Tangible example: Walmart labs had to quadruple the salaries once it realized they could not attract any scientists or top tier engineers.

Not many people get into computers because they dream about staring at a console to figure out why the kubernetes cluster is misbehaving again (though some do).

Like another commenter said, it's the "passion tax": The more interesting a job, the more people seek it. The more people competing for a job, the lower the pay.

And Advertising (FAANG) is insanely profitable, while doing software in other difficult fields (firmware in automotive or embedded, etc) may be technically challenging, but the margin is is only like 6-10% max

Also VC doesn't seem to be all that interested in investing into game dev companies, I guess because it's such an extreme hit-and-miss business (e.g. even when a game-dev company lands a massive hit, the next attempt may be a massive flop and sink the whole company).

> Ostensibly they are doing remarkable similar engineering problem solving

The engineering problems have been mostly outsourced to Unity and Epic Games (e.g. Unreal Engine)

We'll see. It's not like police unions are making life better for citizens.

Unions are there for one reason, the union members. This will most likely be good for the employees and good on them for acting in their best interest but it seems just as likely that a unionized rockstar is negative for the consumer in either increased pricea, extended timelines or minimum effort to meet exact requirements from employees.

The benefits that workers gain from unionizing come from somewhere.

That’s not true at all. Look at professional athletes. The starting pitchers in a baseball game are the best pitchers. Or consider WGA screenwriters in Hollywood. Their ability to make money doesn’t depend in seniority.

This isn't a strict requirement of unions though, right? As a trivial example grad student unions have no real career ladder, though the union negotiates a minimum pay and amount of work for everyone.

lol no.

What’s an example of a unionized vs non unionized group producing the same thing where unionized is better?

But I bet it happened like this:

- when the game was still in active development, it was maybe anticipated that the shop might have a couple dozen items, no problem even when the JSON parsing is extremely slow

- game is released, a separate maintenance team takes over, online mode is running for several years

- over time more and more items are added to the shop, and now maybe there are a thousands of items in that JSON file

- ...and when there's some 'accidental exponential' code in the JSON loader/parser the loading time gets worse and worse, what once was a few milliseconds is now minutes, but there was never a sudden regression after an update, just every week a little bit slower

- depending on the churn on the maintenance team, the current people on the team probably don't even notice an increase in loading time until they leave again for greener pastures, e.g. for them "it has always been that slow"

- management probably first read about the problem in the news ;) (which of course is a problem on its own - but as long as the money keeps flowing and the curves in Tableau go up and up, why should they even care... players apparently also endured it without bringing out the pitchforks)

Didn't think so.

This simplistic view of "management" is detrimental to a productive conversation and doesn't reflect reality.

Maybe exaggerating a bit, but that's the reality in many game dev shops, especially when a game doesn't immediately sell in great numbers.

That's how most studios work.

In fact since we are on hackernews that is kind of thing people wanting to be entrepreneurs do. Work at recognizable big tech company for a few years. Leave to be a founder of a startup. Investors ... well that guy came from google they must know what they are doing etc (the irony is they probably have less of the skills to start a company going that path).

>there's a large pool of juniors/interns that will accept these low wages just because they want to be a part of something popular.

That's an unbelievably bad _and_ disrespectful take. They accept these low wages because it's their only way in the industry, and because the industry has made sure to keep a steady supply of fresh meat to burn out. "because they want to be a part of something popular" doesn't work when the vast majority work on unknown games in content factories for the first ten years of their careers.

How is the existence of a monopsony necessary or even related to a passion tax existing? Suppose the market were a fully free market with tons of software companies on one side and tons of developers on the other. It would fly in the face of reason, and fairness in my eyes, if all developers were paid the same but some got to work on fun stuff like games and others worked on the scheduling software for the scheduling software for the warehouse robot repairs. So a passion tax seems like something that should exist and not really be decried.

https://www.ae.dk/debatindlaeg/2023-05-staerke-fagforeninger...

Now rather than being a relatively underpaid worker in an industry you're passionate about, you don't have the opportunity to work there.

For all this consumer cares, great. Make it 20% more expensive. Make it 50% more expensive. A hundred. If that helps the greater union cause I can take more walks in the woods to pass the time instead.

https://theconversation.com/why-police-unions-are-not-part-o...

Notably, American police (the country that invented police unions) are a modern invention that largely exist as a output of slave catching and bounty hunting services.

This is the kind of weird ass replies I just said appeared last time.

PS - You are editing your comment which is fine, but in turn I have to reply. If it is not reflective of reality feel free to add to the discussion and explain what is false. Also ironically your statement doesnt add to the discussion by elaborating on any part of it. This is exactly the kind of behaviour that doesnt help anyone learn any lessons. its just random insults.

