https://actionnetwork.org/fundraising/support-rockstar-worke...
On another note, heard on Bloomberg today that they've been working on GTA 6 for 10 years at this point. Considering the size of their development teams it's possible that more manhours may have gone into this single title than all video games that were made until the PS1 era combined.
It’s incredible to think about what else has happened during these past 10 years of development. Or think about other decade long stretches and what was accomplished.
Not cutting short what the undertaking of this is, just that the scale of this project spanning a decade is fascinating.
For all intents and purposes it's "functioning" for me. You can search for a game, hit buy, put in your credit card number, then download/play it. I've seen some spurious arguments about how it lacks a cart or reviews, but it's a stretch to claim the lack of them makes them non "functioning". I never bulk buy games, and for reviews I can go to steam or metacritic.
To be fair most online storefronts don't have that. Amazon/walmart at best have "categories", which epic also has. Even online content portals like spotify don't have tags, preferring something like "more like this".
> but it's baffling that no other store gives at least the same amount of those features to you. Even though they could.
The better question is why storefronts don't directly compete on price. We see with airlines that consumers are willing to put up with hellish conditions to save a few percent on airfare. Those features are definitely nice, it's just unclear how they can avoid the free-rider problem if there are competing storefronts.
The way I see it, it depends how you see who is who's customer. Is the gamer the customer of the store, or are they the customer of the developer/publisher who put out the game, and in turn is the developer/publisher the customer of the store. The store cut is the price to buy their services, and they can shop around to find different offerings at different prices, just as gamers might be able to shop around and decide what (platform features) matters to them with the options available.
- Tiktok was not first. Before it was vine and youtube.
- Google was not first. Before it was yahoo and altavista.
Plenty of todays big companies were not the first in their area.
Every online gaming platform other than Steam and GOG sucks. And in fact GOG competes very well with Steam precisely because it offers something Steam doesn't, which is DRM-free games. Steam didn't just beat the Epic Games Store and Origin and Games For Windows Live because it came first, it's just a better platform and the others offer nothing outside of exclusives which they paid for.
I'd personally say it was better as a launcher. Launching Steam itself takes relatively long and when its just in the background its just there idling with ~400Mb of RAM (specifically its WebHelper), which aren't a problem with Battle.net since it idles at 170MB or you can just close it since it launches way faster.
And for companies that shoehorn really bad launchers as an extra layer on steam like EA, you are doing the work of the devil himself
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...
1. source?
2. How does that justify a 30% rate, when presumably it's clawed back from developers?
>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.
Again, nowhere near 30% though
>Meanwhile, AWS has a 30+ percent margin and I dont see CTO's lining up to run hardware...
30% margins on renting hardware is totally different than a 30% tax on transactions, and it's disingenuous to imply they're comparable. At the very least amazon needs to spend the other 70% on running servers and investing in datacenters, whereas valve doesn't. It's studios that are actually doing the development. Valve just is charging 30% on top of that. To take an extreme example, compare the 2-3% fees charged by visa vs the ~15% gross margins that car companies make. Even though that's 5x higher, I doubt many are outraged about car companies' profiteering.
For some reason, people in tech live under the illusion that everything nontangible should be literally free
Strawman.
Apple is a firm technical gatekeeper to their ecosystem. Steam is not at all analogous to that for PCs.
How can user have an optional one-stop-shop that is sustainable for the long-term while not being “evil”.
edit: after some additional search tweaking this is most likely in reference to Wolfire v. Valve, which is now a class-action suit.[0] The argument seems to be that Valve is engaging in anticompetitive behavior by disallowing developers from reselling Steam keys for their games for lower prices on other platforms, not selling the games themselves on other platforms. So this may or may not be what the parent post was referencing.
[0] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/wolfire-and-dark-catts-antitru...
Gamescope is even fully open-source, so you could remove the steam deck UI, and still run any game with the same performance benefits of not running it inside KDE. Of course also, you could flash a new OS on the device itself if you wanted to entirely remove Valve’s presence.
Definitely not comparable to Apple, which is forcing all iPhone users to use their own app store.
Until people stop buying games from these places nothing will change.
Yes, they are loot box whores but so is everyone else.
Steam is a community, social media, and a store. The community is what they built and that community is extremely loyal. That community is also what developers are paying for.
In Gaben, we trust. I have 20 years of experience saying Gabe won't fuck me over to increase EBIDA by .5%. Are they perfect? No, but they are lightyears better than most of their competitors except GOG in terms of putting consumers first.
