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this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2024
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On the one hand, the industry is well known for its poor wages and horrible working conditions. On the other hand, as you said, that's on the companies and we shouldn't be expected to pay their workers for them.
These guys rake in more money than Hollywood, and yet they think we should pay more because they don't want to pay their workers a fair wage? How about we help them unionize instead. That sounds more worthwhile to me.
Well said. There is no way a "tipping" system set up by big publishers would end up in the creators' pocket anyway.
Especially not if you include every small hand from programmer to artist to QA tester etc (and they should be included).
I thought I would do a quick search to see if I could find a "these studio do/don't have a unionized workforce" tracker.
I couldn't find anything so single issue but I did find this:
https://guide.ethical.org.au/company/?company=5451
Its a pretty dire list.
And that's pretty standard for the video game industry. I can think of maybe 2 unionized studios in the US, and those have both happened within the past 5 years or so. One of those is actually a studio that was bought up by Blizzard and was so concerned that their work culture was going to be destroyed and replaced with Blizzard's toxic culture that the entire studio formed a union in response.
Quality of life is so bad in the industry that not only is crunch a normal part of working, but you can expect to work 7 days a week for 3 or 4 months at a time, even eating and sleeping in the office. And pay is so bad that there are people working at Blizzard who can't afford to buy lunch at the company cafeteria and are living out of their cars because they can't afford rent within commuting distance of the office. I recently heard a dev talking about how he left Blizzard to go work for Amazon for better pay and benefits. When Amazon's working conditions are better than yours, you know you're in deep shit.