It is truly just a big ass iPod Touch and just as closed up as an iPod so no flash, no Java, no choice. Just lots of pretty colours for guys in turtle neck sweaters.
They have to constantly update costs anyway for price fluctuations and tax changes. Everything they claim would be a hassle is being done. The data just doesn't show on the front-end.
People do pay more as can be seen here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Points
The prices do fluctuate because points in the UK did cost more compared to the US upon my last investigation. So MS probably only changes the price when the pound comes more in line with the dollar but they're happy when exchange rate has a bigger gap.
Also I don't like the idea of Microsoft (or Nintendo) earning free money via spare points interest from millions of people.
I think the guy, in my opinion, is an ambulance chaser but I also dislike the points system that both Microsoft and Nintendo employ. I want to just pay the *exact* price for my software.
By using points, you end up with left over points, millions of people do this and all those pennies add up to free interest money for MS with no benefit to the consumer as the 360 is by far the most expensive system to get full use out of it.
By using points they can make it appear as if every country pays the same where as in reality each country pays a different price per point. They can raise prices in numerous markets without it being reflected easily to most consumers.
Points, to most people, have no value. Most people would be more upset to see $50 sitting in their account for which they can't use for anything but MS software. But in points format it means less so it's a bit more acceptable.
If I sell my system how do I get my spare points back? Why should I have to ask when I don't need to beg Amazon.com or Play.com to give me my money back if I close my account.
"There's more technical complexities to being able to put local prices in," he added. "You have to do that for every product in every country and you then have to deal with currency fluctuations.
That is a load of crap because they still have to manage costs for all countries and factor in tax for those countries that charge them. Somewhere there has to be a database of costs per points at MS. How can it be hard to pull through that currency amount to the front-end rather than a numerical value which, when someone buys those points, a system has to calculate their cost anyway.
Sony can manage this while giving away their online services for free. I can't believe people are dumb enough to buy into the points scam.
This annoys me but at least it's been announced and I will switch however I've had two Firefox machines that had their keyword search and default searches set to Bing.
Does anyone know who's responsible for going ahead and changing Firefox's search from Google to Bing? I'm not impressed either way. I would not be impressed if it was the other way around too.
It feels like it's an underhanded tactic to try and force Bing on people and I don't think most people will be happy. If it is Microsoft doing this, they won't make people fans of Bing by forcing it on them behind their back.
Exactly. I'm tired of these idiots (and generally they're old too) crying about socialism when we're paying into social security, medicare and medicaid.
If socialism is such a bad thing then don't be shelfish and just try to stop younger people from getting healthcare, take it away from the old people and stamp it out for good.
I also don't like that the people most vocal about socialism also typically come from the dead weight states who are taking more from the government than they're paying in. Must be nice to have the best of both worlds.
All I want is equality and that is what it should be. Either *everyone* should have access to free healthcare or take it away from the elderly and the job shy poor people and everyone can fend for themselves. From an evolutionary stand point this is the best option. Let the weak fall to the side.
The eldery have less reason than the 20 somethings for not being able to pay their own way. They've had their whole life to prepare for retirement. The 20 something has barely been working and won't get paid much. He technically deserves free care more than the eldery who did not prepare for the end of life.
Journalists have no values these days. Most reporting is full of yellow journalism, scaremongering or reads like a company press release.
I have no time for low grade news stories create by some guy who thinks he'll change the world thanks to his useless degree in journalism which, in my opinion, holds the same value as the free watch I got in Golden Grahams ages ago.
Perhaps it's time to get a second job stacking shelves if writing press releases is not paying the bills.
Is it free enough that the people running companies should be able to run them as they want to rather than the government regulating it? Yes you can argue that you can go elsewhere but if the majority are crap well then you're screwed because not everyone can work for one company.
For gaming I personally feel this sort of thing helps the industry prop their way of business where they pump out half assed games because it's cheaper than it should be.
So yes, people are free to do what they want and if they want to risk having no relationships or a social life and poor health, that's their choice but with all freedoms there are responsibilities are they need to realise they're not actually helping things.
Not myself personally. I am American and my father worked in his company's union. Oddly enough that is what put me off unions because he actually did effectively work two jobs to help ungrateful people who wouldn't end up voting the right way because they thought management would be more likely to sack them.
I'm in a union because it happens that this company has one. I didn't join straight away but after about a year, I thought it was only £10 so I might as well give it a go seeing how I waste more than that a month on beers after work.
