Games

and the US is not an easy place to unionize in.

Moreso now than ever before.

Yes, but there are also European developers. Such as Ubisoft, which previously had major issues with harassment, and probably still does. If they have a union, it certainly isn't a powerful one.

The irony is that becoming a solo dev is rarely feasible and even more rarely leads to a product that pays up more than just working elsewhere.

That immediately makes people point to success stories, like Stardew Valley. Dunno about others, but I don't have a family + girlfriend to sustain me for 4+ years, nor am I blinded by the dream possibility of reaching millions of sales when so many games struggle to reach 10k sales.

We (large European gaming companies employees) have been trying to get a CBA for a year and a half now, sometimes it takes time.

AAA dev here; it's not that. It's that attempting to standardize development in a highly fluid and innovative sector can kill your competitiveness as a studio if you'renot careful. That being said, unionization is also desperately needed. Blizzard recently unionized across their while studio, which is probably the best model out there right now; allow companies of a certain scale to unionize so that positive and competitive aspects of company culture/organizational structure can be maintained/improved while ensuring worker's rights against exploitation from the top-down and abused of shareholders/management. Games, and by extension their studios, are intended to be things greater than the sum of their parts, and this is reflected by each company's unique internal culture; every studio operates differently, and this is directly reflected in the games they end up putting out (OG Valve is a great example). How many big studios have you seen shed a sizeable amount of senior devs, after which they no longer seem to be able to make the same quality games as before? Happens all the time, and this is why; the internal culture and proprietary knowledge-base has had a paradigm shift wherein a lot of the studio's previous identity has been lost. That's the magic of gamedev studio culture and the people that create it, and that needs to be protected while also upholding workers' rights simultaneously. The best way to do that is to allow all members of said culture to create their own rules of union governance from within, not necessarily to have standards that maybe disrupt said culture from without. This is obviously a generalization, as you could additionally have a looser external unionization framework protecting and binding/collectively bargaining on behalf of gamedevs as a class of worker; there is more than one way to skin the cat here. Obviously there's a "who watches the watchmen" situation that arises here, so this needs to be done in accordance with reforms in worker advocacy laws holistically, because I don't even need remind anybody of the deluge of "toxic company culture" Kotaku exposés over the years; we certainly need an external and legal framework to push back against that. It's a tough nut to crack, and it's why things seem to be moving so slowly. We're pushing a boulder up a massive hill here while fighting bad actors and neoliberal capitalism at the same time.

It's not that hard to understand. The whole gaming industry is filled with people who are super passionate about games, like passionate to a fault. This makes it very, very difficult to unionize as there's almost always some other game dev out there who would take the job for less pay and more hours.

I actually know a friend like that. He was job jumping a lot, looking for game dev roles almost exclusively. He finally landed such a role. Far as I heard, he's working overtime a lot (voluntarily) and he earns less than half of what I earn as a "regular" software developer.

It’s called “a decades long campaign to erode trust and even awareness of unions by corporate business interests”.

I’m sure it will get a lot worst with AI bs.

Yeah this would be completely illegal in a lot of countries.

You need to either make the position redundant and then you cant hire anyone for 9months or you show 3 separates instances where they failed to meet the job requirements and were notified. You can't just fire people for the fuck of it.

Their crunch culture is def bad (they’re going to kill Sakurai one day), but there is quite a few things they do right. They don’t lay people off and their executives take accountability. Iwata took a significant pay cut when the Wii U flopped.

at least the west is starting to acknowledge the torturous monotony of doing the same job for decades.

In the US the barrier to firing workers is much lower than in other countries. Even layoffs for purely arbitrary or personal reasons are easy and hard to challenge in courts. This is one of the reasons companies have little free capital and choose to lay off many workers as soon as the market looks to be turning. But it also has positive economic impacts as well. That said, EA are a bunch of greedy cunts, and I try never to buy anything new from them anymore (just buying used where they don't get a cut, if they released any games worth owning).

While I feel sorry for her as a worker, I do not feel sorry for her as a writer.

Live Service writing for AAA studios has got to be the most disposable form of fiction. I can find old short stories from magazines that closed close to a century ago, but I can't play the Destiny series from start to finish today?