It's almost as if capitalism was a deeply messed up system that brings out and celebrates the very worst in humanity.

That’s a very reductionist take on what happened here. I don’t think increased profit is likely to result from these firings. How would it?

This is also true if humans in general, at all stations in life, including union members and union leaders. Is there any offer a union would refuse on the grounds that’s too much?

And yet Costco still does just fine.

This would be less of an issue if game companies operated as co-ops.

That’s not a Union thing, that’s a system thing. Anyone fiercely on either extreme of the spectrum is missing the forest for the trees and proudly waving their willful ignorance of the dynamics of power.

In an ideal scenario, Unions and Shareholders would cooperate to achieve suitable outcomes for both parties; in reality, the amount of power needed to even get a Union off the ground and keep it sustained against the onslaught of Capital means those who wield said power are inclined to use it often. It’s why the (debatably) smarter gamble has been more workers forming anti-Capital institutions: cooperatives, union-first enterprises, sustainable corporations with stringent, anti-Capital bylaws. By removing Capital’s power early, those who do come to the table are more likely to negotiate in good faith rather than scorched-earth tactics.

Don’t slight unions as a whole just because power dynamics in a Capitalist society dictate everything be a zero-sum game. Instead, focus on building a better game and fairer set of rules, and recognize Unions are part of that.

The affected employees are in the UK and Canada branches, with their own local unions.

There is nothing forcing developers to release on steam, they can sell directly through a website. It’s not Valve’s fault no other competitor has gotten close to the quality of Steam. Epic Games could have made a dent, but they decided to try to bribe customers instead of making a functioning store.

Plenty of companies have tried to compete with gabe, they’re all just terrible at it

PCs are plenty accessible to developers without Steam.

Uhhh....

11 percent. That is the charge back rate in gaming. The "overall" stat for all transactions is something like 3 percent.

Card processing isnt free. There are fees, and supporting card processing still has more humans in the loop than one needs. Never mind all the technology that comes with running the dam platform.

Is 30 percent a lot. It sure is. Valve isnt a charity, this is how they chose to make money.

Meanwhile, AWS has a 30+ percent margin and I dont see CTO's lining up to run hardware...

This is in no way true because there is no requirement to use steam for PC releases.

Apple is a firm technical gatekeeper to their ecosystem. Steam is not at all analogous to that for PCs.

Are you of the opinion that these marketplaces shouldn’t exist, that they should take a smaller percentage, that they should be entirely ad-supported, or something else?

How can user have an optional one-stop-shop that is sustainable for the long-term while not being “evil”.

Valve allows developers to generate activation keys for their games and sell them on other platforms, where Valve gets a 0% cut. This is how you're able to buy games from places like the Humble Store and activate them on Steam. Their agreement does technically require that you don't sell at a lower price on other platforms, but as far as I know it's never been enforced.

Can a Steam Deck install games without using Steam? If so, big advantage over Google Play and the App Store.

Once you have an IP that's massive and you know people will buy regardless of if you're a trash monster or not, there's zero incentive to do the right thing.

Until people stop buying games from these places nothing will change.

And they were able to get there because they made good games.

I'm happier to pay Valve's 30% than Apple's. With Valve you could always switch to Itch or something if you didn't want to pay, but with Apple you have no alternative. Valve gives you access to a huge player base and lots of useful marketing tools and such.

> They also have an internal culture that's been fairly regularly criticized as being pretty uncomfortable for women and minorities.

Source?

If you were a dev selling a game years ago when physical distribution was the only method, you'd likely end up with a lot less than 70% after both the publisher and retailer take their cut.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/blogs/company-town-blog/sto...

10% if it’s a Linux copy ;)

HL3 is under active development though. If that's a success I'm sure they'd try a Portal 3 as well.

Allegedly HL3 is in active development.

No official announcement yet.

HL3 kinda happened though, but it was called Half-Life Alyx. And while it wasn't a conventional FPS like HL1 and 2, there's absolutely no trace of GaaS in it.

Didn't Valve just deliberately tank the Counter Strike cosmetics market?

And this is why "vote with your wallet does not work". As a consumer there's no way to decide who gets the money.

In fact, even the people who made the game (did the actual work, not managers, advertisers, etc.) don't get to decide.

Correct me if I am wrong but the programmers, designers, artists have already been paid and any money from sales goes to the company and its execs/shareholders.