I do believe that it is very easy for a union to be corrupt and useless. More so if they do make head way and improve things for employees then there is less to justify their existence.
I think if developers were to have their own union they should make it their own rather than joining up with some national union that is effectively a corporation.
People should also be made aware that they should quit the union if they're unhappy with it at all. You can't just join a union and assume nothing can be done or be afraid of looking like an employee brown noser. If it's bad then quit and suggest to others to do the same. Make the union work for you rather than you working for them.
I think it comes own to enthusiasm. Whether you learn on your own or at home, if you live and breath code you will pick it up and be good at it. If you think you'll be a programmer because you like video games and want to make Gears of War 5 and make millions so you stumble your way through uni to get a degree or stumble around the internet on your own effectively learning how to cut and paste other people's work then you will suck and you'll probably hate your job.
There isn't anything inherently wrong with Java. It's a nice clean language and dead easy to generate a lot of boil plate code.
The problem is how people are taught to use Java (or any language) and the fact is they don't teach them enough of the right stuff. I think it has to do with dumbing down development to make more people think they can be programming masters in order to drive down wages.
Companies would absolutely love it if something like Java became a standard taught in high school or earlier. You'd have so many people that know enough to do the bulk of the work and pay them peanuts.
I've seen some people straight out of uni, they think they're hot shit because they can generate loads of useful code with their IDE and it works. Yes it's great that within minutes the boring stuff is written but when that stuff isn't working as expected or their interaction with something that's generated you see that they fall apart and come asking me or consulting the internet.
To an extent that's fine. You can't know everything from your first day on the job but it scary when you see people who aren't keen to actually learn how something works and why they're doing what they're doing or even take any sort of interest in math.
The article claims you can expect to start out around 40k. There are bus drivers earning nearly that and while that's not their starting wage they've basically come straight out of high school with zero debt doing a fairly basic job. It's not even like it's high speed driving. A degree shouldn't necessarily earn you the right to a high wage ( there are a lot of shit degrees) but you should be concerned if you're expected to get deeply into debt, work over time for free and be treated like a slave for 40K when someone is doing a 9-5 job for the same and in fact because the programmer could be doing overtime for free, really he's being paid less than the bus driver.
I buy my MP3s from Amazon now. They're high quality, cheap, lack DRM and it has what I want in the meta data, the title, album, track no. and album art. There are a lot of unnecessary fields already, like lyrics that I find no one uses and for good reason, it's an MP3 and no one cares.
It's bad enough Amarok has decided to put a big freaking wiki window in the middle of the player making me uninstall it, I certainly don't want blogs, videos, tour dates and, rest assured, security risks in my music.
Anyone that has seen the joy of WMA and WMV files polluting porno on P2P networks knows this is a bad thing We don't need a platform independent version of shitty media files.
Without a doubt if this format took off I would quit paying for music until it dies.
Considering NYC alone can't get a decent connection for their iPhones it's actually a relevant example and if NYC can't do it then odds are most of the US is worse off since they're more spread out so AT&T is likely going to care even less about them.
US does a lot of things well but mobile phones are definitely not one of those things.
You're right it is just a video game. There is no reason someone should have to give up an excessive chunk of their social life and potentially harm their health just to make a video game.
Because there is a very good chance they wouldn't do the right thing if no one stood up for the employers.
The reason we got the pay rises based on inflation was because of the union. I doubt they'd do it on their own.
In fact, part of the business is, imo, outdated and was losing money. They needed to make cuts there. That's fair but but giving employees the minimum and no choice who gets cut isn't great. Having someone get you more time before you're sacked so you can find a job and getting voluntary redundancy so those who want to leave get to and those that don't stay.
That's better for the company any way because if someone wants to leave they will anyway in that situation and then that area is left with even fewer people and will suffer further.
Given the choice to get rid of anyone means they'd probably get rid of the older people as they're a drain on health insurance, their pension costs are higher and they're close to collecting that pension. Those people would probably rather stay on so they're more likely to collect that pension.
I'm no hardcore union man. I think a lot of them are corrupt, I've never been part of one before and it doesn't even enter my mind as a consideration when looking for jobs so I may never be part of one again. But while it's there, I will take advantage of it. It's insurance and it's only £10 a month. I'm not making minimum wage, £10 isn't really anything.
So explain to me why it's ok for the publishers to screw everyone, for managers to protect themselves from lay-offs but the developers shouldn't have any sort of protection.
