Seeing the rebirth of unions in tech companies might be one of my favorite things about this timeline.
Not nearly prevalent enough or fast enough, let’s gooooo!
A few years ago a tech friend literally couldn’t comprehend why he would want to be in a union.
Check again, maybe it was me.
I’m at a tech company. It’s nowhere near prevalent, nor do I think many employees actually want it. I’d love for it to happen, though, and IMO the first place it should happen is the video games industry.
Agreed. I think we’re in the, “fuck around and find out,” era of tech company unionization, and I’m fortunate enough to work for a company whose legal team is smart enough to know that a reasonably happy, fulfilled, and compensated workforce is significantly less likely to even start discussing unionization, and so I don’t think that my company will see it anytime soon, if ever (which I also think is fine, for the record). But to your point, with the way that the vast majority of the video game industry treats their employees, I hope that every single one of those large game companies ends up joining a union, because the employees deserve better.
next up: microsoft closes bethesda game studio, reassigns all assets to other departments.
… still glad to see it though. i’d love to see tech giants brought low by all the workers just withdrawing their labor.
This is what’s next for Bethesda, but it’s smart of them to only unionize after Bethesda has started on their next “independent” project. It all depends on how ES6 does. If it isn’t a smash hit with decent reception, Bethesda will be absorbed into Microsoft I guarantee it
If it depends on how ES6 is received they still have another 6 or 7 years
Considering the assholery that Obsidian went through with New Vegas, I fully expect the higher ups to do everything in their power to fuck up TES6 if it means the end of the union, one way or another.
Though with a union, they have an organization set up where they could tell ms to go fuck themselves and start a new studio, especially with non-competes losing their teeth recently.
As a decades-long Bethesda fan, I think this might improve product quality from what we saw in Starfield. It’s clear that somebody needs to be able to talk back to King Todd.
Maybe if they’re not so alienated from their work, we’ll see more of other people’s creative vision.
Starfield is Todd Howard making his Homer Simpson car. It’s a pile of shit no one wanted.
What are you talking about, he revolutionized the walking simulator. Now you can jump real high too. And instead of traveling places you just loading screen everywhere.
You can jump further too, but only if you rebind the jump button :D
I do think that’s more Emil Pagliarulo’s car than Todd
to be fair, a forest fire might improve product quality from what we saw in starfield
Fire is a natural and necessary part of many ecosystemsm. It keeps parasitic insect populations down, stuff like ticks and chiggers, and some plant species rely on fire to prepare the soil for seeds and even is required for some plants to release their seeds. In dry ecosystems like the western USA it also consumes old dead plant material, reducing the fuel available for future fires and reducing fire severity overall. Many foresters and fire fighters advocate for increasing prescribed burns, essentially forest fires that we light on purpose in cooler and wetter times of the year to consume the fuel without risking a catastrophic fire that is difficult to control. I just think that’s neat.
This is the first thought I had. Capitalist apologists would probably say the exact opposite, that owners need to be able to abuse workers to get more and better work out of them, but that’s basically never true. Owners owe so much to their workers’ creativity - even in fields where you wouldn’t expect - and they are deeply unaware of it.
This will be great for the workers, but I don’t think it will necessarily fix the issues in Bethesda’s organization when it comes to game development (and it won’t make them worse either).
Given what we know from Starfield, Bethesda is really lacking when it comes to planning: they aren’t doing a good job at establishing a compact vision for the final product which also results in having issues to establish an agile workflow to get from start to finish. In the best cases, this results in ludonarrative disonance where the story isn’t really supported by the mechanics of the game (example: Fallout 4’s story incentivizes the player to hurry up and look for their son, but they assign a lot of resources into making sandbox mechanics such as those related to base building); in the worst cases, this results in teams returning the ball to each other all the time because they aren’t properly coordinated to build things in the way other teams of the studio needs them, which loses a lot of time and becomes even more glaringly obvious the larger the project is.
The silver lining is: this problem isn’t so noticeable when the designers have the template of Oblivion in their minds and they’re making Skyrim, but it was going to be completely exposed when making the jump to a new IP (and thus a new universe), with a new engine, with some large design jumps such as ceding ground to dynamically created areas; so ES6 doesn’t have to be as much of a low point as it has been Starfield, as long as they’re conservative in their design choices. I’d vastly prefer the leadership of Bethesda to be completely reorganized, which would allow them to innovate by taking well measured risks, but I don’t have much hope for that scenario.
