Irrational Games shutdown exposes the exploitation face of the industry

Early this week; Ken Levine announced that he is shutting down Irrational Games while going off to start a new company with 15 other soon to be former employees. The news took the gaming world by surprise while also reigniting the debate about the industries exploitative practices. Its moments like these that should encourage people in the industry to stand up against the exploitation of their labor.

[stanr]

For too long have game developers and programers been exploited because they love their career. These are not burger flippers, these are individuals whose profession requires years of school and experience to master a highly demanded skill. Maybe they need to think about establishing their own trade union.

[Axonometri]

You mean unions like those that burn down churches and threaten peoples families and children?

[stanr]

I believe your referring to the tactics used by union busting groups that terrorized labor leaders and massacred unarmed protestors. Or maybe the KKK who are also anti labor and resorted to terrorism.

[PotatoAsylum]

The destruction of trade unions only benefits the rich. I'm sorry that you've been brainwashed.

[Axonometri]

No. I am referring to Union members.
http://freebeacon.com/union...

[LightofDarkness]

Christians also bomb abortion clinics, shall we now say all Christians are terrible people and that the religion should be illegalized?

All groups have fringe elements and radicals, it doesn't mean the entire organization is as morally bankrupt or extreme as they are. Labour unions are there to protect the rights of workers. Up until their invention, workers were at the absolute mercy of their employers, which is why so many people died on the job while working for pittence. If you take away the possibility of Unions, it's straight back to that within a few short years. Heck, they already get away with a lot even WITH unions to oppose them.

On topic: yes, developers need to unionize within the games industry. They are treated like absolute dirt, with about 80% of team-members being fired after a game is released in many cases. There is no job security, they have no possibility of accruing a decent pension because they have move jobs so frequently, and they have to constantly uproot themselves to work in another city or country. Couple that with unreasonable deadlines, the infamous "crunch-time" (working up to 16 hours a day, 6-7 days a week for months on end) and the sheer difficulty of the work they do, it makes absolute sense for them. Things need to change in the industry in a big way.

[Axonometri]

Surrounded by fringe, I say, Nuts!

[JBSleek]

Unions are the worse. Even though I agree it's not the answer.

[agonism]

Why hate on service industry workers though? Sure, game development is skilled labor but service industry jobs are tedious, physically demanding, super exploitative, and often relegated to the lower class; it's why you have McDonald's workers on the east coast organizing strikes and attempting to form unions. There's obviously also other positions within development studios that aren't so glamorous but essential to their operations.

Part of the issue with today's unions is that most have lost their militancy and become complacent in class collaborationism while simultaneously developing a labor aristocracy to carve out a safe space for themselves in capitalism. I'm all for developers unionizing to protect themselves from publishers, but on the flipside short of outright anti-capitalism, given developers have access to enough capital, they could arrange studios around collective ownership with decentralized modes of decision-making to create and distribute their own games across various platforms, essentially circumventing publishers altogether. I think Valve has at least one of these in the bag and of course this is partially theory, but there are concrete examples of successful business models as described above.

[DOOMZ]

UNIONISE!!!

[mhunterjr]

I can't believe I'm hearing gamers demand unionization... as much as we complain about the cost of games...

Personally, I wouldn't mind paying extra for games, especially if it meant developers get a better lifestyle. But we as gamers need to realize that our own consumer values helps lead to these kinds of conditions...

More for less is awesome... but someone is paying for it on the other end. When I sit and look at how many man hours go into bringing these games to market, then I hear that say they arent worth what they cost, I'm baffled.

[ravinash]

Often its down to the management of the company which causes these issues.
If a company worked effectively and created a production line of games so that as the programming and testing teams are finishing off the previous game, the art tams are already working on the next one. It's about making your work force efficient.

However a lot of these companies are run by people who aren’t always business minded and don't start thinking about the next project until the last one was finished. Doing this means your paying for staff who aren’t doing anything.

If you’re just dropping staff at the points you don't need them, not only will people go to the competition and work for them, but there are all the other costs involved with hiring and firing the staff as each cycle goes round.

Maybe games makers do need a union or academy to work under to make the industry more stable and secure place to work.

[mhunterjr]

While your right about companies being lead by folks who aren't great project managers, the 'assembly line' approach is not a great one when you are talking about the creative process. In fact, it would likely ruin collaborative cohesion, and destroy any chance of implementing innovative features into a game. We're talking about game development, not game manufacturing.

