> This is a direct-join union, meaning that workers can sign up on their own. This allows folks to bypass traditional unionization processes like elections and employer consent.
Good reminder that the word "union" is overloaded and doesn't always mean what you might assume.
People who join a union like this don't have union representation or union contracts with companies. They rely on individual members to take action in various forms within there own companies. In theory they could call for a strike and ask everyone who is a member to strike from their respective companies, but in practice it's more about raising awareness and making noise in hopes of driving change.
So while technically it's a union, it's not comparable to what most people think of as a union in the United States.
__MatrixMan__ · 41d ago
Most people in the united states think of unions as some kind of entrenched bureaucratic entity that's not capable of effecting change. Typically we say "the union" as if there can only be one, and once it's corrupt, there's no recourse. Often our laws reflect this, striking as part of a "wildcat" union can be illegal. It leads to this feeling that you have to know the right people to unionize.
It's a problematic perspective. "The" union might be an impotent lost cause, but "A" union can appear suddenly, strike hard, and dissipate once the need for it has gone. This seems more like the latter.
atoav · 41d ago
As you correctly point out on a fundamental level unions are just workers of a particular skill organizing to address issues these workers want to see adressed, and by them bekng many they strengthen their bargaining position. Unions can devolve into dysfunctional bureaucratic entities, but so can literally everything else where people come together for a cause — so that is no argument against unions.
Every employee is replaceable, banding together with others that might replace you instead of letting them play you like a fool is a power move.
__MatrixMan__ · 40d ago
I feel like focusing on "workers of a particular skill" is a bit too narrow. A strike could be like...
> These people have disabled a critical part of your supply chain and they will restore it if you improve the working conditions for these other people.
...where both groups of people are part of the same union despite having very different jobs. If you can achieve solidarity across sectors, you can strike much more effectively than by merely refusing to work.
throw9304040 · 41d ago
I would be careful with assuming that.
In some countries/industries you have to be a member of an union by the law. Just by working in industry, union is forced upon you by law, and you have to pay their fees. The only way out, is to form your own union, with all paperwork. It really sucks for self employed folks.
Retric · 41d ago
The word is extremely overloaded. China has a lot of “unions” that exist to protect companies, avoid strikes, and stifle complaints not represent workers.
That doesn’t have any relevance for American unions, but people seems to think any issue they ever had with a union applies to every union.
skyyler · 41d ago
America has unions like this, too. Ask anyone that works for an Albertson's.
Retric · 41d ago
You might think they are overly cozy with Albertson’s but it’s a categorically different situation.
I’d suggest you read up on “fake unions” it’s 1984 level double talk shit.
skyyler · 40d ago
No, really, it's a very similar thing.
There are also fake unions in the United States in the cannabis industry. Pretty grim situation.
Retric · 40d ago
I can see why you might think they are similar on the surface.
However those are paperwork exercises without any leverage that run into legal issues inside the US. “Anyone who signed a labor peace agreement with ProTech Local 33 has 90 days from the ruling to sign a new pact with a legitimate union or risk losing their license”
The Chinese version is stable as they are being actively propped up by the state.
skyyler · 40d ago
Can you provide some concrete information about this? It's less that I don't believe you and more that I would like to learn more.
Retric · 40d ago
This is old (2012) but gives some of the background.
The Lack of Genuine Worker Representation
The All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) is China's only legal trade union, and it is required by the Trade Union Law to "uphold the leadership of the Communist Party." Because one of the ACFTU's priorities is to organize and mobilize "vast numbers of workers to make contributions to the sound and rapid development of the economy," and to foster "harmony in labour relations" so that such development may take place, the vast majority of "trade unions" in enterprises effectively remain under the de facto control of management.
The All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) is still the only legally recognized trade union.
Yeul · 41d ago
"that exist to protect companies, avoid strikes, and stifle complaints not represent workers"
That sounds like the Republican Party.
drakonka · 41d ago
Could you please point me to which countries/industries those are? Just a link is fine. Googling isn't helping :(
butshouldyou · 41d ago
We have a similar thing in Switzerland for the gastronomy (food and drinks) industry. The industry is pretty abusive - here and abroad - so the "union" makes sure there's protections for workers.
Because of this, there's free management training, free skilled training, and holiday and pay minimums. Plus, free advice and legal support for workers.
bena · 41d ago
Just in the US
Screen Actors Guild
Writers Guild of America
Directors Guild of America
NFL Players Association
Now, I'll give you, SAG, WGA, and DGA don't control all film and television production and there are plenty of non-union jobs available. But most of the film and television you consume is union work.
Every player in the NFL is required to be a member of the NFLPA.
dylan604 · 41d ago
> Now, I'll give you, SAG, WGA, and DGA don't control all film and television production and there are plenty of non-union jobs available.
The thing about the "hollywood" unions is that they are very supportive of the others. So when the recent writer's strike was taking place, the actors also supported them as well as the directors by not working without their writers.
If the auto union workers strike, the steel workers aren't stopping work in solidarity. If the stevedores go on strike, the truck drivers don't go on strike in solidarity.
Animats · 41d ago
Not any more. That's called a "secondary boycott", and has been illegal in the US since 1959. Before that, it was common for union truckers to refuse to cross a picket line. When a company's workers went on strike, deliveries by Teamsters stopped.
American labor law was written when unions were much stronger. It assumes strong unions and strong employers in conflict, with the NLRB as referee. That hasn't been true in the US for decades now.
banannaise · 41d ago
The NFLPA functionally only deals with one company (the NFL) so it's not really a great example. Most professional sports leagues have a players' union specific to that league.
The others, though, yes.
bena · 41d ago
Coaches and other front office personnel aren't required to enter a union to work for a club.
There is a union for coaches and it's entirely voluntary. Which is why you won't see Belichick in most Madden games as his contract has to be negotiated separately.
dragonwriter · 41d ago
The NFL does jot employ players, and is a separate company from the teams, which do, and which are also separate companies from each other.
drakonka · 41d ago
And just to be clear - there is an actual law forcing you to join these unions and pay their membership fees? (Not in the US, maybe this law is actually common knowledge that went completely over my head so far!)
jcranmer · 41d ago
My understanding is that it's not so much a law as it is a contract between the union and the employer that prohibits the employer from hiring people who don't join the union.
drakonka · 41d ago
Ah ok, but that seems very different from the comment I was replying to, which said "In some countries/industries you have to be a member of an union by the law. Just by working in industry, union is forced upon you by law, and you have to pay their fees." - that seems pretty drastic, so I was specifically curious about examples of law-mandated union membership/fee payment.
rascul · 41d ago
> Every player in the NFL is required to be a member of the NFLPA.
No they're not. It's optional.
jcranmer · 41d ago
The terms you want to look for are "closed shop" and "union shop" (the difference between the two is that a union shop allows non-union members to be hired, but they have to join the union after being hired).
Animats · 41d ago
Basic labor terms:
- Closed shop - must be member of union to be hired.
- Union shop - must join union when hired.
- Agency shop - don't have to join union, but have to pay a fee to it.
- Open shop - don't have to join union, but can.
- Yellow-dog contract - not allowed to join union.[1]
I was specifically looking for examples of the original commenter's referenced law-mandated unions: "In some countries/industries you have to be a member of an union by the law. Just by working in industry, union is forced upon you by law, and you have to pay their fees."
Closed shops and union shops just seem like an arrangement between employers and unions, not something forced upon you "by law"?
philistine · 41d ago
If you want to work construction in Québec.
bsimpson · 41d ago
In Nevada (and I'm sure others), unions get to set the "prevailing wage," which is the legal minimum wage for work they bid on.
So if your shop is more efficient than the union shop, you don't get to compete on that price savings. It tilts the market towards the unions.
julienEar · 41d ago
It’s crazy how the definition of a union varies so much across contexts, contries/indus. Some prioritize bargaining power, while others focus more on advocacy and awareness.
gamblor956 · 40d ago
Just by working in industry, union is forced upon you by law, and you have to pay their fees. The only way out, is to form your own union, with all paperwork. It really sucks for self employed folks.
The first statement is true in a few industries, but the second statements are false in any industry in which the first statement applies. If union membership is mandated, you don't get a choice in the union you join.
And for the last bit about self-employed folks: the only industries which mandate union membership in which it is also possible to be self-employed are the Hollywood guilds, which set compensation minimums. Hollywood union members are free to negotiate higher compensation, and many do.
The worst thing about all the anti-union FUD that gets spread on HN is that they assume that tech workers would be in the same kind of union as janitors, when the most similar structure would be the Hollywood guilds.
lalaithion · 41d ago
How do you think unions start? Yes, an entire workplace can just up and decide some day to unionize but more often unions start as non-bargaining unions and then at some point get enough support to bargain with the companies.
JumpCrisscross · 41d ago
> more often unions start as non-bargaining unions
Source? I'd guess most unions start as collective-bargaining unions because if they can't colletively bargain I'm struggling to see their point over, like, a conference or subreddit.
3acctforcom · 41d ago
uhhh you should really look into how that works. The union playbook is to organize in secret because retaliation is in the HR playbook. All sorts of fun and completely (not)illegal retaliation like firing organizers.
dtagames · 42d ago
This is fantastic news and something we need very much!
When my studio was closed and 36 of us fired without notice 7 months ago, I poked around at union options and was shocked to find they were only inside individual studios, not even across whole companies, much less across the industry.
The games industry is 100 years behind film and music in standardizing contracts, roles, and rights (including IP rights for failed projects). This initiative gives us a chance to fix it!