Either way it’s a good thing, a major company unionizing could lead to the whole industry unionizing
On that, I agree.
Good for them
Congrats! Now you guys can use collective bargaining to ensure you’re paid for every single bug you code. This is huge!
Seriously though, unions are good for the industry, I’m happy to see this is continuing at ever more software companies.
Unions work in ancap just as well as IRL, thus I support unions.
Regulation doesn’t work IRL and doesn’t exist in ancap.
Why do people here hate ancap again?
If regulation didn’t work, corpos wouldn’t fight so hard to dismantle them every step of the way. If they didn’t work, we wouldn’t see things get markedly worse every time they’re removed.
And ancap just sounds like all the worst bits of libertarianism taken to their illogical extreme and would produce one of the worst possible societies imaginable so why do any people here not hate ancap?
Worth highlighting that, at least in my opinion, regulation by a state isn’t the only way to rein in corporate society-destroying impulses. If all “corporations” were worker owned and operated by the laborers you’d have lots of people “in charge” who like havingclean water and air in their community.
This is a critique of capitalism first and foremost, not of the “anarchist” part (again, admittedly debatable).
Absolutely agreed on that… Got a fair number of companies I’d like to see taken over by the people working them or the communities they serve
If regulation didn’t work, corpos wouldn’t fight so hard to dismantle them every step of the way. If they didn’t work, we wouldn’t see things get markedly worse every time they’re removed.
OK, they work, just both ways. Corps work to make them work more for them and less for everyone else. Since they have more power, they slowly succeed.
And ancap just sounds like all the worst bits of libertarianism taken to their illogical extreme and would produce one of the worst possible societies imaginable so why do any people here not hate ancap?
Ancap is one of the words for libertarianism.
and would produce one of the worst possible societies imaginable
I think a society valuing freedom and non-aggression above the rest in not that.
History is a great teacher. Without a powerful state to curb the influence of the owners of capital like when the US dismantled the standard rail in the early 20th century, what is going to prevent the natural concentration of wealth in the hands of an all-powerful lord, since accumulation is the endgame of capitalism?
What you describe can only ever become a nightmarish dystopia that would bring about a new era of feodalism. And nobody except a few sheltered idiots are falling for that shit.
And what you seem to describe in your other comments is actually minarchism and not anarchism, which handwaves the complexity of anarchism away for a flavor of “extreme economic conservatism but I don’t want to pay taxes”, which is incredibly shallow and selfish, on top of being actively against your personal interest.
Ancaps are like monotheists to anarchism’s atheism. You’ve given up MOST oppression and hierarchy but for some reason you still worship the inequalities of capitalism.
Abolish all hierarchy, end all oppression.
Anarcho-capitalism is an oxymoron. You need hierarchies to protect private property, otherwise the whole thing just collapses on itself because there’s no significant force to prevent theft - and not just by communities, be it states or cities, not following the principles of that selfish flavor of liberalism.
Even if everyone lived in an “ancap” dystopia, that doesn’t make everybody magically immune to greed, and some would happily bend the rules and loot, kill or steal, even if they agree on the social contract.
I really don’t think these idiots deserve the label “anarchism”. I like to go with “neo-feodalism” because this is what their dystopias can only resolve to ultimately as soon as wealth is concentrated enough (which is inevitable without corrective action currently undertaken by the state in normal societies).
I’m not saying this for you as much as I’m saying it for the lemmings that might not be too familiar with their nonsense.
For one illustration of the dangers of their stupid ideology, see https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-project-new-hampshire-libertarians-matthew-hongoltz-hetling
but for some reason you still worship the inequalities of capitalism.
We actually don’t, we worship voluntarism, taboo on aggressive violence and personal borders, the rest is up to free interpretation from these axioms.
Also it’s not monotheism, rather a system like Taoism in the wild.
But I’ll return to this:
but for some reason you still worship the inequalities of capitalism
There’s an issue with no evolutionary mechanisms in a society.
A person who doesn’t know how to survive and doesn’t get help from others dies. A person who knows or gets that help doesn’t. On this level there are no problems as we assume that people help each other, if we are talking about “usual” anarchism.