I keep giving Valve my money because they keep giving me good value for that money and a trustworthy environment to spend that money in. I have no loyalty. I also buy games from Humble Bundle and GOG.
I'm not excited about the prospect of losing my 4000 games but the literal only options available for consumers right now are "Pay money and get a game that we can take away at any time, fuck you over, do all sorts of bad things, and we demonstrably hate you", or "Pay money to get a game and a refund period and a bunch of features and maybe when Gabe dies we will do that other thing"
There is no alternative. GOG is run by the same people who released CyberPunk2077 as a bug ridden mess to please upper management, so they even have evidence of already straddling that line right now.
They also take an absurd cut of developer income and saddle devs with costs that they don't always want. (Selling on Steam? Valve takes 30% and forces you to moderate the forums on your listing page that you cannot opt out of.)
They also have an internal culture that's been fairly regularly criticized as being pretty uncomfortable for women and minorities.
Valve has done some cool stuff, but let's not lionize them too much. They are probably better than an average company, for sure, but it's important to remember that they are also sketchy in some very gross ways as well.
Happier is a fine place to be. They are both still too high. Not everything has to be binary -- I can think Valve is offering some utility and also think that Valve is charging too much for that utility.
The fact that Gabe has a billion dollars worth of yachts probably suggests that maybe, just maaaaaybe, that 30% could be lower and Steam could still provide you the same level of marketing support and player base.
The sales you will miss are what steam brings to the table
You don't get to decide that. Apple's price is not set by free market competition, Valve's is.
https://9to5mac.com/2025/05/19/apple-may-lower-app-store-com...
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/11/apple-announces-app-s...
It's especially backwards when you consider that those AAA games put far more strain on Steams infrastructure with their >150GB install sizes.
There are even games you can buy on one service and play multiplayer with people who buy it on steam! I chose to buy MSFS2020 through steam for example because the steam platform is dramatically better than the absurd way the Windows Store does anything, but we fly in the same skies!
There's no lock in or exclusivity. You can literally buy the same exact executable from multiple places, and the only change is the feature the store program supports. Buying a game through the Epic Store for example won't let you use steam input, but you can even then play it on the steam deck with some effort! I think you can even use Proton on executables you don't get through steam!
A dev can even make it so that, if you buy their game on steam, you do not have to have steam running or installed to play it. They have that freedom. They also have the freedom to mark a version of the game such that steam allows you to access that old version forever
If you are a dev who releases a game on steam, you can mint a bulk quantity of steam keys and sell or distribute those outside of steam!. Probably if you abused it, Valve would tighten it up or ban you, but why would you bite the hand that feeds you? It's how, for example, Humble Bundle initially worked.
That's right, you don't even need to buy your game from Valve to use all their features! A substantial portion of my library paid money to Amazon instead, through humble bundle.
People use Steam because it has 20 years of established trustworthiness in an industry otherwise made up entirely of assholes who hate you.
Meanwhile, in the place that Steam does poorly: Old games, GOG has much more of the market.
People actually are willing to pay for trust and care. Steam has repeatedly and regularly improved how their storefront displays information and informs consumers, because their primary problem is discoverability and wading through the mountains of games from people desperate to collect some of the money waterfall that Valve enables.
When you put a game on Steam, the contract ensures that anyone who purchases it cannot lose access without it being Valve's decision. Developers or publishers who do stupid things or pull games five years down the line cannot prevent you from playing a game you buy on steam if it isn't dependent on some server somewhere. None of the other storefronts have ANYTHING like this, mostly because they are run by the exact companies who WANT to be able to prevent you from ever playing an old game again, so they can sell the same thing to you in a new box.
Compare that to Apple's 30%, which similarly has lots of features their platform enables including unlocking significant consumer spending, but they do not give you any alternative. If you want even a single dollar from someone on an iPhone, you HAVE to pay apple 30%, and at least for a while they wanted that even to cover netflix subscriptions for example.
If you as a developer do not want to pay valve 30%, you are free to do like Notch did for Minecraft and distribute it yourself, and you are free to run into the same problem it had where my friend was unable to purchase minecraft for decades because his bank refused to send money to the Scandinavian bank involved, whereas even a literal child without a debit card can use birthday money to buy a steam gift card and purchase your game with no adult involvement. (maybe that's not a good thing for society, but it's great for game dev business).
Valve does not have a moat other than simply consumer trust. Minecraft sold a hundred million copies through a dude's website. There has literally never been a moat in computer game distribution. An entire industry of British children existed writing games and selling them in local stores. A moat has never been possible, because Valve cannot make your computer not run other software.