I have nothing to do with Rockstar and wish them well, Im just saying that if I were management during these situations I would have quit or made a public apology. Its just what I feel I would have done. Regardless of the salary. I mean if one is mgmt they should take responsibility.

But maybe in late stage capitalism that is both an abhorrent and illogical idea.

I've done this kind of stuff many times, and something like a json array taking minutes to parse would likely be very very obvious when looking at a trace.

Margins.

Game development doesn’t pay more because game development companies can’t afford to pay more.

Sure, an individual game dev company may make a lot due to the hit driven nature of the field, but the totality of the market simply makes less money per developer than big tech does.

In order for that to change, the market has to increase in size by appealing to a more casual audience, or existing gamers have to pay more. Not something I think most gamers would like. And these are the people who the workforce of game developers form from.

Aviation unions force very high standards and represent a lot of the developments in safety and procedures.

Nuclear power is heavily unionised, resulting in a very stable and highly qualified workforce.

Unions in film and tv have done great work defending artists rights and protecting actors, writers, crew, and others from predatory behaviour by studios.

Fire fighter unions stand against unsafe demands and protect the crews in ways the individuals can’t, resulting in meaningful change. (I’m aware of UK but projecting and assuming this applies internationally)

I could go on…

As a counter anecdote I’d point to Boeing’s non-union facilities, which have produced notably less reliable airplanes than their union locations ever did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederation_of_Japan_Automob...

In fact part of the SCAP mandates after World War II two during the MacArthur occupation was specifically to form powerful unions in Japan

Is it really “disrespectful” to make an observation of how the world is even if it maybe isn’t how it should be? That fact of the matter is no one “needs” to accept these wages. Software development in general and game development in particular labor fields of choice. Being a software developer can pay you better in so many different parts of the field, even today long after the dot com boom. People are choosing to accept these bad offers because they value working in this part of the industry more than they value the higher wages they can get elsewhere. Just like plenty of us choose not to make FAANG levels of money because we value our work life balance, or our specific living locations or our principles and beliefs over the money that those companies are throwing at people.

We can talk about how these bad offers are knowingly abusive or artificially suppressed and still acknowledge that people are making informed choices to accept those offers.

Sorry, it just doesn't make any sense to make such a broad statement regarding this at all.

This just brings game development in line with other code monkeys. Top studios will pay top dollars, Indie studios will pay what they can, often almost nothing.

And I see nothing wrong with that, do you?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activision_Blizzard_worker_org...

Regarding your hypothetical, two points. First, Hollywood unions did essentially go down the path you imagine. The solution there was to create a less arbitrary system that allowed actors to work their way into the union and get a degree of income stability and protection from (previously horrendous) employer abuse.

"The supply of jobs won't magically increase (it would likely decrease with higher wages)"

You should look into the economics of these game studios a bit more. The unit economics are not like those of producing bricks which an essentially linear (capital, labor) -> bricks production function. The distributive effects between the employers, workers, and consumers would be very difficult to model. You can't really figure out the marginal contribution of the factors of production. To use a Hollywood analogy: Do we know how much less one of George Clooney's films would net if a different actor were cast instead of him? If we can't be sure, can we know what his marginal contribution was?

To put it the other way, work that is distasteful in some way, should also pay more, but this is missing the point.

I think the point of the unionization is that the monopsony of a small number of AAA game studios gives them excessive market power to reduce compensation and especially to reduce working conditions.

A union can acquiesce to the passion tax and say that top developers at a AAA should make $150k/year (a bit low), while simultaneously saying that that developer should be able to see their children on nights and weekends. The project management that leads to "perma-crunch" is something that ought to be resolved on the employer's side, not by the employees.

Would the company not conduct interviews and pick out whoever seems like the best candidates?

Police unions act just like every other union does: in the interests of their members.

Unions are illegal in lots of the world. Federal public sector unions weren't legal in the US until the 1960s. Did the fact that they were illegal in 1965 have any bearing on whether or not they should be allowed? Does the fact that something is illegal in the US have any bearing on whether or not Japan should allow it?

I had to look it up as well. I assumed it was a play on words about Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony (the three big video game console players).

And Unity always ruled supreme for AA and mobile games.

Recent notable example is Crimson Desert, they spent years building their own engine for this game and IMO they raised the bar when it comes to creating a huge realistic world.

Others that come to my mind are Decima and RE Engine.

> People want big tech on their resume because it makes them look qualified.

I think I said that?

> People with top qualifications work at big tech because of pay.