Joel_Mckay · 41d ago
The churn rate in the gaming studios is usually abnormally high. Most key talent often breaks off into their own indie studios, and while budgets wont be spectacular AAA level... the content usually offers better quality fun, and the artists aren't burned out in 6 months.
The film and TV production situation is nothing to aspire toward... especially if you are a contractor. It never lead to more stable work for the crews, and became a feast or famine type seasonal working arrangement for many.
Unions are better than none, as at least your crew actually gets paid by some rat-fink production manager that often disappeared on wrap.
Best of luck, and some of the best talent I've met was shafted by a AAA studio at least once in their career (often for some really bizarre reasons.) =3
Ferret7446 · 41d ago
How is this fantastic news in an industry that is on fire and collapsing?
The US (and more generally Western) gaming industry is getting obliterated by Asian studios. I doubt a union (pre-supposing this is a union, which it is not) would help US studios be more competitive.
A union doesn't help you if your company, or entire industry, goes bankrupt.
johnnyanmac · 41d ago
The big studios aren't suffering in the same way the laid off employees are. Their numbers aren't rising at pandemic level and they decide to panic. They aren't shuttering anytime soon.
Asia isn't really booming either. At least if you compare to western studios. Japan had decades of a stangant economy and are coming out of a recession. Any kind of growth is a gold mine for them. China is a minefield as well economically.
> I doubt a union (pre-supposing this is a union, which it is not) would help US studios be more competitive.
It's not about competition, it's about protecting your livliehood so you don't get sacked to make an earnings call look a smidgen better.
PeterStuer · 41d ago
The US game industry seems to be collapsing because they do not offer the customers what they want.
Treating employees in the industry fair might not change this, but should be beneficial to them regardless, unless it would make the misalignment of the product offer even worse which is entirely possible.
93po · 41d ago
it doesn’t give consumers what they want—it just targets a small subset willing to spend the most money.
johnnyanmac · 41d ago
unions aren't directly about consumers. Why argue this angle? Consumers don't get games if devs don't exist.
>it just targets a small subset willing to spend the most money.
people with money aren't worried about getting laid off. Quite the contrary.
schnitzelstoat · 40d ago
Europe seems to be doing alright with the likes of Warhorse, CDPR, Rockstar North, Paradox Interactive etc.
The salaries here are far lower than in the USA which probably helps a bit, that's not good for the workers though of course.
dreadlordbone · 41d ago
I don't understand. If a company closes, how is a union supposed to help?
banannaise · 41d ago
Ideally the union wants to deal with the larger entity that controls the studio. Presumably, the studio did not go out of business; rather, it was shut down by its parent company.
gopher_space · 41d ago
One of the benefits to having a labor representative in top-level planning is as a sanity check. Harder to tank your own company if you have feedback loops in place.
alexathrowawa9 · 41d ago
Can a union force a company to continue a project if the company decides to cancel it?
munk-a · 41d ago
Unions are a bargaining tool that can theoretically advocate for anything - it's more useful generally to talk about what they usually do. Generally unions focus on employee rights and will only organize for specific business policies if it is causing obvious harm to the company and employees. I'd only expect a union to force a project to be continued if it was being canceled for silly reasons (internal company politics and similar) but usually simply moving the workforce to another project would be sufficient.
wickedsickeune · 41d ago
Yes. But it can more reasonably force the company to retain the employees of said project, and move them to other projects instead of firing them.
dontlaugh · 41d ago
That does depend on laws in your particular country.
In the UK, you can be join the national union even if you are the only one in your workplace. Typically union recognition within a particular workplace comes later after sufficient numbers join.
smeeger · 41d ago
companies with unions are a hundred years behind companies that run efficiently and do what they are supposed to instead of acting as a playing piece in the game of politics and union corruption. nobody ever talks about the fact that unions in america are corrupt… unions in germany aren't corrupt and germans can build bridges still. we can barely manage it without hiring foreign firms… stop worshiping unions its part of the problem
officeplant · 41d ago
Unions and the labor laws they helped create save American lives. Unfortunately American companies have been upset about this for decades and fight it at every level. Including lobbying laws into places preventing industry strikes. Thus leaving us far behind countries with properly working unions like Germany as you mentioned.
AngryData · 41d ago
Most of the problems with US unions can be traced back to anti-union legislation that used the promises of entrenching current unions as a carrot to get the laws passed to suppress new unions. New unions are much harder to create today, even more so if there is an existing union that covers similiar employees to your own.
And old established unions are hard to get rid of even if the majority of employees are unhappy with it and would rather it was either gone or replaced with a different union with different rules and leaders.
And an old entrenched bureaucratic political position is an easy target for corruption.
jisnsm · 41d ago
Yes, unions at video game studios are bound to save so many lives.
In other words your comment is hyperbolic and does not apply to the topic at hand.
crooked-v · 41d ago
Given the pattern of video game studios unceremoniously laying off people the second a game is complete and how health care in the US is overwhelmingly tied to employment, it's extremely plausible that somebody somewhere has died from lack of collective bargaining power. If it hasn't happened, that's most likely because people just leave the video game industry before they actually need those health care benefits.
officeplant · 41d ago
>Yes, unions at video game studios are bound to save so many lives.
Stress & constant overtime crunch culture will absolutely be a detriment on the health and wellbeing of workers in any industry.
Again, labor laws saved lives in the past, they can save and/or benefit lives today.
>In other words your comment is hyperbolic and does not apply to the topic at hand.
Welcome to the topic at hand.
FirmwareBurner · 41d ago
>Again, labor laws saved lives in the past, they can save and/or benefit lives today.
They can, but game dev is not a critical national industry that politicians are gonna fight for with laws to protect labor. Otherwise we could have had unionized clothes making union but what saw instead was the entire textile industry shipped oversees. Game dev will follow a similar fate.
You can unionize if you want, but unless you're guarantee to have a blockbuster IP on your hands capable of raking in billions, you won't be able to compete with game devs from lower CoL countries.
In a globalized free market with no tariffs, high CoL labor can't compete with low CoL labor making commodity goods, which a a lot of games are nowadays. Unions won't fix this, but accelerate offshoring at the expense of the local industry.
Apocryphon · 41d ago
> you won't be able to compete with game devs from lower CoL countries.
I mean, those devs might unionize as well. Certainly would've helped both the ZA/UM and CD Projekt Red devs, for different reasons.
FirmwareBurner · 41d ago
>I mean, those devs might unionize as well.
The word "might" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. If unionization in Asia was so easy we would have seen it happen a long time ago, but what we saw instead was suicide nets on buildings.
Apocryphon · 40d ago
That caricature was so long ago a new caricature (from seven years ago) has emerged to lampoon it:
Granted, I have no doubt that the work culture is much tougher than in North America. But even the Chinese government has recognized 996 and taken steps to address it.
America talks often about union corruption. In fact, it does this to the point of crowding out any productive discussion - because Americans are often quite resistant to looking at other countries and understanding what approaches they take to certain social issues.
YesBox · 41d ago
Just my opinion. I have no experience working in the industry _for someone else_. I am, however, working on my own game (3+ years). I'm not a believer in poor work environments, as I don't think that environment maximizes creative output. I know what it's like working with less than 7 hours of sleep, or sitting in front of a screen hours on end. It dulls the mind. It's like being half alive.
All that said: A hit based industry is not one that provides stability. I cant think of how slapping a union on top of an unstable foundation is going to solve anything. I've heard a couple people who crossed over from the film industry say it's just going to turn most roles into contracts (just like the film industry), and will quickly filter out the unskilled and less driven people.
There isn't really a solution to this. Market pressure keep the prices of games down. Funding gets a better bang for buck by investing in up and coming countries (e.g. Poland). Most qualified[1] games don't even break a million. Hitting [just!] $150,000 in revenue is when Steam starts seriously promoting your game[2]. $150K is not even enough to live in a coastal city (after dev. costs), never mind hiring people.
[1] The dev had the intent to market _and_ sell a legitimate product, which is the minority of games on steam.
[2] howtomarketagame.com
jmyeet · 41d ago
> I cant think of how slapping a union on top of an already unstable foundation is going to solve anything
You mean like the entire television and film industry? Any production over a certain (small) size is completely unionized. It's so massively successful the American cultural exports dominate in almost every corner of the world.
I'm not sure where the idea that unions can't work for the games industry comes from since it's almost identical to the film and TV industry. Unions exist so workers don't get exploited and to provide stability.
What about Nintendo? They famously have very limited layoffs. They see value in providing stability and maintaing culture and institutional memory.
If anything, it's short-term profit-seeking that destroys industries. You see this in the world of original content production for streamers. They cut the size of writers rooms. They tried to no longer have writers on set. There's a push for "mini writing rooms". Why? Because it cuts costs on a very short term basis.
In doing so, Netflix (etc) are intentionally throwing away the model that created billion dollar properties like Friends, Seinfeld, ER, MASH, Cheers, etc that, to this day, generate massive profits. Seinfeld was known for getting over a million viewers when it was running in syndication.
Long-term it creates problems. Future products and showrunners are writers who need to get experience on set. Shortsighted cost-reudction is literally killing the future of the industry.
As for the price of video games, there are several aspects to this:
1. AAA publishers like to complain that games still cost $60 after years. That's true but also the distribution is significantly higher than it was 20 years ago. You're selling way more games;
2. The marginal cost of producing a game via download is essentially zero; and
3. Games eventaully get much cheaper on Steam. That's a good thing. Early experiments with this showed that selling a game cheap on Steam could generate significantly more revenue than the original release. And because the marginal cost is zero, it's all profit.
maxglute · 41d ago
The entertainment industry isn't doing well right now. Nor gaming. US film+TV grew by 5x thanks to streaming money in last 20 years. Gaming sector also exploded. But everyone is competing for attention with each other and decades of backlog. Netflix has milked the game to the point where they're competing against sleep - there's only so demand for the occasional hit properties. IMO it's not the same supply/demand enviroment anymore that can support unions everywhere. Very few companies are Nintendos who has a few golden goose franchise and an entire hardware ecosystem to support long term vision. And of course if most of the industry doesn't unionize, the few that could likely won't, even if the should.