That is not a good argument though. Try building your own distribution and take some of those billions.
You are welcome to start your own progressive game market place for PC. Go undercut him and charge 5% fees. You literally just need to dump game files on a CDN right? How hard can it be? /s
I do find it odd that this account is new and the type of posts it leaves. Seems almost like an LLM...
So does Apple. Despite this, they are both engaged in rent-seeking (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking), which has a harmful effect on everyone but them.
Imagine if roads weren't public, but were built by a single private company. You have a business that moves goods by truck. You can use the private company's roads, but only if you pay 30% of the profit of your goods to the company that owns the roads. It only takes 2% of the profit to maintain the roads; the other 28% is profit (rent) for the road-owning company.
You could choose not to use the roads. But then the only way to deliver the goods is by parachute (which may be possible, but isn't practical). So you use the roads. But this means you have to jack up your prices to make any profit for yourself. Competing is much harder (tighter margins), and your customers are paying more than necessary. Everyone's life is harder, except for the road company.
Would the PC video game market be bigger or smaller without steam?
While I hate always connected DRM, and lamented the death of physical media when steam got huge (and also refused to get a steam account for years for that reason), we would have multiple shitty stores if steam didn't exist, I think.
Look at epic and all the other distributors. Their stores are terrible and that's with the inherent competition of going against steam. Imagine if they were the only game in town. . .
This doesn't match with the definition of rent-seeking at all, as described in your wikipedia link:
> Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth.
To my knowledge, Valve has not manipulated public policy or economic conditions to maintain Steam's dominance. Steam hasn't pushed for legislation to prevent competitors, it hasn't prevented developers from selling their games on other platforms, and it doesn't even prevent you from installing non-Steam games on Valve's own proprietary hardware and operating system.
That's actually a very easy choice to make.
I think they're being sued over delisting someone for this last I checked, even if their public policy might not interpret their MFN that way
Source?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9aCwCKgkLo
https://medium.com/dunia-media/the-nightmare-of-valves-self-...
Additionally, when I actually look into the alleged statistics of claims that "Valve is primarily white and male", the numbers ... don't actually look that bad? We shouldn't expect any company to fit national demographics exactly.
Allegations of unpaid labor: https://web.archive.org/web/20160209211205/https://www.reddi...
As for the second, I'm confused as to why anyone would provide unpaid labor to a large, profitable corporation.
And yes, while it was mostly "unpaid", during my time there (2016-2020), we had a year-end rally every year which the "fastest" teams to complete translations would receive Steam wallet codes for their effort. I received up to $350 the first year of rally.
The next year they gave us Artifact keys...
and then the one Valve employee managing the server left Valve, and STS was slowly being replaced by Crowdin
they essentially killed crowdsourcing starting with Artifact. We (the STS members) had no access to new strings, then came Underlords, the new client... Only TF2 translations are crowdsourced to this day. The rest are done by their external teams.
This controversy is known and there are a few translators on Steam/Valve that came from the community, but nowadays it is mostly outsourced, and they do a terrible job (they replaced gamers with people who can't even bother to download the game to check the context a string is applied to).
The medium link says nothing about women and minorities specifically. It's a critique of flat management structures in general.
It seems like the flat management structure allowed an ad-hoc hierarchy of cliques to form in the office anyway, pitting entrenched teams of old-timers against new hires, but implicitly. When you think of the lack of support for TF2 over the years, this is illuminating.
It's astounding that Valve/Steam are still as successful as they are in spite of this culture.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/blogs/company-town-blog/sto...
Steam is much much easier for Valve.
I am not saying it has a value, but 30% seems a lot.
Of course, in the end that 30% we end up paying it ourselves.
Steam also has a solid update/beta pipeline. Game companies post blog posts about new game updates so you keep up to date with development. They also did an amazing job with SteamOS which feels rock solid.
I never had issues with GOG or Epic (where I buy less to be honest), but that might be me.
But Steam has the network effect. They launched first. Of were the first that successfully did it.
Ultimately, reviews of games tend to be pretty useless because people who play games have very little understanding of a) what makes games fun, and b) the complexity involved in making the games.
I have creators I follow whose tastes are closest to my own, and I watch their content for reviews, then go to the store that makes the best offer.
