I certainly know I’m better than those who can’t even negotiate their own salary 
Hmm yes love to grovel at the foot of the person who I’m providing labour to so they can turn a profit.
The airline industry is a highly regulated one with very strict standards that are difficult and expensive to adhere to. The games industry might as well be the paper plane industry by comparison. The first thing that a games industry ‘crash investigation team’ would need to do is expel 95% of developers for not meeting quality standards, is that what you’d want?
Realistically though, let’s just learn to do what we need to do so we don’t crash.
My experience has been the opposite here in Australia. We have had strong unions for a long time. Those industries and workers that joined a union are doing far better off then professions that decided to negotiate for themselves as individuals. Its lead to the situation in my industry where the guy on the end of the line stacking boxes (union) is getting paid significantly more then his manager (individual). Despite the fact that the manager requires more education, is harder to replace, and has more responsibility.
The key difference between the two workers is the union. If the guy stacking boxes gets ticked off, every guy stacking boxes stops working. The factory grinds to a halt. On the other hand if the manager gets ticked off, he gets replaced.
You can see this same effect across every industry in the country. Those in areas which have had collective bargaining in place for a few decades are now all considerably better off in terms of pay and working conditions then those areas which have gone with individual agreements.
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Unions will simply create a situation where much more work is sourced abroad. Big and small studios (including Unity) already do this. Enforcing Unions will simply and efficiently kill local industry stone dead, because unlike film you do not need to know who is making the latest AAA blockbuster. You don’t need Chris Hemsworth. You don’t need Sigourney Weaver. You just need latest Nitefort or latest Taletell game and whoever makes it is irrelevant to consumers.
With software we seldom need everyone in the same country. Unions will push the work to other countries.
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On the other hand though, we have very little technological innovation, or ‘silicon valley spirit’ going on over here. I’ve heard more than once that Australia suffers from ‘tall poppy syndrome’, and based on my own observations it exists here in no small amount.
The way I see it, the problem is that, while organizations that stand for the collective good are usually (at least in the beginning) somewhat of a good thing, they tend to create a culture that makes it hard for people to see the world as a non zero sum game, or to evaluate opportunities that are associated with risk and individual development. That has all sorts of consequences that are perhaps more destructive than people think.
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Except if this was true, why wouldn’t all work be sourced abroad already?
Also true. Drawing on Australia again, you can see the same trend. Sure our manufacturing workers get paid more then all of our local geographic neighbors. But most manufacturers are closing Australian facilities and sending them off shore. The ones that remain are incredibly efficient. But there aren’t a lot of them.
What makes you think that’s not happening? It’s not overnight, but major AAA studios don’t open regional studios in india for nothing.
Most of those are glorified QA houses, not development jobs. And maybe, just maybe, the existence of unions could help drive policies that help favour local jobs.
Unions need a base to work. From that they get power and money via politics. So they are simply DOA in the tech industry because nobody wants them, they have no base.
The reason they’re DOA in the tech industry is because the tech industry is run by libertarian nutcases and because in North America unions have been viciously stigmatised. People are told they don’t want unions by the people in charge or, in many cases, will get fired for even suggesting the idea because worker protections over here are that bad.
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It’s extremely hard for something to Unionize when the labour isn’t required to be in the same country. In the one small case this did happen in the game industry, it resulted in a grand total of absolutely nothing, and only managed to even make noise because it had crossover with the movie industry: 2016–2017 video game voice actor strike - Wikipedia
There is too much talent and not enough jobs in the game industry, and all of the talent and jobs are scattered worldwide, because it’s not less efficient to work like that. If it was less efficient, everyone including Unity wouldn’t open studios in other countries.
Unity opens studios in lots of countries. Because it’s the best way to get talent. And really, that’s never going to work for a Union:
This doesn’t make Unity or any tech company evil, it just means people need to stop whoring themselves out with shitty contracts expecting some golden hand of love to look after them. Demand good contracts.
If someone says “but really need this job, got no choice…” bullshit. Game dev is totally choice. There’s many more jobs in enterprise and they all pay better. For art, there’s huge amount of shops doing design work. Game dev is fun and has a loud voice. It inspires kids who immediately gun for it. The talent entering the industry is endless and prodigious and Unity contributes to that talent pool. Every kid picks up a copy. Stars in the eyes.
Only to fall foul of grim posts by hippoder, draining the life and soul from the world.
<Coughs and sips some water, pinky finger out>
Anyway yeah, I just think it’s not that solvable other than demanding a bit more protection in the contract like @AndersMalmgren has suggested.
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Seriously though, does the games industry need unions, of all things? It’s such an overwhelmed and exploited industry that if anything, it literally needs protection from ‘workers’, not the other way around.
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I don’t understand you billy but here is a picture of an ice cream.
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You know what? Calling BS. Do you know why I’m calling BS? Because people keep making the actor comparison, but what about film work that could be outsourced? What about editing and animation? What about effects work? Oddly enough, they have a union too! It’s called IATSE and it’s far reaching enough that if you want to hire anyone from a union, you have to hire everyone union otherwise union workers won’t, well, work.
That’s the thing about collective bargaining. When you have a game dev union, it’s not just at the top level, it’s at every level. You aren’t just protecting big names, skilled developers, people who are in demand, but everyone. The actor thing doesn’t even make sense because an actor’s value is externalised to the public, but the public aren’t the only people involved. There are names in game development that are in demand. They are designers, they are coders, they are team leaders, they are artists. They have names in the industry and unions will protect them as well as rely on their protection because we’re all in this together.
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I’m being a bit facetious to make the point. I like a bit of an open market, come what may. But the idea that all of the devs peddling the hundreds or thousands of daily entries across Steam and the app stores need some kind of job protection, is just beyond my understanding.
In any case, you can really only provide that kind of protection to a well-regulated industry, which (even if it were possible for games) would probably be far harder on devs than any problem they have now.
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Most leadership in the tech industry is very left wing. In my 20+ years working in or around Silicon Valley, I’ve been the token conservative most of the time. What I’ve seen is that despite overall political bent, people follow the money. Employees in tech companies don’t think unions are bad because of the media. In fact the majority of liberals I have worked with think unions are generally good, just not in tech. Which IMO is kind of funny, because this is a situation where they look at a context they actually know and say ya it wouldn’t work well here. But for a context they know little about, they say ya it would be good over there.
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Progressivism isn’t inherently left wing and their entire corporate policies are chiefly libertarian.
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The number of people I know that have been made redundant or had their studio close from under them right after delivering a project to a publisher is ridiculous, the fact they finished the project means they did their job and their reward is often unemployment.
It’d be great to have an some sort of idealised union for game Dev and game QA staff… But has an industry ever unionised post globalisation?
The fact that people are passionate and get exploited because they want to be in industry is not a valid argument. Look at sports people. They love playing their sport and they get paid crazy amounts and usually it’s because of some collective bargaining by a player association that enforces that the sports league they are apart of share profits fairly. This unfortunately isn’t often the case for female sports people, but that seems to be changing now.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see e-sports players and teams unionise before game developers, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see e-sports stars have better job security and fairer pay than the game developers that build the games they play.
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