SpicyLemonZest · 41d ago
Video game voice actors at the intersection of entertainment and gaming, but they're unionized and have maintained a strike for about 8 months now, forcing multiple major companies to start releasing content without English voicelines. It's very doable if employees want to.
maxglute · 41d ago
>forcing multiple major companies to start releasing content without English voicelines.
But not forcing suits to concede. Premature to assume voice actors will win in the end. On the continuum of "indispensible", "rainmaker" talent to easily replacable, screen talent has leverage to unionize because their faces sell tickets/subscriptions. My understanding is voice actors are bluntly not valued as much, hence the long strike, they don't have comparable leverage, especially with AI on horizon. Least valuable / most fungible are production, which is why the situation is increasingly shit for even existing unionized talent in entertainment and extra worse for non unionized sectors like vfx, or most of video games - they're replacable by neverending supply of talent willing to work for less, not just in US but abroad.
johnnyanmac · 41d ago
if companies would rather release worse content than pay labor, that's a cost in and of itself. The writer's guild had similar impact in the 2010's.
I don't know who will win, but it's not like these choices are not without consequence. These moves definitely slow down their plans.
maxglute · 40d ago
IMO with voice talent it's pretty obvious the AI will eventually win, especially when it pertains to video games where projects can contain 1,000s hours of dialogue. There's disruption right now because studios are being nice / have talent locked into existing projects that's hard to recast/pivot from. IIRC the voice acting drama also has a transnational dimension, something about blacklisting international talent from union projects if they don't join/pay dues to a US guild, which sits wrong with me. Either way the consequences of ceding to unions is bad for consumers, at least in video games. I don't want smaller projects to pick between either having all union voice acting and no AI which may be prohibitively expensive / not possible depending on scope. I want amateur RPG makers able to make projects with accessible AI generated voices, especially with how fast they're improving etc.
YesBox · 40d ago
It's not identical. Film and TV has one city where the vast majority of shows are produced: LA. Much easier to organize when everyone is located in the same place. Game studios are spread all over the US[0]
Nintendo isn't an American company, and Japanese have different cultural values (with tradeoffs)
> If anything, it's short-term profit-seeking that destroys industries
Im not so confident about that. For most games, you launch it once, and you get the vast majority of the revenue within one year of release. Then the next game has to be better (and cost more) than the last. I think it has less to do with short term profits (games take years to develop).
> AAA publishers like to complain that games still cost $60 after years. That's true but also the distribution is significantly higher than it was 20 years ago. You're selling way more games;
> The marginal cost of producing a game via download is essentially zero;
You lose 30% of that to the storefront, 30% on marketing, 10% on server, 5% on engine. (fun fact: the profit margin of games were higher in the 90s) [1]
> Games eventaully get much cheaper on Steam. That's a good thing. Early experiments with this showed that selling a game cheap on Steam could generate significantly more revenue than the original release. And because the marginal cost is zero, it's all profit.
No it isn't. Not when people's expectations continue to rise.
Not sure I Agree about the price of video games. It very much had adverse effects to devaluing games, not dissimilar to the streaming wars. It's really hard to bring up prices again once people are used to something costing a certain amount.
And as you expect it hurts indies the most. People spending years on a decent product and they are locked to selling at $10 because the market is so used to deep sales. At some point the next generation will scoff at the idea of paying for any game.
johnnyanmac · 41d ago
If a studio dies, it dies. Unions don't nor are trying to fix that. it happens.
But that's not the situation right now. It's companies making record revenue but choosing to do mass layoffs to make numbers look good. That's what unions fix. These companies aren't going broke from retaining existing talent. Those west coast studios are making hundreds of billions to compensate, so I'm not worried about them neither.
>I've heard a couple people who crossed over from the film industry say it's just going to turn most roles into contracts (just like the film industry), and will quickly filter out the unskilled and less driven people.
sure, they can, have, and will try to. Issue is that games are much harder to plan than film (or perhaps the executives simply can't plan as well). So a lot of those principles that "worked" in film go out the door. In addition, with service games on the rise you can't just rush something out to make day 1 revenue and tear everything down.
YesBox · 40d ago
"Record Revenue"
While there are some success, there are also some failures--all across the cost scale. WB games were making $XXX,XXX,XXX games, and just had to shut down 3 studios and cancel a game.
Lots of other examples (Anthem, Concord, Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin to name a few)
That record revenue is used to fund the next game, which is almost always more expensive than the last.
nitwit005 · 41d ago
Being a contractor isn't inherently bad. If you work at a company that is contracted to work on games or films, you're more insulated from the financial risks. You will normally get paid either way.
Sounds like an effort of the CWA, who is also behind the efforts to unionize Google, the Apple Stores, Mapbox, the NY Times, NPR, and the gaming companies mentioned at the bottom of the article:
This is the first I've heard of "direct-join union"s. DuckDuckGo only brings up variations of this article, or the pages to join individual, employer specific unions.
Where can I learn more about this type of union? Is there one for US IT workers?
Look to who is benefiting. Do you see any names you recognize? Anybody you love to hear?
If you want to hear, see, mocap them more make sure they are on board before your declare a side.
Edit: typo
bentt · 39d ago
25 years in the game industry. This is worth a try. I would rather see individuals derisked more so they can be creative and happy. This may mean top performers make less and crappy workers don’t leave fast enough. It is worth the risk of that. The studios have been irresponsible since video games became an investment vehicle. Pendulum needs to swing back.
Fwiw I have been indie for 10 years so this would not benefit me.
wnevets · 41d ago
Kind of surprising it has taken this long for such little progress, video game workers have been abused by these mega corporations for decades [1].
looking at the games US workers have put out... this is only gonna make 'western' games worse.
US games are in a tremendous slump of quality and seem to be slop factories rn. Add in unions, I don't know. I don't see this helping the slop factories become not slop factories.
johnnyanmac · 41d ago
how about slop factories that don't abuse workers as a start? do people ordered to make bad games deserved to be treated like slop?
egypturnash · 41d ago
WOOOO
TaurenHunter · 41d ago
Gamergate II loading...
blacktits69 · 39d ago
yeah they make stolen game concepts and then shadowban me and psychologically torture me to play with fucking losers
charcircuit · 41d ago
Looking at their website, it has obvious socialism / communism design influences. I hope these activists fail to get a foothold in the industry. These are not the type of people I want to work with and it would be bad for the stock price.
frakt0x90 · 41d ago
Most people joining unions are concerned about horrible working conditions and lack of basic respect and rights. The stock price should not be put above basic decency.
short_sells_poo · 41d ago
It is truly amazing how violently certain people want to fight against their own rights and organizations whose purpose is to fight for those rights.
ThrowawayR2 · 41d ago
Workers in industries where there's an oversupply of labor driving down wages want unions. Workers in industries where there's an undersupply of labor don't care because there's no benefit to them. What's amazing about that?
mullingitover · 41d ago
Unions in the past century were strongest when there was a chronic labor shortage. Somewhere around the 1970s the labor shortage ended, and that's also about the time that union power began a serious decline.
Negotiating solo against a large organization with an available labor pool is the weakest possible position, even if the type of talent is in demand. I'd argue that people always want the power in compensation negotiations that's only obtainable by forming strong associations. It's just a matter of whether they can get it or not based on the political power of their counterparties. This type of conflict has been happening since the dawn of civilization.
johnnyanmac · 41d ago
There are some people who are a part of (or want to be a part of) companies and unions are venom to them. This narrative of Americans being future millionaires really clouds judgement on the reality that many can barely escape scape out of minimum wage labor. Very few millioaires (and no bilionaire) got where they were by starting out a minimum wage.
Vaslo · 41d ago
Source?
johnnyanmac · 41d ago
corollary: who is joining a union to pump their stock price?
This is all opinionistic, but use a bit of logic here. Ask yourself what a union is and what the incentives are.
diggan · 41d ago
> it has obvious socialism / communism design influences
Which website are you looking at?
Unless I'm mistaken, the website is https://uvw-cwa.org/ and it isn't even red, have no hammers/sickles, and mostly talks about "stronger together", which fair enough, I guess could give some knee-jerk reaction about socialism if you don't believe in working together with others.
Ah, much like Republicans - the party of socialism and communism because red.
duskwuff · 41d ago
Do you also avoid YouTube, Coca-Cola, and Netflix because of their obvious socialist connections? :)
charcircuit · 41d ago
No, because I am evaluating the overall design language the organization uses. Red is just one element that this group of people uses, but other people also use red.
johnnyanmac · 41d ago
you've done a horrible job in that case, and even calling your analysis bikeshedding is overly praising this.
Do more than judge a book by the color of its cover next time to communicattion such design language.
charcircuit · 40d ago
I wasn't the one who first mentioned color, and I gave an example other than color. People attacking my statement by focusing on color are trying to paint me as ridiculous.
mullingitover · 41d ago
You're going to be furious when you look at the terminology and symbolism of the United States:
- it's a "Union," founded by "We the people" rather than being subjects subservient to an ordained ruler
- It has revolutionary ideals at its core
- There are fasces everywhere, an overt symbol of collective effort
- Right out of the gate, the US socialized one of the largest industries: transporting mail across the nation. Founders wrote it into the Constitution to ensure that it was untouchable
- To go along with that, the interstate highway system is a massive, communal project
- The most politically untouchable service, something politicians practically place on an altar, is a massive wealth redistribution scheme: Social Security
Beyond all this I didn't see a single thing on that site that has socialism design influences, which frankly makes it sort of un-American.
sham1 · 40d ago
> Looking at their website, it has obvious socialism / communism design influences.