Now, people form communes. Communes require organization. We don’t want them to have hierarchy, but the situation where everybody respects the rights of others won’t hold by itself. If you expel those who make trouble, then a sufficiently intelligent sociopath may persuade the majority to expel those they don’t like. Other than it being the problem in itself, this will eventually make sociopaths more likely to be the leaders of communes, and form hierarchy. If you don’t expel those who make trouble, you’ll need hierarchy right away to re-educate or jail or punish and otherwise discourage them somehow. These are all with the assumption of common property.
But if we have private property and voluntarism, so every person is a faction in itself, as if they, pun intended, had sovereignty, - we have an evolutionary mechanism which reduces the advantage sociopaths have. It doesn’t negate it, but you may collect power, expressed in property, as an alternative to power expressed in social ties, and the existence of the latter you can’t abolish. So we prolong the life of communities.
And there’s another consideration - property can be collected both by honest and dishonest means, the former meaning someone’s opinion is more valuable on practical subjects. Power as social ties is usually of the “dishonest” kind. Even without private property, frankly, someone of more use for the commune has more weight, but private property allows to account for that more easily. When your understanding who is more useful for the commune and who is less useful for the commune is skewed, it’ll have smaller chances of survival.
And then how do you share resources with a commune part of which you don’t want to be? What will make them behave in the spirit of brotherhood and equality and such? Same if you are a smaller commune. Will they declare you antisocial or something, capture all those resources for themselves and leave you to die?
(With ancap to share resources and various devices of existence property is preserved, and other borders erected, and systems on basis of voluntary agreements are offered to prevent violence.)
weird how this flavour of “anarchism” is pretty identical to conservative politics
I’ve specifically put parentheses to leave the hypothetical situation where I’d like to see answers as the last paragraph without them.
I’ve literally explained how with property you get a mechanism for communal cooperation without hierarchy.
You don’t seem to differentiate private property and personal property and also I learned long ago not to bother debating with ancaps because the rational ones tend to un-cap themselves on their own eventually
The difference would exist in a world where you have a mediator making it. How would you differentiate them without such?
Say, I have a longbow, a tunic, leather pants and shoes and arrows on me and a piece of cloth I sleep on. Is that piece of cloth personal or private property? Say, for me they are all the same, but somebody near me needs that cloth. I say no, because I need it too. They say I’ll be fine with half of it. I say no without disputing whether half of it is enough for my needs. Who’s right?
EDIT: Ah, also I’ve already, as you say, “un-capped” myself like 10 years ago, being tired of the emotional component of ancap, and was trying to be realistic and open to new ideas and such. I don’t regret it, I’ve learned a few more things, it was cool and all.
But in the end realized that what I have is simply an evolution of ancap. Even when I’ve been reading Trotskyist articles and imagining ways to build that. Thus I’m calling myself ancap.
The only things comprising ancap are moral constraints, all the rest is good until it doesn’t violate them. Say, ancaps are fine with ancom communes existing and interacting between each other in pretty ancom ways. The only situation where ancom won’t be a valid ancap is when ancoms prevent someone from leaving their heaven if that someone wishes so or try to conquer the neighboring Ancapistan for agricultural land.
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Because many ancaps don’t agree with you about unions. Are you sure you’re not a market anarchist?
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Not everyone here is an anarchist.
It was a rhetorical question ; unions function through negotiating together most of all.
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Unions don’t work without a central state.
If there isn’t an organization larger than a corporation making it keep to a line, a corporation will end up as a monopoly. If a line of work for certain skills is completely monopolized by one company, a union can’t ever get bigger than them to enforce anything. Its a stalemate that the company can end by training scabs and a union can’t end at all. That’s assuming the company doesn’t just start murdering Union heads which is probably the first thing they’d start to do without an organization larger than a company to call on.
Of course, maybe we could unionize everyone into a people’s union, for the purposes of having a bigger entity than a corporation that can defend the people. Pay some Union dues to them to get some police-equivalent people to make companies toe the line. But corruption exists and while the USA isn’t really for the people today, that is pretty much how the USA started.
Unions as we know them rely on regulations like anti-monopoly laws to exist.