The overall score tends to fairly represent the likelihood that I’ll like the game, and when in doubt reading a couple of reviews tends to give a clearer picture. And then, the reviews themselves can be rated, and there’s a “recent reviews” score that protects against review bombings and gives a clearer picture of the game’s current state. Not to say that there aren’t exceptions - there’s a poorly-received game that I’ve poured hundreds of hours into recently - but I literally wouldn’t know how to set up a better system myself.
In contrast, the Epic storefront is fucking laughable.
Actually, something I always complain about Steam is that the videos of the games are not about the gameplay.
They are most of the time about the trailer, like if it was a movie. I want to see the game playing!
The up front risk you take on Steam is $100. It still ends up being a meaningful risk because the numbers show almost nobody makes that back, because developers are so interested in selling their game on steam that the market is outright supersaturated.
>Of course, in the end that 30% we end up paying it ourselves.
I used to buy video games at walmart. Unlike games I bought at walmart, Valve has done things that retroactively add value to games I bought decades ago, like remote play together, adding internet multiplayer to games that never even thought about it, and a controller system that allows pretty much anything you can think of. Games that had zero controller support for a decade just do now, no extra download, and the required configuration is often the single button press to select whatever configuration someone else made. Valve created an entirely new software platform for games that makes it so even games that are utterly broken on modern systems can work again, and it's just built in. If I buy a game today, I'm pretty confident I can play it in 20 years. An actual system for sharing digital games with other accounts, with large caveats.
Refunds, despite Valve only offering them because it's the law in several countries and they were losing court cases, are not a thing for physical game purchases here in the US. Once you take off the shrink wrap, you are fucked.
Steam has built in support for Beta branches and old game versions that the game dev can enable. Steam has built in support for DLC, and market systems for trading and selling digital "goods", not that I really think that's a good thing but some people seem to. Steam has fully built in support for cloud saves.
Steam has a fully integrated "friends" system, and that system is convenient for the end user and includes features like screen sharing and voice chat and gifting people games.
Steam offers fully integrated mod management for at least a large subset of all possible mods for any game.
Like I cannot stress enough how even if video games were 30% more expensive in steam (they aren't, devs distributing through steam are making a larger portion of the profit than they used to), retroactively adding functionality to games I bought a decade ago and producing a system that makes it very likely I can play these same games in 20 years is so worth it. Everything else is just a bonus. Their hardware also shows great value per dollar, so the "They are overcharging" narrative just doesn't track.
Meanwhile, steam avoids problems that plague other digital storefronts. Easy returns (again, forced on them), their launcher mostly respects my resources and doesn't destroy my computer every time there's an update, the way Valve negotiates terms they have a much better setup: Even if a publisher or developer pulls their game, as long as you bought it before then you can always install it and play it. Transformers Devastation was pulled from the store years ago and cannot be purchased by anyone I think anywhere, but I can still download and play it on a new machine because that's the contract Valve got Activision to sign. The game literally doesn't have a store page anymore.
Fuck Valve's child gambling profits and invention of loot boxes, but their distribution business is unambiguously the most respectful of the consumer and developer. Only GOG with their work towards preservation and lack of DRM comes close.
I own 4000 games on steam. That's about 3900 more than I would have ever bought in a world without Steam. Their wishlist system is a direct driver of sales that wouldn't happen otherwise. When the Epic Store launched, it didn't even have a damn shopping cart.
If they don't like the culture, then they should work elsewhere.
I hear Google is hiring.
Nothing worse than joining a company you contributed zero to building from the ground up, then unilaterally deciding the culture needs to change according to your whims, right now.
You might feel uncomfortable working in a black barber shop. Or a cat cafe with pet allergies. You've contributed nothing to their business, they shouldn't have to change for you.
You should feel empowered to have a voice in the products of your labor. And you should feel empowered to have a voice in the culture that produces those products.
Your employment is "at will".
You are not entitled to any item in your list of demands.
You are, however, free to leave at any time for something more suited to your tastes.
Can you point to the word entitled in my posts? Or are you putting words in my mouth?
Can you point to any demands? Or are you arguing against something I didn't say?
You listed a bunch of things which should be, an opinion, he says your not entitled to those things, a probable fact relevant to the likelihood of attaining your professed desires, and he then offers a solution if you are unhappy with not having the things you professed 'should' be afforded.
I made no demands and I made no assertions about entitlements. That reply to me was a strawman.
I made two statements: 1) I suggested people have multiple criteria for selecting a workplace, not just culture. 2) I suggested people should have the ability to voice their input over their work. (Note, that's a weaker claim than "people should have input over their work". Just that they should feel like they are able to voice their input.)