Okay, and why is this exactly bad? After all, the workers behind games want to get better working environments and they use the workers' movements symbolism in representing this. Also, class solidarity.
> These are not the type of people I want to work with
And you don't have to. You can always go indie and not associate yourself with people who organise themselves for the sake of a better industry. No one's forcing you to have solidarity and no one is forced to have solidarity with you.
> and it would be bad for the stock price.
I'll be frank (and a tad polemical) but if an industry cannot maintain its value without exploiting its workers, it shouldn't exist. That's just the free market at work.
devnullbrain · 41d ago
The film industry does fine.
But, well yes. In many countries outside NA, unions are affiliated with left-wing parties.
charcircuit · 41d ago
I don't watch American films. Requiring everyone to be in a union results in a homogeneous where there is the same garbage and degeneracy being produced that is not for me.
devnullbrain · 41d ago
Your point might come across as disingenuous if you start by complaining about stock prices but immediately switch to cultural dogwhistle concerns.
tekla · 41d ago
Who cares? A union doesn't stop the fact that high budget games just kinda suck. Layoffs happen because these games bomb over and over and over and money runs out.
chii · 41d ago
a union doesn't guarantee money, that's true. However, a union can guarantee acceptable hours worked - for example, limit overtime (without pay) to X hrs per week.
Or, they ensures you're credited regardless if you left before the game shipped (because it is a form of portfolio for your career).
And lastly, a union means you cannot be exploited hard, like a lot of wanabe game programmers and artists are wont to be.
qingcharles · 41d ago
I quit gamedev because the hours were insane (often 80/wk) and the pay was ridiculously low. I would have loved a union to have tamped that down.
But.. the core problem was the schedule for development was bunk. If the schedule was right you wouldn't need crazy long hours.
FirmwareBurner · 41d ago
> If the schedule was right you wouldn't need crazy long hours.
Unless you're making the next GTA6 for which the customer is willing to wait forever, if you increase the schedule so that everyone works fewer hours, then you'll get outcompeted in the free market by game devs from China, Korea and Japan where long hours are not an issue and can get games much quicker to market on lower budgets, putting you out of business.
johnnyanmac · 41d ago
Games aren't manufacturing. Studios can try, but no one is going to make Elder Scrolls VI feel like ES6 except Bethesda's team, design, and tech. Especially when people doubt Bethesda can do it themselves. Silksong is not something you can outsource to China. Even decent competition can't quite nail that feel people have about The Sims.
Games also aren't zero sum either. Turns out consumers can buy more than 1 game a year.
chii · 40d ago
Unfortunately, most of those games you named are labours of love, and do not bring as much revenue per dollar spent as shitty mobile gambling slot machine games.
And those are what's available as work these days, but has increasingly been outsourced to cheaper locations. Good riddence, but it also means lost jobs.
FirmwareBurner · 40d ago
>Games aren't manufacturing
Yes it is if you're EA, Ubisoft, Microsoft, Sony, etc. The executives there run the game making like factories.
>Studios can try, but no one is going to make Elder Scrolls VI feel like ES6 except Bethesda's team, design, and tech.
The original Bethesda staff that worked on your favorite franchises doesn't work there anymore, they all retired or moved on to greener pastures and the studio, just like EA, Ubisoft, etc is full of clueless underpaid and overworked juniors that don't have the skills or eye for detail the original staff had. Here the Chinese and Koreans will eat you alive.
>Games also aren't zero sum either.
No, but the hours in a days is a zero sum. People have the same free time after school/work to play games, this doesn't grow with the market. So they have to carefully pick what games they'll spend their time and money on. And if it's between some Western slop or an Asian game that's better and cheaper, they'll pick the latter. The more competitive the gaming market is by international players, the more western game studios will be squeezed out.
qingcharles · 41d ago
Humans are humans. I'm betting the workers in Asia doing 80+ hours are equally as weary as the ones in the West. What's the burnout rate? It's expensive to replace a developer halfway through development as it takes forever to get up to speed on both the codebase and the game design.
FirmwareBurner · 41d ago
>I'm betting the workers in Asia doing 80+ hours are equally as weary as the ones in the West.
Of course, but workers in the west also have strong economy and a lot of other better choice than working in a sweatshop. Workers in Asia do not , that's why all offshoring goes there.
johnnyanmac · 41d ago
Pretty much everything said here is incorrect in this current context.
FirmwareBurner · 41d ago
What is correct then?
hamandcheese · 41d ago
Why aren't China, Korea, and Japan outcompeting Hollywood?
FirmwareBurner · 41d ago
They are starting to outcompete Hollywood on quality (see Godzilla minus one, Squid Game, Parasite, etc), they just don't have the hundred millions of dollars of marketing budget that Hollywood has to push and advertise their movies in foreign cinemas across the world, nor do Americans have a huge appetite of watching movies with subtitles, nor could they read even if they wanted to ("54% of adults have a literacy below sixth-grade level"[1]).
And cool, good for them. They can get laid off after Korean game devs working for 1/5 the pay make games that sell much better
munk-a · 41d ago
You're focusing on a fact of the market which is not relevant to unionization discussions - what you're presenting is a risk for everyone in the industry. Instead unionization focuses on doing what we can to ensure we're treated with common decency and respect where we do work.
robertlagrant · 41d ago
> what you're presenting is a risk for everyone in the industry
I don't think that's quite true. Unions can definitely make a company less competitive, in addition to the usual headwinds they face.
munk-a · 41d ago
Your statement isn't false but it isn't the norm. Unionized employees have much higher retention rates and that comes with better skill growth within an organization which generally leads to a more competitive entity. The modern market driven employment process causes massive long term inefficiencies while optimizing for short term valuation which can increase debt accessibility but generally lowers long term value. I think this is a wider discussion however and it'd be better to focus any examination of unions on the employee outcomes who are effectively the consumers of union.
Whether a company prospers or fails the employees working for that company will, in nearly all circumstances, have much better quality of employment while that company lasts. I'd argue that long term company health is supported by unionization but I understand that there is a massive entrenched cultural rejection of that notion.
robertlagrant · 41d ago
> I'd argue that long term company health is supported by unionization
This is too black and white. Unionization creates another power structure in a company, one that isn't particularly aligned with company health, but can be. It just depends on the people involved and how they use that power.
> but I understand that there is a massive entrenched cultural rejection of that notion.
I've no idea what you mean by a cultural rejection - which culture are you talking about?
johnnyanmac · 41d ago
>It just depends on the people involved and how they use that power.
this is basically a tautology so it's a useless statement. Water for a human can bring them back to life, drown them, or tear their body apart. of course context, intent, and factors matter.
But in general, unions are good for a traditional company health: happy workers -> more productivity -> better products. Us being in this turmoil where we aren't fousing on better products doesn't change that.
robertlagrant · 41d ago
You've dismissed what I said and then immediately fell victim to it. I don't think you can assume unions create happier workers, nor that happier workers create better products. Unions can also just make comfortable jobsworths. There is no guarantee of anything there.
This is one of those things that's hard to spot from an un-unionised standpoint. You have hard-working, driven workers who sometimes suffer unfairnesses that a union would solve. So unions look good, because your workers are hard-working and driven, and it's all upside.
A decade of unionisation might look very different. For example, the UK in the 1970s briefly moved to a 3 day working week[0] because of coal miner strikes that meant there wasn't enough power in the country. Not all examples are this extreme, partly because we learned from that experience, it's worth thinking of things more objectively, outside of the current context, and analysing the pros and cons of both positions.
> I've no idea what you mean by a cultural rejection - which culture are you talking about?
Eh, I grew up in the states and unions were heavily demonized there. I tend to couch my words quite defensively due to that - my apologies.
> This is too black and white. Unionization creates another power structure in a company, one that isn't particularly aligned with company health, but can be. It just depends on the people involved and how they use that power.
I agree that this isn't a guarantee, there are both bad unions and some good unions that do ill for what they perceive to be good reasons - however, generally speaking, increasing job security and tamping down on companies' instinct to turn to layoffs will usually benefit companies. My experience in the workforce is that larger companies use layoffs as a frequent tool for stock price manipulation when they're having a bad quarter to appear "lean" - and while the markets do respond positively to that it generally comes at the expense of long term company health.
This is definitely a case where both unions and companies can be in the wrong - but it seems that companies are much more often in the wrong. Long tenured employees are quite valuable and layoffs should be a tool used in the extremes to account for overgrowth and shouldn't be happening multiple times in the same decade unless a company is in severely poor health.
soperj · 41d ago
Can also get you a loyal workforce like at Costco.
devnullbrain · 41d ago
Insomniac faced job cuts just 4 months after releasing Spider-Man 2, a game that sold 11 million units and had a score of 97% on Opencritic at release. Epic Games also laid off staff last year. They made a game you may have heard of called 'Fortnite'. It's been rather successful.
But then so has most of the industry, which has experienced growth year-on-year.
A profit does not prevent layoffs and no individual can 10X themselves to safety. There is a huge power and incentive disparity between the people with the power to initiate layoffs and the people who get laid off. There's a way to shrink the gap, but it means accepting you have more in common with your colleagues than your shareholders, then communicating it collectively.
johnnyanmac · 41d ago
>They made a game you may have heard of called 'Fortnite'. It's been rather successful.
ehh, I give it a week /s
But yes, i'm surprised people still fall into this notion that the last 3 years of layoffs falls into anything close to a just world. it's been clear that these tech cuts are not merit based for a while.
lenerdenator · 41d ago
What makes you think they just kinda suck?
tekla · 41d ago
What is the last game you can think of that has the cultural impact of the Halo 3 release?
