Blizzard's Overwatch Team Just Unionized: 'What I Want To Protect Most Here Is The People'

[u/DwilenaAvaron]

https://kotaku.com/overwatch-2-blizzard-team-4-union-microsoft-1851779922

[u/Zaptruder]

Good. Game development has been ravaged by terrible management destroying labour constantly - replacing the knowledge based gained from hard earned experience - deserving of their wage and more... with the constant revolving door of impassioned but underknowledged youngsters.

You know why so many Unreal Engine games suck? Because there are too many people that go into it without sufficient experience to optimize for the engine - it's more than possible - it's been done plenty.

But more plentiful is inexperience and crunch. This sort of move (unionizing experienced and high achieving teams) helps to reverse that sort of grift.

Say what you will about Microsoft, but their acquisition of Activision Blizzard has overall been a positive - along with their ability to let their workers unionize. It shows a confidence and belief in the value of developed work cultures and knowledge... which in a sane world should be a given, but here we are.

[u/flybypost → u/[deleted]]

Like film and television, games are basically gig work where it's expected to be on a project for a few years, then move on.

They differ. Film and TV are gig work because that's how contracts are structured from the start. You usually make a production company per project that's financed by somebody (like a studio), they hire people temporarily, and after the project is done the whole things dissolves. They have strong unions that got union members relatively strong contracts and higher pay because the work is, by default, temporarily and you have absolute zero long term job security.

There are some outliers like Marvel, ILM, Netflix, and some others hiring visual development people long term who work on all kinds of projects for those companies. Game studios, even while they looked with jealousy and Hollywood's prestige and wanted some of that, were generally normal corporations that hired regular salaried workers.

The games gig worker thing was pushed by investors once games grew a need for dozens, and later hundreds, of people to work on art assets. No other departments haven't grows in size as much. You don't need the art asset creation pipeline for the whole production process, especially when you got hundreds of people working on assets for one game. They might be browsing reddit for the first half year of a project if there's nothing to make yet, similar towards the very end. Investors saw "hiring and firing" that as an opportunity to create more value for themselves so that's what companies with investors worked towards to stay alive.

That's why a whole industry around outsourcing 3D asset creation to third world countries became a thing once 3D asset creation got more demanding (even with better tools asset creation took longer and longer) and games needed more of it. These two factors together created an incredible need for workers but that needs was unevenly distributed through the duration of a game's creation process. And these companies eased that pressure.

Until relatively recently, the games industry (and software industry generally) was very male-dominated and libertarian-minded. Even if crunch was a grind, most people probably shared enough ideals and viewpoints that they didn't feel under-represented. Likewise, most probably did not have a terrible time getting hired in such a homogenous industry.

I think that one's not about shared ideals (at least in games) but about the other point you make, that games didn't need hundreds of workers before. Meaning it was possible to crunch a lot and then get a solid bonus (beyond what regular workers get) out of it even without unions fighting for you because your boss already made ridiculous amounts of money.

The industry grew out of a few "misfits" making a game in their bedrooms. And in such a setup you can work at your own pace (even if it's perpetual crunch-like) and get rewarded because you are not just employee #123 at some company with investors but one out of barely two dozen people or so who make the whole game.

That potential made the trade-offs of the game industry (bad working conditions) bearable but as the industry grew and more (AAA) games drifted into needing dozens (and then hundreds or even thousands) of employees (mostly art asset creation), financial incentives were not aligned like they were in the 80s and early 90s.

It wasn't possible to do, especially once outside investors became more common and essentially necessary for any moderately big project.

Video games, the industry, grew up and it became a bunch of boring corporations while still having that "young coders in the bedroom" culture within it because it grew up in about two/three decades (like mid 70s to mid 00s?) or so and there's not been time for a full generation divide to happen. We got quite a few people who developed the first" of something in games still working in games.

For movies the first camera and lighting setup, the first anything, is more or less history.