That's true which is why I'm not too bothered about a place having a union (this is my first to be honest and will likely be the last since it's a rare thing) but they can be nice. The problem is probably when the company starts treating people well and then then the union is left trying to justify their existence.
The ideal thing would be that developers would just stick together and not require paying someone to speak for them.
I think ideally developers don't need a full on union. If they would at least stick together and protest companies that treat their fellow developers like shit rather than paying dues to people to do things for them.
I suspect the gaming industry is a bit like the movie industry and you'll end up getting black balled if you stand up against their activities which is why you end up seeing anonymous wives doing the complaining instead. They can't black ball everyone.
By just sticking together than going the proper union route then there is no union trying to justify paying dues once things get better.
Money doesn't mean much when you're always at work and no they don't make shit loads when you factor in the cost of living in areas like Silicon Valley and not everyone at Rockstar is Sam Houser and therefore don't get a big ass wage like his.
So should employers pay India wages to US developers and the developers should live with it just because there are people that do the job for even less than that?
Good thing you tow the company line, they'll definitely push you up into management where you don't have to produce anything of value.
If the conditions are the same everywhere then you can't really go elsewhere. All companies forcing poor conditions on employees is just as bad as the government forcing perfect conditions on employees.
Government regulations aren't necessarily socialism or are you for removing the bill of rights and allowing local communities decide whether people can own guns or have free speech based on their community's needs?
There is not just one union. There are many of them and they're only as bad as the people who join the union and vote for the people running the union.
If so many developers are so perfect and anti-bloated union then when they start their own it will be perfect.
The fact is it is wrong that people work so many hours for free and risk not having a relationship just to make shitty game sequels. Over working employees most likely contributes to poor software too. People just don't function well without a decent sleep.
So your choices are really either to get the government to make those sort of practices illegal or start a union. If you start your own it will be small and nearly impossible for it to be corrupt like the auto workers union. If it does go corrupt quit and get your fellow workers to quit too. A union is effectively a company and you need to vote with your feet and your wallet.
Labour laws aren't in their infancy but tech related fields still have to deal with companies treating employees like shit. Whether its importing people on H1-B visas to work for less, exporting jobs or making you work for free. There's also much more ageism in IT because companies prefer naive young employees who don't realise they're being fucked up the ass. Most jobs don't have to deal with those sort of things so yeah a union is probably a bit useless.
Companies don't only sack useless people. If they're cost cutting they're more likely to cut someone who they deem a bigger financial drain which can be someone who is a better developer purely because his pay is in relation to his skills. He could be older too and therefore more likely to be using more healthcare benefits so again, he's a drain. He's not useless but he can lose his job.
My union only asks for £10 a month and has protected jobs without protecting useless people and negotiated sensible inflation based pay rises. The pay rise deal gets reviewed in 5 years. If the company doesn't want to offer it again they're willing to go for that. They've not been locked into being forced to pay people more money for no good reason.
If you have a union you have the duty to vote in decent people to run it properly and if the union does things wrong then you have the duty to get people to quit the union.
Despite having a union I still work overtime and sometimes I do it without asking for pay because accomplishing something excellent and worthwhile is my my drive. What I don't want is my employer expecting me to give up my free time whenever it suits them. When I switch jobs (which the odds are I will given that I'm not old), I'm not bothered if the company has a union or not because I'm very confident in my ability to do my job, I don't slack and I will do my best to end up in a decent company.
Game companies in particular treat employees like shit. The publishers are like the RIAA, they don't give the retailer much profit (hence the reason they sell used games) and if it's hardware the retailer probably gets zero profit which is why a lot of them did not want to carry the PSP Go. They fuck over the developer by making them give up their social life with potentially no compensation.
Any sector that has to charge high prices for their products yet they can't afford to give retailers a decent cut or pay their employees then something is wrong. It needs to be fixed.
I can't see why people rather support a corrupt set of publishers than start-up their own union because it might end up corrupt.
Maybe if publishers had to start paying for all the work their employers do then they'll think twice about releasing shitty sequels year after year.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got all the 12 year old girls chained in my basement deleting my collection of Lisa Simpson pictures at this very moment.
Let me guess, they're removing more senior staff and taking on cheap young and or foreign staff.
It is truly just a big ass iPod Touch and just as closed up as an iPod so no flash, no Java, no choice. Just lots of pretty colours for guys in turtle neck sweaters.
Because the movie file is not flash. Flash plays a movie file. Apple grabs that file and plays it in something else.