Your idea works if we were interested in companies making iterative games... Where there is little need for interaction between teams. COD and Madden come to mind. But if you're trying to do new things in a game, the games vision might change several times throughout production as programmers hit hardware limitations or testers realize a particular feature doesn't work well. These bottlenecks are artifacts of the creative process, and explain why there is a mad dash of hiring and man hours towards the end of the cycle, and departures when the game is released.

Assembly Line + Art doesn't work.

I think Ubisoft has been implementing your idea as of late. While it hasn't resulted in bad games, and appears to be an efficient use of assets, you can already start to see a convergent design philosophy between their key titles. The gameplay loops between Assassins Creed, Far Cry, and Watch Dogs are now almost identical.

[rainslacker]

What really irks me is that so many websites and apparently gamers feel that the industry is so exploitative of it's workers that they deem that it's necessary for industry workers to unionize. Where are the quotes from developers calling for this.

But here's the kicker.

I'm surprised not a single one of these sites, or gamers, does even the most cursory of google searches to see that unionization is already in the works, or at least being looked into. It has been for the past two years, however, unionization isn't necessarily the answer to the workers complaints.

Do you know what the biggest concern of these workers is? Crunch time. Not low wages. Not lack of compensation, as most dev studios compensate for crunch time. Nowadays, about 1/3 of the people that work on a particular game are outsourced or contract workers anyhow, so a union would mean nothing to them.

In any case, unionization would have done nothing to prevent the shut down of irrational games, nor would it have helped the workers that work there. At no point have I seen a quote from someone that works at irrational say how terrible this whole ordeal is. Ken Levine has gone on record to say he will do everything in his power to get his people jobs. I'm sure they will have a pretty healthy severance package as well. He even stated that many would probably be given jobs within 2K's other developers. It means moving, which can suck, but that's also the nature of the industry, and not something a union will really fix. If a company does not need staff for any extended period of time, not even a union can compel them to keep someone on board just because.

Unions can certainly have positive benefits for the workers, but I have yet to read a recent article that can articulate how it would have changed the situation at Irrational games one bit. I have yet to read a recent one that even seems to understand what the grievances are, and why those conditions exist in the first place. All these articles are just jumping on the current bandwagon trying to be some knightly saint, in what I can only assume is a way to look intelligent, or endear themselves to the developers themselves. Unionizing is an extremely political topic, and I haven't seen anyone who can look at it in any sort of unbiased or rational way and see the pros, cons, and effects it will have overall for both the industry and the workers themselves.

In any case, most studios hire on a per project basis. It's expected. It's understood. It's part of the business. Unionizing only means that more people will become contract workers because studios often don't want to spend money during down time, which at times can be 1/2-1 year between development cycles. When people become contract workers their chance to be able to get works diminishes, or they end up splitting their money with a agent and paying their own taxes and healthcare. So it's not really for everyone.

I do think ravinash is kind of on point. There should be a better streamlining of tasks within companies and the industry itself to prevent the down times that cause company layoffs. But unions will not help that. That will come when publishers finally get their act together and realize they can make more money by doing so, and get better games out quicker by doing so.

[agonism]

I for one don't romanticize game developers or the tech industry as a whole, especially when considering the conflicts taking place between the preexisting residents in the Bay area and the gentries that have swooped in to colonize lower income neighborhoods. I feel that tech has the least potentional for the radicalization of its workers in contrast to other industries even if they're still proles, albeit mostly middle class ones like a lot of the labor aristocratic unions out there.

It's really just a matter of if developers as workers, the ones who actually create these games, are satisfied with the practices of some publishers, in addition to what type of ethics they adhere to. Do the interests of publishers actually align with that of the workers or is that just a played out myth to prevent class struggle? Do they appreciate the hierarchies, the general precarity, the crunch times that negatively impacts their personal lives, a loss of control over the creative process, etc? Is this about the money or acquiring a reasonable income while doing what you enjoy?

I'm sure some developers are happy with wherever they are right now and would be reluctant to join a union, but if the entire industry were to unionize it'd be a massive restructuring of how power is deployed and exercised altogether; back in the day they used to call this tactic solidarity and it's often still used to successfully prevent, albeit sometimes temporarily, getting canned during cutbacks. And if significant outsourcing takes place, like it has in many other industries, maybe more people will start to acknowledge the systemic nature of many of the issues in 'society.'

Having studied political economy and actually existing capitalism and its periodic crises quite a bit, that besides just the development cycles I have to say with the type of budgets allocated to some of these AAA games according to a projected profit margin, it's no wonder there are plenty of examples of unsustainable models and job insecurity within the industry. This is also what happens in an economy where profit motives are the primary determining factor in almost all things, rather than that of need and pleasure.