Etheryte · 41d ago
This is a common phenomenon, but I forget what it's called. Everyone thinks the golden age of whatever was when they grew up with it and it's never been quite the same ever since. Doesn't make it true though.
dandellion · 41d ago
It's not that. Some of my favourite games of all time have been made in the last few years. Japanese devs, eastern European devs, Nordic devs don't seem to have any issues making absolute bangers. Meanwhile, the most recent one in my list from an American developer is... Skyrim. Over a decade old.
Almost half of the games on that list launched after 2010, 6 of those being after 2020. Not sure what qualifies a "modern game", but after 2010 would probably be where I personally draw the line.
The most recent game on that list is from 2023, maybe it just takes time before a game end up on that list? Baldurs Gate 3 was beyond mainstream popular at one point, and surely will end up that list sooner or later, but maybe it's still too early?
mrob · 41d ago
I draw the line at the 2006 release of the Horse Armor DLC for Oblivion:
This is the turning point where the industry began to change from selling products to selling services. Expansion packs existed before then, but they were sold as complete experiences, essentially mini-sequels sold at a discount because they reused the same engine. The horse armor was something different and controversial at the time.
robertlagrant · 41d ago
I wouldn't call a 16 year old game particularly modern.
I would probably say the OP was commenting more on Western gaming, as that's the pattern (see UbiSoft's consecutive string of failures, for example). Games like Elden Ring, Animal Crossing, and Cyberpunk came out of popular non-Western gaming.
The only Western games in that list for the last 6 years are Call of Duty games and Hogwarts Legacy, which was good, although from what I remember vilified by Western media for helping enrich JK Rowling.
johnnyanmac · 41d ago
Why are we using business expenses to argue cultural impact of games to begin with? And how does this relate to unions?
robertlagrant · 40d ago
> Why are we using business expenses to argue cultural impact of games to begin with?
I wasn't.
> And how does this relate to unions?
I was replying to the comment above, not a different comment.
ANewFormation · 41d ago
Think about what you're saying - the majority of those games are at least 16 years old.
That itself is fairly damning but what puts it over the top is that there are wayyyy more gamers nowadays than there were 16 years ago.
Modern AAA stuff is just simply pretty bad. Games made on a conveyor belt just don't work, at least beyond a point - and that point, wherever it may be, is well behind us for just about all AAA studios.
johnnyanmac · 41d ago
Yes... almost like 16 years ago is when game sales weren't depending on how long games were on shelves. Shocking that Minecraft can still sell today because it's been on a digial storefront for almost 20 years.
>Modern AAA stuff is just simply pretty bad
1. your conclusion doesnt match your premise. what does sales have to do with quality?
2. this whole argument is just a useless tangent. If you want to look for games not on a conveyor belt, don't look at best selling lists. Especially for networked games continually updated for decades vs. hand crafted releases
ANewFormation · 40d ago
There's obviously many more long tail games, but with few exceptions games, even long tailed, tend to be heavily front loaded. The list, in terms of games from e.g. 2018-2023 will likely look identical, so far as the games included, in a decade.
The reason the reflects on AAA games is because AAA in modern times is much more about budget than depth or quality. AAA games are dumping massive amounts of money on titles with the hope of a quick turn-around, but sales for these games are increasingly meh, because the games are increasingly meh.
Even the same studios do a poor job of rehashing stuff.
There are currently something like 10x as many players playing Skyrim as Starfield. It's quite pathetic.
tmtvl · 41d ago
We should probably define what 'AAA' means, because Capcom has been hitting it out of the park pretty consistently as of late. The REmakes, Monster Hunter World and sequels, Devil May Cry 5,...
jcranmer · 41d ago
First off, video game sales are notoriously opaque, and one always has to take numbers like this with a grain of salt. (I particularly doubt the number for The Oregon Trail here, and the citation for it is extremely weak).
But also, note that many of the games--especially the ones near the top--also double- and triple-count their numbers by doing rereleases and special editions and whatnot that all get to count for the "same" game.
Next, note that already 10% of the list came out since the COVID-19 pandemic started--is that not modern enough for you?
Finally, several of these games are continually being worked on and receiving content updates. Minecraft and The Sims 4 may be over a decade old, but they both received updates within the past several months, and their players fully expect more updates in the next several months. Does that mean they aren't modern?
Goronmon · 41d ago
Well, Halo 3 isn't on that list either.
And I see a handful of games released since 2020 on that list.
It also only deals with games that are sold. Whereas games like Genshin Impact have a massive worldwide audience and yet aren't going to show up on that list.
No comments yet
simonw · 41d ago
Games don't have the same effect as movies where everyone sees them within a month of release.
It's hard for a game released in the past year to make it onto a top ten list full of games like GTA5 that have been consistently selling copies for over a decade.
smeeger · 41d ago
and it doesnt make you any more right. i remember in 2007 i noticed that movies sucked… i was a teenager. and i was right because every industry has its ebbs and flows. if you just measure the metrics of cultural impact, halo is a high water mark. people dont even play single player games or watch movies anymore. now the big cultural impact is happening on tiktok and things like that. things are not the same regardless of how much you want to believe that
johnnyanmac · 41d ago
>i remember in 2007 i noticed that movies sucked… i was a teenager. and i was right
You had an opinion, it was neiter right nor wrong. I was a teenager and watched Juno, 300, Bay's Transformers, And Pirates of the Carribean 3. I thought it was a renaissance. It's all based on personal experience.
> things are not the same regardless of how much you want to believe that
So how is this related to a union in 2025?
SpicyLemonZest · 41d ago
Just from the 2020s, Hogwarts Legacy, Animal Crossing New Horizons, and Valorant. I think you're overweighting the impact of Halo 3 - note that its sales numbers put it nowhere close to the list of best-selling games you linked below.
pmalynin · 41d ago
Most recently I think Baldurs Gate 3. People have also been enjoying Balatro a lot
smeeger · 41d ago
go out onto the sidewalk in your city. ask a hundred people what they think about balders gate 3 and then ask them what they think of halo… doing so might break your mind open to the truth
Maxatar · 41d ago
I didn't go out and ask random people, but as far as sales figures go from what I find Baldur's Gate 3 has sold more copies than Halo 3 has. Of course it's not a fair comparison since Halo 3 was released in 2007 and only on a single platform, but I would imagine if I went around and asked a random group of people they'd likely be far more familiar with Baldur's Gate 3.
Halo 3 seems to also be very popular only in the U.S., while Baldur's Gate 3 is more recognized internationally.
daedrdev · 41d ago
Only if they are in your age group though. People older wouldn't know Halo, and Fortnite is far more popular than halo ever was both overall and with the youth.
johnnyanmac · 41d ago
break my mind that... most people on the street didn't play halo. Or any "hardcore video game". Sure.
xboxnolifes · 41d ago
Fortnite has had a larger impact on the newest generation of gamers.
johnnyanmac · 41d ago
that's highly opportunistic so what's your goal here? Some people can say Baldur's Gate 3 from less than 2 years ago. Others, Eldin Ring from 3 years. Some may even go more niche and suggest games like Undertale or Hollow Knight or go more artsy and suggest Orba Dinn. It's as subjecive as art.
Closest I can get to an objective answer would be Fortnite (since you aren't really specifying the kind of cultral impact). and that's "only" 7 years old or so.
devnullbrain · 41d ago
I know people who called in sick on the release date of the Elden Ring DLC.
qingcharles · 41d ago
Is Halo 3 good? I honestly didn't even know there was a Halo 3 and I'm an ex-gamedev, so I'm thinking the impact of it wasn't that huge?
ANewFormation · 41d ago
It set the standard for online matchmaking, had exceptional (if not revolutionary) AI for an FPS, phenomenal level design, and is a definite competitor for the best game soundtrack ever. It is probably Bungie's magnum opus.
So it makes perfect sense that contemporary AAA devs would have no idea it even existed.
silisili · 41d ago
I'd argue Halo 2 set the standard for online matchmaking. I don't think younger people understand just how popular xbox live/halo 2 were in that era. Probably how us olders underestimate just how popular stuff like Fortnite is today.
Jach · 41d ago
I'd second this. The "advanced AI" was pioneered with Halo 2's Behavior Trees. I'd not give very high props to level design to any of the 3, partly because I so easily remember all the re-used assets and geometry and moving areas, but also because Halo was responsible for what I see as a decline in overall FPS design. From reload mechanics to limited ability to carry weapons, to the level design itself that went from more abstract and branching level design to long corridors with too much linearity. There's more creativity in things like the Metroid Prime series, just because of the need for backtracking and new areas when you get new gear. (Of course the Half-Life series also contributed, though interestingly few FPS games have tried to imitate the physics puzzles.) Later on Gears of War and other cover shooters took that to its own sort of perfection. There's good level design in all these, but it's good in their contexts, not exactly phenomenal or standout especially just looking at the FPS genre. (The multiplayer Halo maps are of course pretty good, but again while it's probably just a difference in taste, I think of them as overall steps down from what was going on in Quake/Unreal and their derivatives.)
I guess I'm mostly just amused by the initial comment suggesting Halo 3 of all games as a super incredible cultural impact game. I just can't see it like that at all -- at the time it was just a capstone to what Halo 1 and 2 set up. And in modern times, Halo is so irrelevant that it's probably going to be on Sony's console.
