You just described why workers should want a union. But that's not what determines whether or not unions will catch on in the industry. Thats determined by the structure of the industry. If its not critical and there are plenty of replacements waiting to take your job, unionization just wont take off on a large scale.
The ability to unionize has very little to do with the ideology of the workforce and everything to do with the structure of the industry. It wont work out in video games because it's not a critical industry and there are plenty of people willing to do the work.
That logic doesn’t make any sense to me. Game programming, art, and even marketing are highly specific niches within those broader fields. You can’t pick any random programmer off the street and get them up to speed on game development overnight (let alone your specific crazy custom engine/architecture, as often seems to be the case).
1) Nothing critical is lost if a video game team stops working. Society doesnt need it and there are lots of alternatives.
2) There is already a major labor surplus for video games. It's famously hard to get into and low paying because of it. There is no doubt someone else is willing to step in.
The criticality of the industry, for whatever subjective measure you’re using there, doesn’t matter for union forming.
It’s the leverage that the nascent union has over the company owners and management, who presumably still want to make money.
That being said the video game industry does have a deluge of naive young people willing to sell their bodies and souls for their dream, so I don’t have high hopes for this group.
I understand why workers in the video game industry want to unionize. They like the industry but the standards are shit. I do not see how unions will catch on in the video game industry.
The ability to unionize has very little to do with the ideology of the workforce and everything to do with the structure of the industry.
Unions tend to catch on when labor is irreplacable, workplace is large and centralized, if they can halt critical operations beyond their industry (ie railroads, ports, etc), there is low exposure to competition/off shoring, etc. The video game industry itself is not very ripe for unionizatoin.
I'm not sure that's true. Surely doormen, janitors, and security guards are not "irreplaceable" and can't "halt critical operations beyond their industry".
That's all labor that can only be done "here and now." Can't just have Indians do it over the internet. And replacing the workers at a moment's notice is usually complicated by the striking workers harassing and attacking the replacements. Again, hard to do that when your replacement is on the other side of the globe.
You cannot simply transfer Magic the Gathering to overseas workers and expect any kind of usable result. It will be from an entirely different cultural framework.
> You cannot simply transfer Magic the Gathering to overseas workers and expect any kind of usable result.
If you fed all the lore into an LLM and trained diffusion models on all the artwork I bet you could keep the train running from India until the end of time. The only thing that would derail it is if customers _knew_ it wasn't "authentic."
I don't think LLMs are anywhere near careful enough with their wording to not break the game. Non-native speakers will have a similiar problem if they are extremely proficient.
If everyone at a game developer goes on strike, there is basically no amount of outsourcing or scab labour that can replace them. This is actually probably true of basically all software
Just refusing to share passwords into key systems would be enough to significantly halt any attempt to bring on an entirely new development team
Yes but what happens? The video game is not maintained or released. Society doesnt care that much. It's not critical and there are millions of alternatives.
Magic: the Gathering is the only profitable arm of Hasbro. I don't have the specific revenue numbers, but Arena is a huge part of the ecosystem. Sure, society at large wouldn't care, but letting the Arena release schedule slip behind the "paper cards" product would be a huge embarrassment within the community of customers and content creators that fuel the MTG machine. I would be shocked if they let it happen lightly.
I would be a lot less shocked if Hasbro sends in the Pinkertons to do some "persuasion" in the coming weeks and months:
Some historically powerful unions have enjoyed their power because their strikes not only stop their employers making money, but also impose great inconvenience on many people downstream of them.
If truckers or dockworkers go on strike there's no food on the shelves, if coal miners go on strike the lights go out, and so on.
As a consequence of this, employers are motivated to make a deal not just by missed opportunities to make money, but also by politicians, other powerful capitalists, and public opinion.
Of course there are plenty of unions where this isn't the case; theatres and hollywood are unionised despite the fact nobody freezes or starves when they go on strike.
Game developers are, I think, closer to the hollywood position than the dockworkers position.
It is both true that there has been an OSR revival, and that D&D is more popular than ever -- just with a much broader and culturally normative audience.
Also: Yes, Hasbro did some shit, but they also had to relent and CC their SRD. This all happened years ago.
I say this as a committed Pathfinder player who hasn't seen a good reason to return to D&D (PF2e is good enough). D&D is doing numbers and no one cares that us nerds moved on because of weak tea from the previous decade.
You say he's a bot because he's suspicious of unions, yet you acknowledge plenty of tech people are suspicious of unions. Seems like you dont think he's a bot at all and you're just trying to delegitimize his viewpoint without actually confronting it.
I always thought perfectionism meant extremely high achievements (for too great of a cost). But it can also be quitting without any progress because you can't accept anything less than perfect (which may or may not be achievable). Perfectionism can be someone procrastinating on a large task.
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