Also, exploitation as I understand it is the extraction of profit from labor, mostly done by a class that contributes nothing to the production and distribution process besides capital, despite the capital having already been created by workers with only money entitling this class to it, and we already all know about the discrepancy between the rich and everyone else, right? Of course, if you're pro-bourgeois I'm sure there's a way to rationalize this, it's not as if rationalism hasn't been used to justify all sorts of shit before. And to finish, anyone who thinks they can take a position to be a neutral observer of parties is mistaken, refusing to take a position is just an explicit or implicit support for the perpetuation of the state of things.

[rainslacker]

I don't think you're inherently wrong, but at the same time what I comment on is the fact that many seems to know what's best. The fact of the matter is is that most people making comments, and the articles I've read so far on this subject, are making broad sweeping assumptions which may have no basis in fact. Worse, they don't even address the issue with the amount of seriousness to get all the information about what is currently happening, or what their proposals would mean for the workers, the industry, and the end consumer. It's all knee-jerk reaction, and it comes across as extremely shallow and ignorant.

I myself have studied game design, and we've had this debate in our ethics class that was based on the industry. The teacher let us all say our piece, which amounted to pretty much all the comments that the industry should unionize, or not depending on how that person felt, and the teacher at the end of it all said, "And how do you know this is the case? Have any of you actually worked in the industry". It was a very humbling experience, although I did take a middle of the road approach and was one of the few that actually asked if the industry workers were looking or wanting such a thing. There are a few movements out there to unionize, however nothing that is industry wide.

Anyhow, to your last comment, I never said one doesn't have to take a side. I just said that one should remain unbiased until they can get all the facts, and understand the consequences of whatever side they wish to be on. To do otherwise is a great disservice to those that people are seemingly speaking up for. While they may have the best intentions, and want the workers to be treated fairly(which is OK), it doesn't mean what they are proposing is actually beneficial.

[agonism]

I'm not really hip on this comment system yet, so hopefully I'm replying to your last response.

I would argue that what's good for almost any industry isn't necessarily good for the workers, namely that of profitability. Increased wages, benefits, humane work conditions, overall stability, etc all put a burden on profit accumulation which is necessary to remain viable in a competitive market economy.

It's why this outsourcing to countries where there are few protections with minimal self-organization for workers has occurred and flexible work forces have become so pervasive in the states. While I'm playing into the double bind of class right now from a perspective of struggle rather than outright war, I just want to point out that trying to take a stance of conflict resolution between entities that are often diametrically opposed to each other puts us into a deadlock like we are with so many other things right now, you know?

[Ogygian]

While it sounds like a good idea, I'm not sure it really is...
Gaming is a fast-moving, highly creative industry where major publishers are weaker than ever and indie studios are taking over. You can't "unionise" the members of several-person indie studios, and putting yet more pressure on the major publishers is only going to make them disgustingly uncompetitive.
Also, are we not going to inevitably suffer the anti-consumer antics of a union not dissimilar from the Screenwriters' Guild?

I don't want to go into a deep ad-hominem attack on the author of this article though I could, as they sound like some radical socialist who hasn't bothered to understand economics before criticising it. (Free Trade is not the prime cause of the decline of the blue collar worker, but technological progress; they also fail to mention why turning blue collars into white is bad).

If this comes into place, we're likely to see further outsourcing of work and the profitability of AAA devs suffer. Indie devs will become more frequent, which will lead to LESS stability for most devs.

I'm sorry, but this is a stupid, brash call which is only going to end up harming both those it would be created to protect and us, the consumers. I actually like AAA games and want them to keep coming, as I care about the profitability of the industry, and this is going to hurt both.

[yeahokchief]

The stupid kid who wrote this should consider burger flippin. He'd probably be a lot better at it than writing. The grammar in this pos is just awful. The comments in the article nailed it.

They're making decent money doing what they're doing. They were probably notified well in advance and given severance pay on top.

They wont even have any problem finding another good job. Tons of studios put up messages saying they were hiring.

[DJ]

Unionizing is probably the smartest decision. Remember how the Need for Speed Rivals developer was shut down just a few months after they released their first game? It seems like publishers are either mis-managing their teams or simply firing everyone to improve profit margins.

[fossilfern]

I remember growing up wanting to make games but for whatever reason I decided not to go down that route and sometimes I'm glad I did.

These people seem to have little job security and are constantly switching from one business to another because they have no choice. Not to say all game companies are like that but it sounds like striking gold when you get a company that wont lay you off after 5 years or so.