Neither of those two things are demands nor entitlements, and the latter I would assume would be pretty non-controversial unless you believe that bosses should have absolute and complete control over every facet of a worker's job. (I guess I work in tech, where it's pretty widely accepted that people have autonomy to make some decisions on their own about how and what work is achieved.)
I don't have an opinion on Valve or allegations Valve is doing that. I just find it very strange to say it's entitled for a black to want to be treated as equally as a white.
Assume a white guy voluntarily takes a job working in a wig shop that only sells black women's hair care products. He's going to be uncomfortable at some point. Does he have a right to not be uncomfortable? Should the company culture change, should they stop selling wigs and ditch their customers until he becomes comfortable?
No. The easiest solution is he should work elsewhere. He took the job knowing exactly what was involved. So no, you are not entitled to not be culturally uncomfortable.
Fun fact: Nintendo's revenue split on WiiWare was 60/40, and required minimum downloads to even get your revenue out of Big N.
I'm not sure how any of that is sketchy or gross. As far as marketplaces and platforms go, this is quite reasonable, and there are many successful games which are either not on Steam, or are cross-listed on multiple platforms, or are cross-listed on both Steam and the developer's own distribution channel.
I'll give you lootboxes, they are pretty shitty.
We should be ok with pointing at the shady parts of things we like and going, "It would be better if it were not so shady."
Valve is good in many ways! Valve would be better if it didn't profit from getting kids to gamble on skins!
Lol Valve is taking a cut of a ridiculous amount of video game sales while releasing no games.
I like some of their work on the linux support side, but they have sold out as much as Apple has if anything.
They kind of did, with their sudden pivot from primarily making singleplayer games to almost exclusively making F2P GaaS titles the instant they got a taste of lootbox money. Half-Life 3 and Portal 3 will never happen because Valve makes 100x as much money with 1/100th of the effort by peddling Counter Strike skins.
No official announcement yet.
Simply raising the $1800 transaction limit and $2000 balance limit would have been far less disruptive, but that may have put Valve in financial regulators crosshairs. There's surely a reason why they chose those numbers in particular.
(But I may also argue the point they never sold out in terms of being a game studio as opposed to a publisher.... "So when's Half Life 3 releasing?")
The issue is trying to force (or likely, continue) bad practices when they're clearly not working and then lacking the leadership to realize that a retaliatory layoff is only going to make things worse.
Ah yeah unregulated illegal underage gambling, the great resistance. Gabe could shutdown the whole thing with 1 click, all the sites are using the Steam API, but they don't and you know why.
Valve did a lot of things good but they are also the original source of a lot of bad things from lootboxes to skin gambling to the FOMO battle pass cancer of modern gaming.
Case and point: Valve doesn't have a union.
You have to be very misguided to believe that the c suite in most companies is not engaged in n adversarial relationship with its employees, whether those employees are unionized or not.
This isn't a given, this is just an opinion, and one you didn't bother trying to argue for.
Many systems do function much better with adversarial units in them. Governments have the adversarial units of checks and balances. Companies have the adversarial forces of the market. A news paper has the adversarial units of editors to their writers.
Also, with apologies for the whataboutism, we unfortunately finance thugs all day every day (my internet provider, German government and pension, Deutsche Bahn, etc are massive extortionists); it's not really black and white.
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.)
EDIT: I might have overstated by saying it doesn't work but it definitely doesn't have the same level of effect as people collectively saying "this behavior is wrong and you will be punished for it, regardless if I buy the product" (for example by editing laws). It also doesn't allow any control over how the money is distributed among those who worked on it (compared to for example adding a law that limits absolute/relative spending on marketing - whether you think it's a good idea or not).
Some companies may share a profit. I heard that Activision used to pay some of the revenue from Call of Duty to the developers, although I can't confirm it. And it was a long time ago, not sure if they still do.
1) A lot of people would immediately stop contributing to open source. In fact i ahead have because ML is being used to launder my work to use it without resourcing my licenses. Same with any other area where people share their work for free. It would all be monetized by those with access to better advertising.
2) Anything published would be immediately scooped up by the big players. How would a small competitor like Nebula compete with YouTube if YouTube took all its content and offered it for free with ads?
3) How would you even know who the original creator was if those stealing the work stripped away attribution? They already do but at least you have some limited ways to fight them.
2) what do you mean "scooped up"? What's to stop a small platform from providing the same content that a large platform does, if we've done away with intellectual property?
3) I'm confused. If you're paying somebody to create a proposed work, and then they create it and get paid for doing so, and then nobody is allowed to restrict access to it, where does the theft come in?