(And yes, employees can also be shareholders but they almost always own such a tiny share it does not really matter. In a just world, ownership would be distributed automatically according to time_worked * skill_level.)

happy employees doesn't imply the need for a union

Next thing you know, people want to not work on weekends!

> The thing holding back unions in the U.S is the unions themselves and the laws around them. Once a union forms, they have entirely too much power.

This is a nice summary of the central issue with unions in the U.S. A rational person can quickly see why people are clamoring for unions in the U.S. and also why American companies are so resistant.

I'm going to get downvoted into a massive smoking hole in the ground for daring to state this opinion, but, as a lifelong enjoyer of the English language: native speakers butcher it the most.

Right the fact you may not be able to understand some Scottish people because of their accent doesn't mean they're not competent English speakers, it just means the accent is difficult for you to understand, which isn't relevant when writing.

There are a few famous movie scenes where somebody deliberately uses perfectly reasonable English sentences but with such a thick accent that most English users cannot understand it, but once you know what they said you can play that sound back and yeah, that's what they said, you just couldn't understand the accent e.g..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs-rgvkRfwc

Indeed the joke is that people keep repeating what the hard-to-understand bloke said even when it's perfectly obvious what he said, because if you can understand it then you can't tell whether it was hard to understand.

That's not even Scottish, the bloke in that scene is from Somerset, which is the far side of the country but exactly like Scotland most people in Somerset don't talk like that most of the time, but some of them do, some of the time and to them it's normal, that's just how you say words.

Even discounting this, and despite everyone bleating on about its (very real) flaws, ChatGPT and other LLMs do quite a good job of proofreading and suggesting improvements to written English text[0]. I find it works best if you keep them on quite a tight leash but it's certainly within the compass of their capabilities to take badly written English and turn it into well written English, and even adopting a particular style to do so.

[0] Performance in other languages... well, I suspect it's still going to be quite variable, which is another valid criticism that has been levelled at the more popular mainstream models over the past year or two.

Yeah I was thinking about that, these days you just run whatever text you want to anonymise through an LLM with some instructions for style.

That's what I am thinking.

I'd use a local LLM too to make sure the original prompt does not leak and can't be connected to the published output.

Doing my own research, ChatGPT summarizes the state as generally unions improve wages and working conditions for employees much more than they pay in premiums. This has gone down since the 1970s but is still a noticeable effect. Indeed the 40 hour work week comes from unions. There is a negative effect on profitability, but that’s subject to interpretation:

> The negative effect on profitability from unionization may reflect that unions raise labour costs (via higher wages/benefits) and may impose work rules or other constraints that reduce flexibility. The classic model: higher labour cost → lower margins, unless offset by higher productivity or price increases. But the productivity and growth effects are less clear: many studies find little or no negative effect on productivity or capital structure, suggesting that unions may shift the distribution of returns (towards workers) rather than clearly kill growth.

So it may be worth revisiting the research you cited so decisively against unions as it likely contradicts your belief about them.

Cherry picking examples to paint broad brush/strokes doesn't work. There are game companies all over the world, and have varying levels of work/life balance. Your crude caricature is just that; crude.

Thanks:

/r/gaming post that wasn't only about product: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/154ko01/why_is_bliz...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blizzard_Entertainment#Hearths...

> And no, consumers have never really cared in the gaming space. They won't do anything differently because of this.

Consumers almost never care outside of isolated causes du jour or when it directly affects someone they know. Look at all the self-proclaimed socialists and progressives walking around with iPhones manufactured by Foxconn, a company known for treating its employees so badly there were inquiries into the suicide rates of their workers at one point.

While I have my concerns about unions, they are absolutely necessary in many cases. Companies are not your friend, nor are your fellow consumers most of the time.

Yes, that's vague. I specifically mean a creative monopoly. Compare the writing and dialogue of a Paul Thomas Anderson or Tarantino movie to Rockstar. Most of their games don't come close. Because it's a game the standard for storyline and dialogue is slightly lower because you are like "wow I am almost literally a cowboy/Nico". I wonder if we will see a mix of games with genuinely Tarantino style writing and narrative + technical / design implementation. Small studios doing this faster and more ethically would be better. People who quit Rockstar are very talented with something to prove too.

I genuinely cringed at the end of RDII due to the dialogue just need to mention that again haha.