They aren't illegal but it's a dodgy business practice with zero benefit to the consumer but loads of benefits for the business.
That would be the same with Steam as well so his claim that it's inline with Steam is still valid.
They have to constantly update costs anyway for price fluctuations and tax changes. Everything they claim would be a hassle is being done. The data just doesn't show on the front-end.
People do pay more as can be seen here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Points
The prices do fluctuate because points in the UK did cost more compared to the US upon my last investigation. So MS probably only changes the price when the pound comes more in line with the dollar but they're happy when exchange rate has a bigger gap.
Also I don't like the idea of Microsoft (or Nintendo) earning free money via spare points interest from millions of people.
By using points, you end up with left over points, millions of people do this and all those pennies add up to free interest money for MS with no benefit to the consumer as the 360 is by far the most expensive system to get full use out of it.
By using points they can make it appear as if every country pays the same where as in reality each country pays a different price per point. They can raise prices in numerous markets without it being reflected easily to most consumers.
Points, to most people, have no value. Most people would be more upset to see $50 sitting in their account for which they can't use for anything but MS software. But in points format it means less so it's a bit more acceptable.
If I sell my system how do I get my spare points back? Why should I have to ask when I don't need to beg Amazon.com or Play.com to give me my money back if I close my account.
The article on Edge ( http://www.edge-online.com/news/microsoft-points-never-intended-to-mislead-people%E2%80%9D ) has Aaron Greenberg saying 200 points is 200 points. That's not entirely true. In the US it may be $5.00 and it may be $10.00 to someone else.
He then states:
"There's more technical complexities to being able to put local prices in," he added. "You have to do that for every product in every country and you then have to deal with currency fluctuations.
That is a load of crap because they still have to manage costs for all countries and factor in tax for those countries that charge them. Somewhere there has to be a database of costs per points at MS. How can it be hard to pull through that currency amount to the front-end rather than a numerical value which, when someone buys those points, a system has to calculate their cost anyway.
Sony can manage this while giving away their online services for free. I can't believe people are dumb enough to buy into the points scam.
This annoys me but at least it's been announced and I will switch however I've had two Firefox machines that had their keyword search and default searches set to Bing.
I don't know if it's Mozilla or MS doing it. I know Mozilla told people to switch but never said they would do it and apparently I'm not the only one. http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-view_forum_thread.php?locale=tr&comments_parentId=361018&forumId=1#threadId368122
Does anyone know who's responsible for going ahead and changing Firefox's search from Google to Bing? I'm not impressed either way. I would not be impressed if it was the other way around too.
It feels like it's an underhanded tactic to try and force Bing on people and I don't think most people will be happy. If it is Microsoft doing this, they won't make people fans of Bing by forcing it on them behind their back.
Exactly. I'm tired of these idiots (and generally they're old too) crying about socialism when we're paying into social security, medicare and medicaid.
If socialism is such a bad thing then don't be shelfish and just try to stop younger people from getting healthcare, take it away from the old people and stamp it out for good.
I also don't like that the people most vocal about socialism also typically come from the dead weight states who are taking more from the government than they're paying in. Must be nice to have the best of both worlds.
All I want is equality and that is what it should be. Either *everyone* should have access to free healthcare or take it away from the elderly and the job shy poor people and everyone can fend for themselves. From an evolutionary stand point this is the best option. Let the weak fall to the side.
The eldery have less reason than the 20 somethings for not being able to pay their own way. They've had their whole life to prepare for retirement. The 20 something has barely been working and won't get paid much. He technically deserves free care more than the eldery who did not prepare for the end of life.
Journalists have no values these days. Most reporting is full of yellow journalism, scaremongering or reads like a company press release.
I have no time for low grade news stories create by some guy who thinks he'll change the world thanks to his useless degree in journalism which, in my opinion, holds the same value as the free watch I got in Golden Grahams ages ago.
Perhaps it's time to get a second job stacking shelves if writing press releases is not paying the bills.
Is it free enough that the people running companies should be able to run them as they want to rather than the government regulating it? Yes you can argue that you can go elsewhere but if the majority are crap well then you're screwed because not everyone can work for one company.
For gaming I personally feel this sort of thing helps the industry prop their way of business where they pump out half assed games because it's cheaper than it should be.
So yes, people are free to do what they want and if they want to risk having no relationships or a social life and poor health, that's their choice but with all freedoms there are responsibilities are they need to realise they're not actually helping things.