Huh? That doesn't make any sense. "Vote your wallet" does not mean throw money on the ground haphazardly and pray that it finds its way to the appropriate home. It means hand the money directly to the person you want to have it. There is no way to avoid deciding who gets the money. That's the only choice you get to make.
https://rollingout.com/2025/05/07/target-ceo-salary-drop-ami...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/dougmelville/2025/08/21/the-qui...
> The Quiet Part Out Loud: Target Ditching DEI Cost The CEO His Job And Investors $12 Billion
So, it would not be hard to impair Rockstar with a coordinated, sustained economic retaliation campaign against them. If it kills the company, we help workers find other jobs and shareholders learn a lesson about capital allocation. Poorly run companies die all the time, some just need to be helped along.
I write this out of pure sympathy for the incredible work that I know gamedevs do, I'm not associated with Rockstar at all.
[1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/gta-6-delayed-once-again-to...
GTA V is dated. It's 12+ years old.
Like imagine if MindsEye had thirteen years of anticipation before it came out.
One can only hope this employee survived.
The chances of a company turning around are super low, adding a union makes it harder. Just run.
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.
Most of your post was complete non-sense but this last line really does take the cake.
In any case, a longtime friend of mine was senior graphics programmer on GTA5, and I was very close to interviewing with Rockstar in Edinburgh at his recommendation. But then I remembered how gamedev burnt me out at age 19 (my first job, at Lionhead), and how I've never been burnt out since, and decided against it. Been in offline rendering since then and never looked back.
Rockstar North is based in Edinburgh as you say, why wouldn't English be at a high level?
E.g. someone who grew up playing piano might be able to play at an incredibly advanced level, while also being terrible at reading or writing sheet music.
The science around skills acquired during childhood/adolescence vs. learned skills is interesting. For example, I would not be surprised if non-native speakers, on average, have a better handle of the difference between effect/affect, there/their, etc.
Shoot the messenger if you want, but the evidence is literally ubiquitous.
That’s from training system rather than age.
You’ll rarely catch me mixing up there and their because I’ve learned those words reading them, and in written form they’re very distinguishable.
I couldn’t write a poem to save my life though, because I can’t tell which words in English rhyme - the written form of an English word isn’t trustable.
An interesting example is natives with different accents making different mistakes - Latino Spanish speakers for example commonly confuse c and s while writing, as it’s a similar sound.
Spain's dialect however pronounces those letters very distinctly (their famous “lisp”) so to Spaniards it’s obvious which one to use.
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.
I know plenty of people from the area this forum post is about and everyone has a high standard of English... even the people with thick local accents and non-native English speaking Europeans.
Does Rockstar hire lots of non-European people to work in Edinburgh or something?
[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.
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.
Why can't this style of management just take hold at a game company?
I suspect that hollywood has a pretty similar release cycle, and I've never heard of the dysfunctional management in that industry. (maybe it is normalized? maybe people don't expect a job after a movie is done?)
> 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.
One of these things is not like the other.
Given that ChatGPT is still very much in a "trust, but verify" state (on a daily basis it confidently states falsehoods about subject matter I'm highly familiar with, for instance), I'm wondering if you followed up to confirm that the data at the sources provided by ChatGPT accurately reflected what it told you.
If you're going to insist that others revisit their research, I would hope that you're making a good faith effort towards doing the same.
Citation?
or if we change bankruptcy such that labour is paid out rather than creditors.
laws are setup to reduce and limit the risk for capital, and capital can hedge its risks where labour cannot. Generally nobody is able to work to full time jobs
To argue your point, the strongest argument is that labor cannot easily diversify or easily re-train for new sectors. But there aren't entire job sectors being wiped out with any kind of regularity or high frequency. Mostly people take skills from one job into another.
And speaking more about the US, social safety nets (not arguing that they're perfect) have some role to play when labor faces downsides. There is no "unemployment" for a company (again I'm talking about average businesses without cherry picking the too big to fail examples - which are a tiny percentage when looking at the number of small/medium/large businesses that operate around the world).
https://gtaforums.com/topic/1004182-rockstar-games-alleged-u...
* Has anyone heard of game-buying consumers voting en masse with their pocketbooks over ethical/social concerns about a game/publisher/studio?
(I absolutely don't mean something like the Gamergate psychosis, though that was the first very loosely related event that came to mind. I mean respectable commercial boycotts, for admirable reasons.)
Also, I may be misremembering, but there was something pertaining to esports supressing the hong Kong riots.