Modern Warfare 2 probably was more influential than Halo 3, especially for the FPS genre.
Jach · 41d ago
I don't dispute it had massive hype at the time. I wasn't even an xbox fanboy but I still played it with friends who had the system. I still think its long-term cultural impact is rather minimal, the biggest influences of the series on gaming as a whole came from Halo 1 and 2. And as a sibling comment notes, Call of Duty Modern Warfare released only a few months later and was similarly massive, but unlike Halo, CoD has kept up its appeal and impact over the years, from MW2 and on. (Even newer Halo games ape CoD more than their own roots.) Most gamers haven't played Halo, though hopefully most would recognize its title. In comparison, Minecraft (which came later), has such broader name recognition as well as more people who have actually played it, and continues to have strong and popular cultural impact to this day. It didn't have a flashy launch, though, sure.
Perhaps I'm just missing your argument. Is your argument mostly about the immediate "pop" surrounding the launch, rather than any sort of longer term cultural impact? If so, then sure, I'll grant Halo 3 had one of and perhaps even the largest launch hype of all time from the physical release age. Still it's not like Halo 2 wasn't hugely popular at its launch too, though 3 was probably bigger. And of course the already mentioned Modern Warfare had a big launch, though by MW2 the whole culture of launch hype with midnight releases and camping out and so on was just about dead thanks to digital distribution and such. You had other games later on with crazy marketing too -- how are super bowl ads relevant? Dante's Inferno (2010) is a game I've never played but it also had a super bowl ad I've never seen until now. I'd dare say its impact is far less than Halo's, both at its launch (seems to be a God of War clone) and since.
But if you really are arguing that nothing has had a bigger long-term cultural impact since, the single counterexample of Minecraft is enough to stand against that. Speaking of God of War, there's another franchise that has probably by now out-shined the Halo series for cultural impact. (And maybe worth arguing that it probably contributed to Halo 4's dumb "Press button to beat the Didact" QTE?) I'd even put 2011's Dark Souls higher for birthing a new subgenre term, the "Soulslike", even if it took until Elden Ring for FromSoft themselves to hit the pinnacles of financial success and launch success with the formula. And so many other games.
tekla · 41d ago
Name a single thing that GoW has that has had a cultural impact. Even now, I have normie Navy friends who want to push names for ships after Halo.
USS Pillar of Autumn
USS Long Night of Solace
USS Spirit of Fire
I do not know of any series that has this level of cultural impact
TeaBrain · 40d ago
>MW2 the whole culture of launch hype with midnight releases and camping out and so on was just about dead thanks to digital distribution and such
Not quite. MW2 was the largest video game launch on record by pre-orders, revenue and units sold when it was released. Its release broke nearly all of Halo 3's release records. There was no digital release at launch. It also had a massive advertising campaign. There were large ads in every store with an electronics or games sections to an extent that I haven't seen since.
ineedaj0b · 41d ago
that's likely why you're an ex-game dev if you didn't know about Halo 3
johnnyanmac · 41d ago
How about we make sure the workers aren't abused and then talk about improving the quality of the games? There are a few decent studios who still make unsatisfactory release
>Layoffs happen because these games bomb over and over and over and money runs out.
Not these days. How many layoffs have EA/Activision done now? 4 waves each?. Sony's been doing well but still laying off all the NA studios.
Good reminder that the word "union" is overloaded and doesn't always mean what you might assume.
People who join a union like this don't have union representation or union contracts with companies. They rely on individual members to take action in various forms within there own companies. In theory they could call for a strike and ask everyone who is a member to strike from their respective companies, but in practice it's more about raising awareness and making noise in hopes of driving change.
So while technically it's a union, it's not comparable to what most people think of as a union in the United States.
It's a problematic perspective. "The" union might be an impotent lost cause, but "A" union can appear suddenly, strike hard, and dissipate once the need for it has gone. This seems more like the latter.
Every employee is replaceable, banding together with others that might replace you instead of letting them play you like a fool is a power move.
> These people have disabled a critical part of your supply chain and they will restore it if you improve the working conditions for these other people.
...where both groups of people are part of the same union despite having very different jobs. If you can achieve solidarity across sectors, you can strike much more effectively than by merely refusing to work.
In some countries/industries you have to be a member of an union by the law. Just by working in industry, union is forced upon you by law, and you have to pay their fees. The only way out, is to form your own union, with all paperwork. It really sucks for self employed folks.
That doesn’t have any relevance for American unions, but people seems to think any issue they ever had with a union applies to every union.
I’d suggest you read up on “fake unions” it’s 1984 level double talk shit.
There are also fake unions in the United States in the cannabis industry. Pretty grim situation.
However those are paperwork exercises without any leverage that run into legal issues inside the US. “Anyone who signed a labor peace agreement with ProTech Local 33 has 90 days from the ruling to sign a new pact with a legitimate union or risk losing their license”
The Chinese version is stable as they are being actively propped up by the state.
The Lack of Genuine Worker Representation
The All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) is China's only legal trade union, and it is required by the Trade Union Law to "uphold the leadership of the Communist Party." Because one of the ACFTU's priorities is to organize and mobilize "vast numbers of workers to make contributions to the sound and rapid development of the economy," and to foster "harmony in labour relations" so that such development may take place, the vast majority of "trade unions" in enterprises effectively remain under the de facto control of management.
https://www.cecc.gov/publications/commission-analysis/recent...
The All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) is still the only legally recognized trade union.
That sounds like the Republican Party.
Because of this, there's free management training, free skilled training, and holiday and pay minimums. Plus, free advice and legal support for workers.
Screen Actors Guild
Writers Guild of America
Directors Guild of America
NFL Players Association
Now, I'll give you, SAG, WGA, and DGA don't control all film and television production and there are plenty of non-union jobs available. But most of the film and television you consume is union work.
Every player in the NFL is required to be a member of the NFLPA.
The thing about the "hollywood" unions is that they are very supportive of the others. So when the recent writer's strike was taking place, the actors also supported them as well as the directors by not working without their writers.
If the auto union workers strike, the steel workers aren't stopping work in solidarity. If the stevedores go on strike, the truck drivers don't go on strike in solidarity.
American labor law was written when unions were much stronger. It assumes strong unions and strong employers in conflict, with the NLRB as referee. That hasn't been true in the US for decades now.
The others, though, yes.
There is a union for coaches and it's entirely voluntary. Which is why you won't see Belichick in most Madden games as his contract has to be negotiated separately.
No they're not. It's optional.
- Closed shop - must be member of union to be hired.
- Union shop - must join union when hired.
- Agency shop - don't have to join union, but have to pay a fee to it.
- Open shop - don't have to join union, but can.
- Yellow-dog contract - not allowed to join union.[1]
The two extremes are mostly illegal in the US.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow-dog_contract
Closed shops and union shops just seem like an arrangement between employers and unions, not something forced upon you "by law"?
So if your shop is more efficient than the union shop, you don't get to compete on that price savings. It tilts the market towards the unions.
The first statement is true in a few industries, but the second statements are false in any industry in which the first statement applies. If union membership is mandated, you don't get a choice in the union you join.
And for the last bit about self-employed folks: the only industries which mandate union membership in which it is also possible to be self-employed are the Hollywood guilds, which set compensation minimums. Hollywood union members are free to negotiate higher compensation, and many do.
The worst thing about all the anti-union FUD that gets spread on HN is that they assume that tech workers would be in the same kind of union as janitors, when the most similar structure would be the Hollywood guilds.
Source? I'd guess most unions start as collective-bargaining unions because if they can't colletively bargain I'm struggling to see their point over, like, a conference or subreddit.
When my studio was closed and 36 of us fired without notice 7 months ago, I poked around at union options and was shocked to find they were only inside individual studios, not even across whole companies, much less across the industry.
The games industry is 100 years behind film and music in standardizing contracts, roles, and rights (including IP rights for failed projects). This initiative gives us a chance to fix it!
The film and TV production situation is nothing to aspire toward... especially if you are a contractor. It never lead to more stable work for the crews, and became a feast or famine type seasonal working arrangement for many.
Unions are better than none, as at least your crew actually gets paid by some rat-fink production manager that often disappeared on wrap.
Best of luck, and some of the best talent I've met was shafted by a AAA studio at least once in their career (often for some really bizarre reasons.) =3
The US (and more generally Western) gaming industry is getting obliterated by Asian studios. I doubt a union (pre-supposing this is a union, which it is not) would help US studios be more competitive.
A union doesn't help you if your company, or entire industry, goes bankrupt.
Asia isn't really booming either. At least if you compare to western studios. Japan had decades of a stangant economy and are coming out of a recession. Any kind of growth is a gold mine for them. China is a minefield as well economically.
> I doubt a union (pre-supposing this is a union, which it is not) would help US studios be more competitive.
It's not about competition, it's about protecting your livliehood so you don't get sacked to make an earnings call look a smidgen better.
Treating employees in the industry fair might not change this, but should be beneficial to them regardless, unless it would make the misalignment of the product offer even worse which is entirely possible.
>it just targets a small subset willing to spend the most money.
people with money aren't worried about getting laid off. Quite the contrary.
The salaries here are far lower than in the USA which probably helps a bit, that's not good for the workers though of course.
In the UK, you can be join the national union even if you are the only one in your workplace. Typically union recognition within a particular workplace comes later after sufficient numbers join.
In other words your comment is hyperbolic and does not apply to the topic at hand.
Stress & constant overtime crunch culture will absolutely be a detriment on the health and wellbeing of workers in any industry.
Again, labor laws saved lives in the past, they can save and/or benefit lives today.