Not myself personally. I am American and my father worked in his company's union. Oddly enough that is what put me off unions because he actually did effectively work two jobs to help ungrateful people who wouldn't end up voting the right way because they thought management would be more likely to sack them.
I'm in a union because it happens that this company has one. I didn't join straight away but after about a year, I thought it was only £10 so I might as well give it a go seeing how I waste more than that a month on beers after work.
I do believe that it is very easy for a union to be corrupt and useless. More so if they do make head way and improve things for employees then there is less to justify their existence.
I think if developers were to have their own union they should make it their own rather than joining up with some national union that is effectively a corporation.
People should also be made aware that they should quit the union if they're unhappy with it at all. You can't just join a union and assume nothing can be done or be afraid of looking like an employee brown noser. If it's bad then quit and suggest to others to do the same. Make the union work for you rather than you working for them.
I think it comes own to enthusiasm. Whether you learn on your own or at home, if you live and breath code you will pick it up and be good at it. If you think you'll be a programmer because you like video games and want to make Gears of War 5 and make millions so you stumble your way through uni to get a degree or stumble around the internet on your own effectively learning how to cut and paste other people's work then you will suck and you'll probably hate your job.
There isn't anything inherently wrong with Java. It's a nice clean language and dead easy to generate a lot of boil plate code.
The problem is how people are taught to use Java (or any language) and the fact is they don't teach them enough of the right stuff. I think it has to do with dumbing down development to make more people think they can be programming masters in order to drive down wages.
Companies would absolutely love it if something like Java became a standard taught in high school or earlier. You'd have so many people that know enough to do the bulk of the work and pay them peanuts.
I've seen some people straight out of uni, they think they're hot shit because they can generate loads of useful code with their IDE and it works. Yes it's great that within minutes the boring stuff is written but when that stuff isn't working as expected or their interaction with something that's generated you see that they fall apart and come asking me or consulting the internet.
To an extent that's fine. You can't know everything from your first day on the job but it scary when you see people who aren't keen to actually learn how something works and why they're doing what they're doing or even take any sort of interest in math.
The article claims you can expect to start out around 40k. There are bus drivers earning nearly that and while that's not their starting wage they've basically come straight out of high school with zero debt doing a fairly basic job. It's not even like it's high speed driving. A degree shouldn't necessarily earn you the right to a high wage ( there are a lot of shit degrees) but you should be concerned if you're expected to get deeply into debt, work over time for free and be treated like a slave for 40K when someone is doing a 9-5 job for the same and in fact because the programmer could be doing overtime for free, really he's being paid less than the bus driver.
I buy my MP3s from Amazon now. They're high quality, cheap, lack DRM and it has what I want in the meta data, the title, album, track no. and album art. There are a lot of unnecessary fields already, like lyrics that I find no one uses and for good reason, it's an MP3 and no one cares.
It's bad enough Amarok has decided to put a big freaking wiki window in the middle of the player making me uninstall it, I certainly don't want blogs, videos, tour dates and, rest assured, security risks in my music.
Anyone that has seen the joy of WMA and WMV files polluting porno on P2P networks knows this is a bad thing We don't need a platform independent version of shitty media files.
Without a doubt if this format took off I would quit paying for music until it dies.
Considering NYC alone can't get a decent connection for their iPhones it's actually a relevant example and if NYC can't do it then odds are most of the US is worse off since they're more spread out so AT&T is likely going to care even less about them.
US does a lot of things well but mobile phones are definitely not one of those things.
You're right it is just a video game. There is no reason someone should have to give up an excessive chunk of their social life and potentially harm their health just to make a video game.
Because there is a very good chance they wouldn't do the right thing if no one stood up for the employers.
The reason we got the pay rises based on inflation was because of the union. I doubt they'd do it on their own.
In fact, part of the business is, imo, outdated and was losing money. They needed to make cuts there. That's fair but but giving employees the minimum and no choice who gets cut isn't great. Having someone get you more time before you're sacked so you can find a job and getting voluntary redundancy so those who want to leave get to and those that don't stay.
That's better for the company any way because if someone wants to leave they will anyway in that situation and then that area is left with even fewer people and will suffer further.
Given the choice to get rid of anyone means they'd probably get rid of the older people as they're a drain on health insurance, their pension costs are higher and they're close to collecting that pension. Those people would probably rather stay on so they're more likely to collect that pension.