/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...
They're in it to make boatloads of cash and will do whatever to whoever is needed.
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.
It's the truth though. It doesn't matter if the product was produced as a result of slave labor, union-busting, corporate government coups, extensive pollution, monopolistic behavior, manipulation either of or from the government, theft of natural resources, etc.
People just go 'la la la I can't hear you' and buy whatever they want.
And to some extent I don't blame people for doing that. To really dig into the actions of even a single company could take months of careful research. And given how convoluted the ownership charts can be, you may end up finding that 3/4 or more of what you buy is from a company with despicable practices - I mean shoot look at what Nestle owns.
I don't know if there's a solution. Even if you got people to do all the hard work (ha!), it would be hard for people to get around it.
That's a really good point. With the way modern supply chains work, it may not even be possible to really know if you're buying something that was ethically produced or not.
Indeed that's par for the course, there's plenty to dislike about democracy, but the alternatives we've tried are worse for example.
I used to work at a university that was NON-union, but basically ensured our benefits/raises were always at LEAST as good as the unionized university across town negotiated. THAT's a way to avoid unionizing efforts.
I have a teacher in the family - it's been an unequivocal necessity for them - otherwise the city / schoolboard would run roughshod over them - like 1% raises over 5 years, while their coffers are full.
And there's always a few (*&@#$ parents who think they're "all that" who would try to have individual teachers fired just because their 1st grader only got a "B" when they're clearly a generational prodigy... Unions really help with that.
They had several (4 I think?) union-mandated breaks during the day, which I got in trouble for not taking several times. The reason given was if I didn't take my breaks than they could disappear for everyone. I also was willing to do any job given to me, and given that I had some shop and machining experience, was happy to help with any task given, which made me an asset to management as they cold put me in anywhere as needed to help production along, but angered old crotchety employees that didn't want me in their space and were happy doing the absolute minimum to collect their wage.
So yeah, my experience with Unions is they breed mediocracy and pull everyone down that wants to set themselves apart to management. Wages were standardized rather than based on individual accomplishments so there was no incentive to excel.
I'm certainly not "anti-union" but my original comment is that HN thinks Unions are this utopia and in a sober reality they often aren't.
Had I any dependants, I'd definitely stay (just for the benefits! which cost nothing-more for one dude or an entire family).
Started my own residential shop, now-retired; life probably would have been easier had I stuck with commercial, instead.
Just because some unions aren’t as good as others is not a reason to dismiss unions.
It seems likely the vast majority of HN has never been a member of a union themselves given the audience, so the obsession feels like a savior complex IMO.
Yeah, unions accomplished a lot of good things many decades ago. But if you think they haven't morphed over those decades and are still automatically a net positive for all workers, I could probably sell you a bridge.
For my experience at Teamsters, there was zero incentive for employees to actually perform. Everything was done by senority across the board, and you're literally just aging and waiting your turn.
The insurance was good, the wages were average, and the incentive to do better was non-existent. And yes, firing people unless they did something egregious was much, much harder.
Pretty much everyone I know who works hard does so in spite of their circumstances. Not because of them.
Of the engineers I've worked with, the cooks I've worked with, the waiters I've worked with... the hard working ones don't win. They get taken advantage of and run into the ground. They perform, and perform more, and more, and that exclusively works against them.
And, as you go up the ladder, you can very clearly see the hard work and competence thin out more and more. The people who are successful aren't smart, or hard working, they're just good at maintaining a status quo.
These are not unionized places. So, maybe it's a capitalism thing.
Also the narrative and dialogue is ever so slightly overated in Rockstar games because the competition is quite nerdy/square in that department as are most of the audience. The ending of Red Dead II was actually quite trite, especially in terms of dialogue and narrative (in my opinion) even though the game is incredible overall. It is honestly still very far from a Tarantino script.
I genuinely cringed at the end of RDII due to the dialogue just feel the need to mention that again...
CWA is a big, traditional, national union (think phone company employees, health care workers, flight attendants) that has voted to set aside a portion of their dues to help organize us, their fellow workers in the tech sector, which I consider a truly beautiful act of solidarity. They are having some successes, which seem to be building.
Getting plugged in with the training and, almost as importantly, a CWA organizer, is a great first step if you know you'd like a union but don't know where to start.
You could also vote no on a unionization vote, or just not join. I'm sure your loyalty will get a special consideration when the next round of arbitrary layoffs (coupled with record-breaking profits) happens.
I do wonder what country American Airlines operates in then…
https://viewfromthewing.com/american-airlines-fired-two-flig...