>In other words your comment is hyperbolic and does not apply to the topic at hand.
Welcome to the topic at hand.
They can, but game dev is not a critical national industry that politicians are gonna fight for with laws to protect labor. Otherwise we could have had unionized clothes making union but what saw instead was the entire textile industry shipped oversees. Game dev will follow a similar fate.
You can unionize if you want, but unless you're guarantee to have a blockbuster IP on your hands capable of raking in billions, you won't be able to compete with game devs from lower CoL countries.
In a globalized free market with no tariffs, high CoL labor can't compete with low CoL labor making commodity goods, which a a lot of games are nowadays. Unions won't fix this, but accelerate offshoring at the expense of the local industry.
I mean, those devs might unionize as well. Certainly would've helped both the ZA/UM and CD Projekt Red devs, for different reasons.
The word "might" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. If unionization in Asia was so easy we would have seen it happen a long time ago, but what we saw instead was suicide nets on buildings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpB9Aeq8lUA
Granted, I have no doubt that the work culture is much tougher than in North America. But even the Chinese government has recognized 996 and taken steps to address it.
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/east-asia/china-neijuan-invo...
Also, Foxconn manufacturing isn't exactly the same thing as NetEase video game development, even if they both exist within the same labor environment.
Foxconn workers killing themselves by jumping off their office budling is a caricature to you? How out of touch can you be?
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012...
https://www.foxbusiness.com/features/apple-foxconn-factory-c...
All that said: A hit based industry is not one that provides stability. I cant think of how slapping a union on top of an unstable foundation is going to solve anything. I've heard a couple people who crossed over from the film industry say it's just going to turn most roles into contracts (just like the film industry), and will quickly filter out the unskilled and less driven people.
There isn't really a solution to this. Market pressure keep the prices of games down. Funding gets a better bang for buck by investing in up and coming countries (e.g. Poland). Most qualified[1] games don't even break a million. Hitting [just!] $150,000 in revenue is when Steam starts seriously promoting your game[2]. $150K is not even enough to live in a coastal city (after dev. costs), never mind hiring people.
[1] The dev had the intent to market _and_ sell a legitimate product, which is the minority of games on steam.
[2] howtomarketagame.com
You mean like the entire television and film industry? Any production over a certain (small) size is completely unionized. It's so massively successful the American cultural exports dominate in almost every corner of the world.
I'm not sure where the idea that unions can't work for the games industry comes from since it's almost identical to the film and TV industry. Unions exist so workers don't get exploited and to provide stability.
What about Nintendo? They famously have very limited layoffs. They see value in providing stability and maintaing culture and institutional memory.
If anything, it's short-term profit-seeking that destroys industries. You see this in the world of original content production for streamers. They cut the size of writers rooms. They tried to no longer have writers on set. There's a push for "mini writing rooms". Why? Because it cuts costs on a very short term basis.
In doing so, Netflix (etc) are intentionally throwing away the model that created billion dollar properties like Friends, Seinfeld, ER, MASH, Cheers, etc that, to this day, generate massive profits. Seinfeld was known for getting over a million viewers when it was running in syndication.
Long-term it creates problems. Future products and showrunners are writers who need to get experience on set. Shortsighted cost-reudction is literally killing the future of the industry.
As for the price of video games, there are several aspects to this:
1. AAA publishers like to complain that games still cost $60 after years. That's true but also the distribution is significantly higher than it was 20 years ago. You're selling way more games;
2. The marginal cost of producing a game via download is essentially zero; and
3. Games eventaully get much cheaper on Steam. That's a good thing. Early experiments with this showed that selling a game cheap on Steam could generate significantly more revenue than the original release. And because the marginal cost is zero, it's all profit.
But not forcing suits to concede. Premature to assume voice actors will win in the end. On the continuum of "indispensible", "rainmaker" talent to easily replacable, screen talent has leverage to unionize because their faces sell tickets/subscriptions. My understanding is voice actors are bluntly not valued as much, hence the long strike, they don't have comparable leverage, especially with AI on horizon. Least valuable / most fungible are production, which is why the situation is increasingly shit for even existing unionized talent in entertainment and extra worse for non unionized sectors like vfx, or most of video games - they're replacable by neverending supply of talent willing to work for less, not just in US but abroad.
I don't know who will win, but it's not like these choices are not without consequence. These moves definitely slow down their plans.
Nintendo isn't an American company, and Japanese have different cultural values (with tradeoffs)
> If anything, it's short-term profit-seeking that destroys industries
Im not so confident about that. For most games, you launch it once, and you get the vast majority of the revenue within one year of release. Then the next game has to be better (and cost more) than the last. I think it has less to do with short term profits (games take years to develop).
> AAA publishers like to complain that games still cost $60 after years. That's true but also the distribution is significantly higher than it was 20 years ago. You're selling way more games;
> The marginal cost of producing a game via download is essentially zero;
You lose 30% of that to the storefront, 30% on marketing, 10% on server, 5% on engine. (fun fact: the profit margin of games were higher in the 90s) [1]
> Games eventaully get much cheaper on Steam. That's a good thing. Early experiments with this showed that selling a game cheap on Steam could generate significantly more revenue than the original release. And because the marginal cost is zero, it's all profit.
No it isn't. Not when people's expectations continue to rise.
[0] https://www.gamedevmap.com
[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/19_NC1ZskeN47LHaYJziotbA0sqL...
And as you expect it hurts indies the most. People spending years on a decent product and they are locked to selling at $10 because the market is so used to deep sales. At some point the next generation will scoff at the idea of paying for any game.
But that's not the situation right now. It's companies making record revenue but choosing to do mass layoffs to make numbers look good. That's what unions fix. These companies aren't going broke from retaining existing talent. Those west coast studios are making hundreds of billions to compensate, so I'm not worried about them neither.
>I've heard a couple people who crossed over from the film industry say it's just going to turn most roles into contracts (just like the film industry), and will quickly filter out the unskilled and less driven people.
sure, they can, have, and will try to. Issue is that games are much harder to plan than film (or perhaps the executives simply can't plan as well). So a lot of those principles that "worked" in film go out the door. In addition, with service games on the rise you can't just rush something out to make day 1 revenue and tear everything down.
While there are some success, there are also some failures--all across the cost scale. WB games were making $XXX,XXX,XXX games, and just had to shut down 3 studios and cancel a game.
Lots of other examples (Anthem, Concord, Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin to name a few)
That record revenue is used to fund the next game, which is almost always more expensive than the last.
https://cwa-union.org/news/releases/video-game-workers-launc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CODE-CWA
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Where can I learn more about this type of union? Is there one for US IT workers?
Look to who is benefiting. Do you see any names you recognize? Anybody you love to hear?
If you want to hear, see, mocap them more make sure they are on board before your declare a side.
Edit: typo
Fwiw I have been indie for 10 years so this would not benefit me.
[1] https://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html
US games are in a tremendous slump of quality and seem to be slop factories rn. Add in unions, I don't know. I don't see this helping the slop factories become not slop factories.
Negotiating solo against a large organization with an available labor pool is the weakest possible position, even if the type of talent is in demand. I'd argue that people always want the power in compensation negotiations that's only obtainable by forming strong associations. It's just a matter of whether they can get it or not based on the political power of their counterparties. This type of conflict has been happening since the dawn of civilization.
This is all opinionistic, but use a bit of logic here. Ask yourself what a union is and what the incentives are.
Which website are you looking at?
Unless I'm mistaken, the website is https://uvw-cwa.org/ and it isn't even red, have no hammers/sickles, and mostly talks about "stronger together", which fair enough, I guess could give some knee-jerk reaction about socialism if you don't believe in working together with others.
This is red. And look at the zine cover.
Do more than judge a book by the color of its cover next time to communicattion such design language.
- it's a "Union," founded by "We the people" rather than being subjects subservient to an ordained ruler
- It has revolutionary ideals at its core
- There are fasces everywhere, an overt symbol of collective effort
- Right out of the gate, the US socialized one of the largest industries: transporting mail across the nation. Founders wrote it into the Constitution to ensure that it was untouchable
- To go along with that, the interstate highway system is a massive, communal project
- The most politically untouchable service, something politicians practically place on an altar, is a massive wealth redistribution scheme: Social Security
Beyond all this I didn't see a single thing on that site that has socialism design influences, which frankly makes it sort of un-American.
Okay, and why is this exactly bad? After all, the workers behind games want to get better working environments and they use the workers' movements symbolism in representing this. Also, class solidarity.
> These are not the type of people I want to work with
And you don't have to. You can always go indie and not associate yourself with people who organise themselves for the sake of a better industry. No one's forcing you to have solidarity and no one is forced to have solidarity with you.
> and it would be bad for the stock price.
I'll be frank (and a tad polemical) but if an industry cannot maintain its value without exploiting its workers, it shouldn't exist. That's just the free market at work.
But, well yes. In many countries outside NA, unions are affiliated with left-wing parties.
Or, they ensures you're credited regardless if you left before the game shipped (because it is a form of portfolio for your career).
And lastly, a union means you cannot be exploited hard, like a lot of wanabe game programmers and artists are wont to be.
But.. the core problem was the schedule for development was bunk. If the schedule was right you wouldn't need crazy long hours.
Unless you're making the next GTA6 for which the customer is willing to wait forever, if you increase the schedule so that everyone works fewer hours, then you'll get outcompeted in the free market by game devs from China, Korea and Japan where long hours are not an issue and can get games much quicker to market on lower budgets, putting you out of business.
Games also aren't zero sum either. Turns out consumers can buy more than 1 game a year.
And those are what's available as work these days, but has increasingly been outsourced to cheaper locations. Good riddence, but it also means lost jobs.
