UK: Game Workers union jumps 50% after lay offs, "It just keeps coming and coming. And with this wave, I’ve seen people saying ‘we need to join unions’". - eviltoast
Video game developers union membership in UK soars after thousands laid off
www.theguardian.com
Around 900 of the estimated 11,100 job losses in the workforce last year were in the UK’s £5bn a year industry
  • mindbleach@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    3·
    10 months ago

    I’ll occasionally poo-poo efforts to unionize programmers, as the wrong level of abstraction. Software development is too broad to lump together sensibly across all industries, and too narrow for generally organizing office workers.

    Game devs should’ve unionized twenty fucking years ago. Maybe forty. The horror stories about crunch were already commonplace in forums. Several major 90s releases have turned out to be corporate screw-jobs with no comeuppance. Mindscape straight-up fired the entire Lego Island staff the day before launch, probably to fuck them out of promised royalties.

    Christ, third-party console publishing, as a concept, only exists because Atari treated developers like anonymous machines. Warren Robinet’s name appearing anywhere on or in Adventure - a game where he was responsible for every single byte - was a secret act of defiance. A handful of dudes who earned half of Atari’s profits left to form Activision. Then Activision pulled the same shit and a handful of dudes left to form Accolade. Then Accolade pulled the same shit and a handful of dudes left to form Acclaim, are you seeing a fucking pattern?

    It’s not enough to put people who’ve been screwed in charge, to prevent the company from screwing more workers. The incentives are miserable. And that was before the dominant strategy became bottomless money-pits that should be straight-up outlawed.

    This was a long time coming.