They could surely have paid their dues and left the union and kept their jobs (or could have never joined the union to begin with).
[1] https://americanairlines.gcs-web.com/node/42651/html#:~:text...
https://www.marketplace.org/2023/01/03/gen-z-is-the-most-pro...
https://thehill.com/business/4854173-union-approval-surges-p...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/12751/labor-unions.aspx
https://news.gallup.com/poll/510281/unions-strengthening.asp...
What was done was blatantly illegal, EVEN IF the people weren't fired for union organizing, which Rockstar will have a hard time explaining away since they fired only people involved in union organizing.
The fired employees in the UK (not sure about Canada) will get back pay and penalties once the unavoidable legal process finishes.
I'm sure, however, Rockstar will consider all of the sanctions they'll receive as price of doing business.
Despicable.
(And, the very next post is the forum admin confirming that the poster is indeed a rockstar employee.)
metadat•5h ago
They make so much money, why can't they play nice and treat their employees like human beings?
I don't recall reports of Valve (Steam, also super profitable) stooping. Is Rockstar a genetic relative of GAFA, because this is more like what I've come to expect from Amazon.
wahnfrieden•5h ago
Meta is also in the news today for making 10% of its revenue from scams, as well as for having codified policy that scammers representing at least 0.15% of their revenue must be protected from any moderation.
Business thrives on illegality.
saubeidl•4h ago
appreciatorBus•4h ago
At least under liberal capitalism I have the option of not buying games and of making my own.
wahnfrieden•4h ago
m0llusk•4h ago
wahnfrieden•3h ago
m0llusk•3h ago
saubeidl•3h ago
_DeadFred_•1h ago
zaptheimpaler•5h ago
fn-mote•5h ago
saubeidl•4h ago
Firings reduce expenses, the equation above explains the rest. Of course, that's only in the short term, but that's what exec bonuses are given out on!
wahnfrieden•4h ago
zaptheimpaler•4h ago
appreciatorBus•4h ago
tclancy•4h ago
appreciatorBus•4h ago
ineptech•3h ago
t-writescode•4h ago
lotsofpulp•4h ago
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/COST/costco/revenu...
While simultaneously growing profit margin:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/COST/costco/profit...
Hence growing annual net income from $2.3B to $8B in the last 10 years.
castwide•3h ago
t-writescode•2h ago
burnt-resistor•5h ago
That's not how human nature works. Greed doesn't lead to idealism or altruism, it invariably leads to entitlement and more greed. The rich are never satisfied with hundreds of billions, they insist upon trillions.
immibis•5h ago
kevin_thibedeau•4h ago
mlrtime•3h ago
rayiner•5h ago
Because American unions usually don’t stop there. It’s the American winner-take all/scorched earth approach to everything.
stego-tech•4h ago
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.
appreciatorBus•4h ago
fhackenberger•2h ago
array_key_first•33m ago
Why stop there? Why have systems or government at all? Why even bother making murder illegal? After all, it's human nature. After all, it's just how life works. After all, the strong win, and the weak get eaten. Everyone knows that.
hueho•3h ago
tbrockman•4h ago
Rockstar, and owner Take-Two (largely owned by institutional investors--well known for their historical championing of workers rights and fondness of unions), both seem to have your typical corporate hierarchies, where executives are fairly and correctly compensated for being more productive than over 200 software engineers combined.
lotsofpulp•4h ago
Their 10-Ks show they lost a lot of money.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TTWO/take-two-inte...
2025 $-4.479B
2024 $-3.744B
2023 $-1.125B
The meager earnings in years previous to that are beyond wiped out. In fact, expect a lot more squeeze if you work at Take Two or a lot more rent seeking if you are a customer, because based on the stock price movement, the market is expecting a lot more net income.
Edit: looks like they set a ton of money on fire by overpaying for Zynga a few years ago. Customers and employees are going to be paying for that bad decision for a long time.
kg•2h ago
Managing to lose money on those kinds of profits is arguably further evidence that leadership there is overpaid.
tick_tock_tick•2h ago
Because they want to make great games. It's sad but we've never figure out how to replicate the creative output that crunch and stress triggers. I don't understand it and frankly I couldn't stand it so I left the industry but I won't pretend that we have a solution too the problem.
epolanski•2h ago
Because they can.
In the gaming industry the biggest studios get away with running sweat shops because there's endless hordes of brilliant engineers and artists who had always dreamed to make videogames and need a huge name on the CV to move to better places.