Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/07/22/bethesda-game-studios-unionizes.html
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Good for them and long overdue.
Or broken entirely.
An understatement. The pay is less than any other job with the same skill requirements (because it’s “fun”). Someone once told me their son was wanting to join the game industry and saw a job listing that included salary - they assumed that was the monthly wage, because they couldn’t conceive of it being the yearly wage. Working conditions are infamously terrible. What I hear from coworkers and in industry forums sometimes beggars belief. It’s an industry where traditionally managers were simply the developers who were able/willing to stay in the industry and its abusive practices long enough to become management by default. A lot of traditional industry practices amount to hazing, perpetuated by management who think it’s normal (because they put up with it) - it works against productivity, so there’s no rational reason to continue doing them. People often leave the industry because it literally made them too sick to keep working in it. It’s structured as a salaried job, but layoffs are so common that a coworker described game developers as “migrant labor” and I realized he was right. A friend in the industry had, at the time, just moved something like five times in four years, across state lines (and even countries).
The industry only survived un-unionized for so long because it simply drove everyone out after a few years working in it. I think the recent (and unusual) period of stability (that now is followed by mass layoffs) changed workers’ thinking.
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Production studios to close and all operations moved to [insert Asian or Eastern European country with low wages and little/no worker protection laws here] in 3… 2… 1…
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Wishing the union members all the best especially with how badly Microsoft is fucking things up lately
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Sigh, it is a pretty pessimistic view. Honestly though, I don’t know enough about game development in general (and AAA games in specific) to make an informed prediction on whether this is a realistic scenario or not.
I hope it’s not. Highly creative and entertaining games like the ones Bethesda is known for (not looking at you, Fallout 76 and Elder Scrolls Online) require lots of skilled artists including writers, and lots of collaboration. That’s the kind of thing that you really lose when you try to farm out significant parts of your production to digital sweatshops in other countries.
But I also know managers that will just look at the cost/hr of programmers in India, Poland, Romania, Philippines, etc., look at the total man-hours of programmers required to make their last game, and will propose they can make their next game by outsourcing the lions share of the software development to those places. It won’t work of course: it will go way over schedule and ultimately over budget, and would be a bug-riddled mess, and then the company might go bankrupt. But they would do it anyway.
Thanks for owning it.
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