Yes it is if you're EA, Ubisoft, Microsoft, Sony, etc. The executives there run the game making like factories.
>Studios can try, but no one is going to make Elder Scrolls VI feel like ES6 except Bethesda's team, design, and tech.
What Bethesda quality you mean? This? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0R_WcU-hsY
The original Bethesda staff that worked on your favorite franchises doesn't work there anymore, they all retired or moved on to greener pastures and the studio, just like EA, Ubisoft, etc is full of clueless underpaid and overworked juniors that don't have the skills or eye for detail the original staff had. Here the Chinese and Koreans will eat you alive.
>Games also aren't zero sum either.
No, but the hours in a days is a zero sum. People have the same free time after school/work to play games, this doesn't grow with the market. So they have to carefully pick what games they'll spend their time and money on. And if it's between some Western slop or an Asian game that's better and cheaper, they'll pick the latter. The more competitive the gaming market is by international players, the more western game studios will be squeezed out.
Of course, but workers in the west also have strong economy and a lot of other better choice than working in a sweatshop. Workers in Asia do not , that's why all offshoring goes there.
[1] https://www.crossrivertherapy.com/research/literacy-statisti...
I don't think that's quite true. Unions can definitely make a company less competitive, in addition to the usual headwinds they face.
Whether a company prospers or fails the employees working for that company will, in nearly all circumstances, have much better quality of employment while that company lasts. I'd argue that long term company health is supported by unionization but I understand that there is a massive entrenched cultural rejection of that notion.
This is too black and white. Unionization creates another power structure in a company, one that isn't particularly aligned with company health, but can be. It just depends on the people involved and how they use that power.
> but I understand that there is a massive entrenched cultural rejection of that notion.
I've no idea what you mean by a cultural rejection - which culture are you talking about?
this is basically a tautology so it's a useless statement. Water for a human can bring them back to life, drown them, or tear their body apart. of course context, intent, and factors matter.
But in general, unions are good for a traditional company health: happy workers -> more productivity -> better products. Us being in this turmoil where we aren't fousing on better products doesn't change that.
This is one of those things that's hard to spot from an un-unionised standpoint. You have hard-working, driven workers who sometimes suffer unfairnesses that a union would solve. So unions look good, because your workers are hard-working and driven, and it's all upside.
A decade of unionisation might look very different. For example, the UK in the 1970s briefly moved to a 3 day working week[0] because of coal miner strikes that meant there wasn't enough power in the country. Not all examples are this extreme, partly because we learned from that experience, it's worth thinking of things more objectively, outside of the current context, and analysing the pros and cons of both positions.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Day_Week
Eh, I grew up in the states and unions were heavily demonized there. I tend to couch my words quite defensively due to that - my apologies.
> This is too black and white. Unionization creates another power structure in a company, one that isn't particularly aligned with company health, but can be. It just depends on the people involved and how they use that power.
I agree that this isn't a guarantee, there are both bad unions and some good unions that do ill for what they perceive to be good reasons - however, generally speaking, increasing job security and tamping down on companies' instinct to turn to layoffs will usually benefit companies. My experience in the workforce is that larger companies use layoffs as a frequent tool for stock price manipulation when they're having a bad quarter to appear "lean" - and while the markets do respond positively to that it generally comes at the expense of long term company health.
This is definitely a case where both unions and companies can be in the wrong - but it seems that companies are much more often in the wrong. Long tenured employees are quite valuable and layoffs should be a tool used in the extremes to account for overgrowth and shouldn't be happening multiple times in the same decade unless a company is in severely poor health.
But then so has most of the industry, which has experienced growth year-on-year.
A profit does not prevent layoffs and no individual can 10X themselves to safety. There is a huge power and incentive disparity between the people with the power to initiate layoffs and the people who get laid off. There's a way to shrink the gap, but it means accepting you have more in common with your colleagues than your shareholders, then communicating it collectively.
ehh, I give it a week /s
But yes, i'm surprised people still fall into this notion that the last 3 years of layoffs falls into anything close to a just world. it's been clear that these tech cuts are not merit based for a while.
How many modern games are there on this list?
The most recent game on that list is from 2023, maybe it just takes time before a game end up on that list? Baldurs Gate 3 was beyond mainstream popular at one point, and surely will end up that list sooner or later, but maybe it's still too early?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_The_Elder_Scrol...
This is the turning point where the industry began to change from selling products to selling services. Expansion packs existed before then, but they were sold as complete experiences, essentially mini-sequels sold at a discount because they reused the same engine. The horse armor was something different and controversial at the time.
I would probably say the OP was commenting more on Western gaming, as that's the pattern (see UbiSoft's consecutive string of failures, for example). Games like Elden Ring, Animal Crossing, and Cyberpunk came out of popular non-Western gaming.
The only Western games in that list for the last 6 years are Call of Duty games and Hogwarts Legacy, which was good, although from what I remember vilified by Western media for helping enrich JK Rowling.
I wasn't.
> And how does this relate to unions?
I was replying to the comment above, not a different comment.
That itself is fairly damning but what puts it over the top is that there are wayyyy more gamers nowadays than there were 16 years ago.
Modern AAA stuff is just simply pretty bad. Games made on a conveyor belt just don't work, at least beyond a point - and that point, wherever it may be, is well behind us for just about all AAA studios.
>Modern AAA stuff is just simply pretty bad
1. your conclusion doesnt match your premise. what does sales have to do with quality?
2. this whole argument is just a useless tangent. If you want to look for games not on a conveyor belt, don't look at best selling lists. Especially for networked games continually updated for decades vs. hand crafted releases
The reason the reflects on AAA games is because AAA in modern times is much more about budget than depth or quality. AAA games are dumping massive amounts of money on titles with the hope of a quick turn-around, but sales for these games are increasingly meh, because the games are increasingly meh.
Even the same studios do a poor job of rehashing stuff. There are currently something like 10x as many players playing Skyrim as Starfield. It's quite pathetic.
But also, note that many of the games--especially the ones near the top--also double- and triple-count their numbers by doing rereleases and special editions and whatnot that all get to count for the "same" game.
Next, note that already 10% of the list came out since the COVID-19 pandemic started--is that not modern enough for you?
Finally, several of these games are continually being worked on and receiving content updates. Minecraft and The Sims 4 may be over a decade old, but they both received updates within the past several months, and their players fully expect more updates in the next several months. Does that mean they aren't modern?
And I see a handful of games released since 2020 on that list.
It also only deals with games that are sold. Whereas games like Genshin Impact have a massive worldwide audience and yet aren't going to show up on that list.
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It's hard for a game released in the past year to make it onto a top ten list full of games like GTA5 that have been consistently selling copies for over a decade.
You had an opinion, it was neiter right nor wrong. I was a teenager and watched Juno, 300, Bay's Transformers, And Pirates of the Carribean 3. I thought it was a renaissance. It's all based on personal experience.
> things are not the same regardless of how much you want to believe that
So how is this related to a union in 2025?
Halo 3 seems to also be very popular only in the U.S., while Baldur's Gate 3 is more recognized internationally.
Closest I can get to an objective answer would be Fortnite (since you aren't really specifying the kind of cultral impact). and that's "only" 7 years old or so.
So it makes perfect sense that contemporary AAA devs would have no idea it even existed.
I guess I'm mostly just amused by the initial comment suggesting Halo 3 of all games as a super incredible cultural impact game. I just can't see it like that at all -- at the time it was just a capstone to what Halo 1 and 2 set up. And in modern times, Halo is so irrelevant that it's probably going to be on Sony's console.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reaXYMihM1Y
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_of_Halo_3
Halo 3 broke sales records at a time where you needed to buy physical copies.
It had a famous Superbowl ad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKDkKKt9Y7I
Perhaps I'm just missing your argument. Is your argument mostly about the immediate "pop" surrounding the launch, rather than any sort of longer term cultural impact? If so, then sure, I'll grant Halo 3 had one of and perhaps even the largest launch hype of all time from the physical release age. Still it's not like Halo 2 wasn't hugely popular at its launch too, though 3 was probably bigger. And of course the already mentioned Modern Warfare had a big launch, though by MW2 the whole culture of launch hype with midnight releases and camping out and so on was just about dead thanks to digital distribution and such. You had other games later on with crazy marketing too -- how are super bowl ads relevant? Dante's Inferno (2010) is a game I've never played but it also had a super bowl ad I've never seen until now. I'd dare say its impact is far less than Halo's, both at its launch (seems to be a God of War clone) and since.
But if you really are arguing that nothing has had a bigger long-term cultural impact since, the single counterexample of Minecraft is enough to stand against that. Speaking of God of War, there's another franchise that has probably by now out-shined the Halo series for cultural impact. (And maybe worth arguing that it probably contributed to Halo 4's dumb "Press button to beat the Didact" QTE?) I'd even put 2011's Dark Souls higher for birthing a new subgenre term, the "Soulslike", even if it took until Elden Ring for FromSoft themselves to hit the pinnacles of financial success and launch success with the formula. And so many other games.
USS Pillar of Autumn USS Long Night of Solace USS Spirit of Fire
I do not know of any series that has this level of cultural impact
Not quite. MW2 was the largest video game launch on record by pre-orders, revenue and units sold when it was released. Its release broke nearly all of Halo 3's release records. There was no digital release at launch. It also had a massive advertising campaign. There were large ads in every store with an electronics or games sections to an extent that I haven't seen since.
>Layoffs happen because these games bomb over and over and over and money runs out.
Not these days. How many layoffs have EA/Activision done now? 4 waves each?. Sony's been doing well but still laying off all the NA studios.