I'm no hardcore union man. I think a lot of them are corrupt, I've never been part of one before and it doesn't even enter my mind as a consideration when looking for jobs so I may never be part of one again. But while it's there, I will take advantage of it. It's insurance and it's only £10 a month. I'm not making minimum wage, £10 isn't really anything.
So explain to me why it's ok for the publishers to screw everyone, for managers to protect themselves from lay-offs but the developers shouldn't have any sort of protection.
That's true which is why I'm not too bothered about a place having a union (this is my first to be honest and will likely be the last since it's a rare thing) but they can be nice. The problem is probably when the company starts treating people well and then then the union is left trying to justify their existence.
The ideal thing would be that developers would just stick together and not require paying someone to speak for them.
I think ideally developers don't need a full on union. If they would at least stick together and protest companies that treat their fellow developers like shit rather than paying dues to people to do things for them.
I suspect the gaming industry is a bit like the movie industry and you'll end up getting black balled if you stand up against their activities which is why you end up seeing anonymous wives doing the complaining instead. They can't black ball everyone.
By just sticking together than going the proper union route then there is no union trying to justify paying dues once things get better.
Money doesn't mean much when you're always at work and no they don't make shit loads when you factor in the cost of living in areas like Silicon Valley and not everyone at Rockstar is Sam Houser and therefore don't get a big ass wage like his.
So should employers pay India wages to US developers and the developers should live with it just because there are people that do the job for even less than that?
Good thing you tow the company line, they'll definitely push you up into management where you don't have to produce anything of value.
If the conditions are the same everywhere then you can't really go elsewhere. All companies forcing poor conditions on employees is just as bad as the government forcing perfect conditions on employees.
Government regulations aren't necessarily socialism or are you for removing the bill of rights and allowing local communities decide whether people can own guns or have free speech based on their community's needs?
There is not just one union. There are many of them and they're only as bad as the people who join the union and vote for the people running the union.
If so many developers are so perfect and anti-bloated union then when they start their own it will be perfect.
The fact is it is wrong that people work so many hours for free and risk not having a relationship just to make shitty game sequels. Over working employees most likely contributes to poor software too. People just don't function well without a decent sleep.
So your choices are really either to get the government to make those sort of practices illegal or start a union. If you start your own it will be small and nearly impossible for it to be corrupt like the auto workers union. If it does go corrupt quit and get your fellow workers to quit too. A union is effectively a company and you need to vote with your feet and your wallet.
Labour laws aren't in their infancy but tech related fields still have to deal with companies treating employees like shit. Whether its importing people on H1-B visas to work for less, exporting jobs or making you work for free. There's also much more ageism in IT because companies prefer naive young employees who don't realise they're being fucked up the ass. Most jobs don't have to deal with those sort of things so yeah a union is probably a bit useless.
Companies don't only sack useless people. If they're cost cutting they're more likely to cut someone who they deem a bigger financial drain which can be someone who is a better developer purely because his pay is in relation to his skills. He could be older too and therefore more likely to be using more healthcare benefits so again, he's a drain. He's not useless but he can lose his job.
My union only asks for £10 a month and has protected jobs without protecting useless people and negotiated sensible inflation based pay rises. The pay rise deal gets reviewed in 5 years. If the company doesn't want to offer it again they're willing to go for that. They've not been locked into being forced to pay people more money for no good reason.
If you have a union you have the duty to vote in decent people to run it properly and if the union does things wrong then you have the duty to get people to quit the union.
Despite having a union I still work overtime and sometimes I do it without asking for pay because accomplishing something excellent and worthwhile is my my drive. What I don't want is my employer expecting me to give up my free time whenever it suits them. When I switch jobs (which the odds are I will given that I'm not old), I'm not bothered if the company has a union or not because I'm very confident in my ability to do my job, I don't slack and I will do my best to end up in a decent company.
Game companies in particular treat employees like shit. The publishers are like the RIAA, they don't give the retailer much profit (hence the reason they sell used games) and if it's hardware the retailer probably gets zero profit which is why a lot of them did not want to carry the PSP Go. They fuck over the developer by making them give up their social life with potentially no compensation.
Any sector that has to charge high prices for their products yet they can't afford to give retailers a decent cut or pay their employees then something is wrong. It needs to be fixed.
I can't see why people rather support a corrupt set of publishers than start-up their own union because it might end up corrupt.
Maybe if publishers had to start paying for all the work their employers do then they'll think twice about releasing shitty sequels year after year.