a union doesn't guarantee money, that's true. However, a union can guarantee acceptable hours worked - for example, limit overtime (without pay) to X hrs per week.
Or, they ensures you're credited regardless if you left before the game shipped (because it is a form of portfolio for your career).
And lastly, a union means you cannot be exploited hard, like a lot of wanabe game programmers and artists are wont to be.
> If the schedule was right you wouldn't need crazy long hours.
Unless you're making the next GTA6 for which the customer is willing to wait forever, if you increase the schedule so that everyone works fewer hours, then you'll get outcompeted in the free market by game devs from China, Korea and Japan where long hours are not an issue and can get games much quicker to market on lower budgets, putting you out of business.
Games aren't manufacturing. Studios can try, but no one is going to make Elder Scrolls VI feel like ES6 except Bethesda's team, design, and tech. Especially when people doubt Bethesda can do it themselves. Silksong is not something you can outsource to China. Even decent competition can't quite nail that feel people have about The Sims.
Games also aren't zero sum either. Turns out consumers can buy more than 1 game a year.
Unfortunately, most of those games you named are labours of love, and do not bring as much revenue per dollar spent as shitty mobile gambling slot machine games.
And those are what's available as work these days, but has increasingly been outsourced to cheaper locations. Good riddence, but it also means lost jobs.
The original Bethesda staff that worked on your favorite franchises doesn't work there anymore, they all retired or moved on to greener pastures and the studio, just like EA, Ubisoft, etc is full of clueless underpaid and overworked juniors that don't have the skills or eye for detail the original staff had. Here the Chinese and Koreans will eat you alive.
>Games also aren't zero sum either.
No, but the hours in a days is a zero sum. People have the same free time after school/work to play games, this doesn't grow with the market. So they have to carefully pick what games they'll spend their time and money on. And if it's between some Western slop or an Asian game that's better and cheaper, they'll pick the latter. The more competitive the gaming market is by international players, the more western game studios will be squeezed out.
Humans are humans. I'm betting the workers in Asia doing 80+ hours are equally as weary as the ones in the West. What's the burnout rate? It's expensive to replace a developer halfway through development as it takes forever to get up to speed on both the codebase and the game design.
>I'm betting the workers in Asia doing 80+ hours are equally as weary as the ones in the West.
Of course, but workers in the west also have strong economy and a lot of other better choice than working in a sweatshop. Workers in Asia do not , that's why all offshoring goes there.
They are starting to outcompete Hollywood on quality (see Godzilla minus one, Squid Game, Parasite, etc), they just don't have the hundred millions of dollars of marketing budget that Hollywood has to push and advertise their movies in foreign cinemas across the world, nor do Americans have a huge appetite of watching movies with subtitles, nor could they read even if they wanted to ("54% of adults have a literacy below sixth-grade level"[1]).
You're focusing on a fact of the market which is not relevant to unionization discussions - what you're presenting is a risk for everyone in the industry. Instead unionization focuses on doing what we can to ensure we're treated with common decency and respect where we do work.
Your statement isn't false but it isn't the norm. Unionized employees have much higher retention rates and that comes with better skill growth within an organization which generally leads to a more competitive entity. The modern market driven employment process causes massive long term inefficiencies while optimizing for short term valuation which can increase debt accessibility but generally lowers long term value. I think this is a wider discussion however and it'd be better to focus any examination of unions on the employee outcomes who are effectively the consumers of union.
Whether a company prospers or fails the employees working for that company will, in nearly all circumstances, have much better quality of employment while that company lasts. I'd argue that long term company health is supported by unionization but I understand that there is a massive entrenched cultural rejection of that notion.
> I'd argue that long term company health is supported by unionization
This is too black and white. Unionization creates another power structure in a company, one that isn't particularly aligned with company health, but can be. It just depends on the people involved and how they use that power.
> but I understand that there is a massive entrenched cultural rejection of that notion.
I've no idea what you mean by a cultural rejection - which culture are you talking about?
>It just depends on the people involved and how they use that power.
this is basically a tautology so it's a useless statement. Water for a human can bring them back to life, drown them, or tear their body apart. of course context, intent, and factors matter.
But in general, unions are good for a traditional company health: happy workers -> more productivity -> better products. Us being in this turmoil where we aren't fousing on better products doesn't change that.
You've dismissed what I said and then immediately fell victim to it. I don't think you can assume unions create happier workers, nor that happier workers create better products. Unions can also just make comfortable jobsworths. There is no guarantee of anything there.
This is one of those things that's hard to spot from an un-unionised standpoint. You have hard-working, driven workers who sometimes suffer unfairnesses that a union would solve. So unions look good, because your workers are hard-working and driven, and it's all upside.
A decade of unionisation might look very different. For example, the UK in the 1970s briefly moved to a 3 day working week[0] because of coal miner strikes that meant there wasn't enough power in the country. Not all examples are this extreme, partly because we learned from that experience, it's worth thinking of things more objectively, outside of the current context, and analysing the pros and cons of both positions.
> I've no idea what you mean by a cultural rejection - which culture are you talking about?
Eh, I grew up in the states and unions were heavily demonized there. I tend to couch my words quite defensively due to that - my apologies.
> This is too black and white. Unionization creates another power structure in a company, one that isn't particularly aligned with company health, but can be. It just depends on the people involved and how they use that power.
I agree that this isn't a guarantee, there are both bad unions and some good unions that do ill for what they perceive to be good reasons - however, generally speaking, increasing job security and tamping down on companies' instinct to turn to layoffs will usually benefit companies. My experience in the workforce is that larger companies use layoffs as a frequent tool for stock price manipulation when they're having a bad quarter to appear "lean" - and while the markets do respond positively to that it generally comes at the expense of long term company health.
This is definitely a case where both unions and companies can be in the wrong - but it seems that companies are much more often in the wrong. Long tenured employees are quite valuable and layoffs should be a tool used in the extremes to account for overgrowth and shouldn't be happening multiple times in the same decade unless a company is in severely poor health.
Or, they ensures you're credited regardless if you left before the game shipped (because it is a form of portfolio for your career).
And lastly, a union means you cannot be exploited hard, like a lot of wanabe game programmers and artists are wont to be.