Although for the record I don’t hate anarcho capitalism, I just think it’s more of an ideal. A more realistic but comparable system would include a government to protect union rights and prevent oligarchical behaviors while still being mostly hands off on an industry with a Union, letting the union enforce safety and related guidelines.
Ancap does not allow murder, but ancap also doesn’t protect patents and trademarks, so from stage one a monopoly can’t form. In some perspective it can.
Although for the record I don’t hate anarcho capitalism, I just think it’s more of an ideal. A more realistic but comparable system would include a government to protect union rights and prevent oligarchical behaviors while still being mostly hands off on an industry with a Union, letting the union enforce safety and related guidelines.
This is what just a bit under half of ancaps think.
Almost all other ancaps want panarchy, which is more or less the same, but involves a central entity to prevent outright mass violence, while all other functionality is under exterritorial jurisdictions under it.
There’s a negligible minority of complete idealists.
That is minarchism. Still fails as a society model at every metric we judge a good society model with, but you aren’t an anarchist. You just like the folklore because it sounds cool.
Dude is just a different flavor of typical Neo-Lib conservatism. Just tries to pretend to be something else while voting straight R in every election
I once spoke to someone who comes across as libertarian at my workplace and asked them why their resistance to oppression and authoritarianism by the state doesn’t extend to the economy, in that private owners run fiefdoms and both oppress and dictate the actions of their laborers.
The answer was that “I guess I just think there’ll always be some oppression”
This is the kind of critical thinking we’re usually dealing with. These people will lick boots as long as they’re not democratically elected and instead just inherited or purchased. They are OK with dictators and kings as long as there’s no DIRECT violence, no matter the actual harm and violence done to the working class.
Mine work should be a valid career path for children not wanting to go to secondary school
Mostly because it has more to do with feodalism than anarchism proper.
Better be careful they don’t clip through any windows.
Finally some good news out of Bethesda
And I doubt the studio will see the end of this decade under Microshit‘s umbrella. Nonetheless I applaud the employees. Their success might be short lived but it‘s a success all the same.
5.5 years? No way they’ll shut down this quickly. The next Elder Scrolls alone will carry them into 2030. (As much as I would enjoy you being right though…)
You assume TES6 isnt going to be pure trash like FO76 and starfield but… um… I dont share that same outlook. If anything TES6 will be the final nail in the coffin when the masses get their hands on it and see the buggy outdated mess they get.
I didn’t say that.
I expect it to be about as awful as Starfield. However, unlike Starfield (which didn’t sell horrendously by any source I can find, just not great) it has incredible brand recognition behind it. I have no doubts it will sell based on that alone as long as it looks like Skyrim 2 at first glance.
Edit: right after posting I figured out how to formulate what else I wanted to say but couldn’t find the correct words for: “Sadly profitability and quality don’t always correlate.”
neither of those games are pure trash. unless all you ever play is 10/10 masterpieces and nothing worse than that
5.5 years?
Might be just enough for another remaster of Sykrim.
If starfield is anything to go by, the new elder scrolls might be a step back from modded skyrim.
next up: microsoft announces development of Bethesda’s next game will be largely outsourced
This will help standardize contracts across the business and ensure things like credits, benefits, etc are done in a systemic way
✊
A glimmer of hope in dystopyan world. Starlight Glimmer of hope.
Gamersprolitariat did unite and push back against exploitation.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
More than 200 developers at Bethesda Game Studios, the studio behind hit franchises like The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, have unionized with the Communications Workers of America (CWA).
241 workers, including “artists, engineers, programmers and designers,” have signed union authorization cards or “indicated that they wanted union representation via an online portal,” according to a CWA press release.
Microsoft has recognized the union, the CWA says; the company has already recognized unions formed by Activision QA workers and ZeniMax Studios QA workers.
The CWA describes this as “the first wall-to-wall union at a Microsoft video game studio,” meaning that all eligible job titles will be represented by the CWA instead of just one type of worker, according to the CWA’s Catalina Brennan-Gatica.
(Until now, all of the unions at Microsoft-owned studios have only been formed by QA workers.)
Microsoft didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
The original article contains 165 words, the summary contains 147 words. Saved 11%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Damn I needed some good news bad, that is fantastic!
best thing bethesda has done this decade
Well it’s not the company that did it, it’s the workers