Actually I am not sure if that is true. I think top qualification people work at these places because of other reasons than just money. I'm talking Carmack working at Facebook for example is because of more possibilities and less the pay. Like FB is we have this really smart team for you and this tech for you and you can make your own products etc.

After all there is academia and that mostly pays shit and plenty of qualified people there.

> If low quality engineers worked in big tech, it wouldn't be a coveted qualification.

And I think that is probably happening more now. The 10x developer was kind of a myth. More people for less money these days particularly with AI is becoming more of the norm.

I'd really like to know what kind of tangled logic it requires to believe that.

Regardless, police unions aren't the only example of unions who have worked against the benefit of everyone else but themselves. I only used them as an example because I didn't think anyone here would argue disagree that it's had negative outcomes.

What I didn't expect was to find someone arguing that a union wasn't a union. It doesn't matter if it's legal in other places, it's legal in the US. Just because Japan has made police _unions_ illegal doesn't make an US police _union_ not a union.

The fun part of all this is that when union demands start forcing the industry in the opposite direction - higher cost, higher prices, smaller market. In a sane world, we would connect this, but in this world, we will just blame management. The union will forever have an invincible PR shield no matter how crazy the demand.

~~Ultimately the goal is the same: make more money. So I disagree the motivation is "very different" its just a lot harder now to do a startup.~~

You kept editing your comment so disregard the above. I misread it the first time and then it changed. I left my response thats makes no sense now.

To really drive this point home, the gaming community recently lost their minds when it became clear that this generation of video games were going to retail for ~$90 per game. Never mind that even in the early 90’s an average game might retail for $40 and what we would call a AAA game could reach as high as $70. In 2025 gamers declared that $90 was highway robbery. But go look at the credits for an early 90s video game. That $40-90 per unit in the early 90s might need to cover the salaries of 23 people (the size of the credits list for Super Mario World on the SNES). Now $90 has to cover 435 people (the credit list for Super Mario Wonder on the switch). Sure we’re selling a lot more copies now, and (some of) the manufacturing costs are lower. But that’s a nearly 20x increase in personnel for a mere 2x increase in (non inflation adjusted) price.

FAANG used to be the _dream_. Change the world. Work on groundbreaking tech. Solve harder problems than anywhere else. Get Paid incredibly well.

Then I guess a generation focused exclusively on that last part flooded the zone. I still believe that The Great Resignation of 2021 did more harm to our industry than COVID or any interest rate or VC changes.

It polluted the brains of most of the people in our industry from a missionary mindset to a mercenary, and it decimated big company's established cultural memory all to prop up a bunch of unicorns who will probably all slowly die over the next decade.

So now half of the people can't get a job, and the half that can are miserable. This was true BEFORE AI.

Sorry, it just doesn't make any sense to make such a broad statement regarding this at all.

A union's job is to protect the union. Nothing else.

If that were self evident how come there has never been a company that started with employees unionized? To get this supposed benefit

https://uaw.org/we-keep-toyota-running-workers-at-critical-t...

Seems hard to compare since there is no comparison in Japan that is not unionized

But given that China is now winning my original point stands

Monopoly is a single seller.

Monopsony is a single buyer.

While the company is extremely proud of its proprietary engine, I was told it causes severe internal politics. The studio is heavily biased toward the engineers who built the engine. Another huge downside is the lack of documentation—you can't just Google your bugs. (Granted, this was the situation two years ago).

The CEO is famously known in Korea for prioritizing developers while devaluing writers and planners. However, even within that developer-first environment, the proprietary engine has birthed a clear internal hierarchy among the programmers

id Software, the new Doom series uses highly performant engine (as if there was some legacy there for that).

Ignore my first hand experience with your political ideology, it doesn’t bother me.

But, I’ll tell you I’ve been at on-site RVs and BBQs with dozens of on the clock workers. I know a guy making 80/hr to nap and watch TV in his RV for six of his eight hour shift, and this was not uncommon. I know him, because he is THE GUY that can get a vital operation checked out and no one else.

I’m not debating history or ideology. Just experience of a long time working adjacent to UAW.

When I go to on-site to Mexico it’s like an entirely different industry.

Mondragon is a extremely large well structured cooperative that did exactly this and is a hallmark of success for anarchist cooperatives worldwide

I also hope it doesn't sound like I don't care for these developers who are being taken advantage of. They should be compensated fairly for their work.

EDIT I should add why I think it is a great point especially since I make recruiting software. The greatest increases in salary for most people is done by switching companies or jobs. If you don't want to leave the company because you really like what you do it would skew it so that salaries are lower.

Don't disagree with the rest of the comment though.