work. If the unions want to keep the company in business, they would not encourage wasting money on paying "living wages" for those jobs that are worth less than the arbitrary value.
Besides, it is not generally true that "Unions are interested in keeping the company in businesses just as much as the company". Union greed has brought many companies to ruin, or near ruin. This is the obvious result when labor costs spiral out of control and have nothing to do with value of the work being done.
This happens because unions are too powerful. Many of them, such as the AFL-CIO and UAW, operate with stolen money. Most members are forced to join. Workers are forced to join and pay against their will. If union membership was the choice of each worker, only then would unions be any sort of legitimate representative.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Given that well over 1/4 of the posts are by him (27 out of 107), perhaps he should get a job rather than post on Slashdot all day?
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
It may sound ridiculous for those in entertainment to form unions-- actors, writers, directors and animators should be happy just to be working, right? Unfortunately many artists are more than happy to sign on the dotted line to get some exposure and a quick check, without realizing how much value (present and future) they're signing away.
One only has to look at the music industry (in which the acts aren't unionized) to see how badly artists can be screwed. SAG, WGA and the Director's guild do more than guarantee a minimum paycheck-- they ensure that rights are protected and residuals are paid. Without unions, a studio could (and would, and have in the past) steal a script or idea and put an in-house writer's name on it, for example, or re-run an actor's appearance in a show or on a commercial for years without paying them a dime. And then there are the technicians who often work 60-80 hours a week to meet tight production demands... And their unions make sure they're justly paid for their overtime.
Of course, no one NEEDS entertainment (not like society needs plumbers and steel workers, at least) so I understand anyone who'd say "let 'em rot." But this is a multi-billion-dollar industry and you can bet the studio heads would do their best to screw every little guy they could to keep the money for themselves.
So, yes, the game industry should be unionized... Because it's another business where there's no shortage of young, naiive developers who would be more than happy to sell out their futures just to be involved-- without realizing how much value their hard work is actually worth.