Seeing the rebirth of unions in tech companies might be one of my favorite things about this timeline.
this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2024
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Not nearly prevalent enough or fast enough, let's gooooo!
A few years ago a tech friend literally couldn’t comprehend why he would want to be in a union.
Check again, maybe it was me.
I'm at a tech company. It's nowhere near prevalent, nor do I think many employees actually want it. I'd love for it to happen, though, and IMO the first place it should happen is the video games industry.
Agreed. I think we're in the, "fuck around and find out," era of tech company unionization, and I'm fortunate enough to work for a company whose legal team is smart enough to know that a reasonably happy, fulfilled, and compensated workforce is significantly less likely to even start discussing unionization, and so I don't think that my company will see it anytime soon, if ever (which I also think is fine, for the record). But to your point, with the way that the vast majority of the video game industry treats their employees, I hope that every single one of those large game companies ends up joining a union, because the employees deserve better.
next up: microsoft closes bethesda game studio, reassigns all assets to other departments.
... still glad to see it though. i'd love to see tech giants brought low by all the workers just withdrawing their labor.
This is what’s next for Bethesda, but it’s smart of them to only unionize after Bethesda has started on their next “independent” project. It all depends on how ES6 does. If it isn’t a smash hit with decent reception, Bethesda will be absorbed into Microsoft I guarantee it
If it depends on how ES6 is received they still have another 6 or 7 years
Considering the assholery that Obsidian went through with New Vegas, I fully expect the higher ups to do everything in their power to fuck up TES6 if it means the end of the union, one way or another.
Though with a union, they have an organization set up where they could tell ms to go fuck themselves and start a new studio, especially with non-competes losing their teeth recently.
As a decades-long Bethesda fan, I think this might improve product quality from what we saw in Starfield. It's clear that somebody needs to be able to talk back to King Todd.
Maybe if they're not so alienated from their work, we'll see more of other people's creative vision.
Starfield is Todd Howard making his Homer Simpson car. It’s a pile of shit no one wanted.
What are you talking about, he revolutionized the walking simulator. Now you can jump real high too. And instead of traveling places you just loading screen everywhere.
You can jump further too, but only if you rebind the jump button :D
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to be fair, a forest fire might improve product quality from what we saw in starfield
Fire is a natural and necessary part of many ecosystemsm. It keeps parasitic insect populations down, stuff like ticks and chiggers, and some plant species rely on fire to prepare the soil for seeds and even is required for some plants to release their seeds. In dry ecosystems like the western USA it also consumes old dead plant material, reducing the fuel available for future fires and reducing fire severity overall. Many foresters and fire fighters advocate for increasing prescribed burns, essentially forest fires that we light on purpose in cooler and wetter times of the year to consume the fuel without risking a catastrophic fire that is difficult to control. I just think that's neat.
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This is the first thought I had. Capitalist apologists would probably say the exact opposite, that owners need to be able to abuse workers to get more and better work out of them, but that's basically never true. Owners owe so much to their workers' creativity - even in fields where you wouldn't expect - and they are deeply unaware of it.
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Good for them
Congrats! Now you guys can use collective bargaining to ensure you're paid for every single bug you code. This is huge!
Seriously though, unions are good for the industry, I'm happy to see this is continuing at ever more software companies.
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Better be careful they don’t clip through any windows.
Finally some good news out of Bethesda
next up: microsoft announces development of Bethesda's next game will be largely outsourced
And I doubt the studio will see the end of this decade under Microshit‘s umbrella. Nonetheless I applaud the employees. Their success might be short lived but it‘s a success all the same.
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This will help standardize contracts across the business and ensure things like credits, benefits, etc are done in a systemic way
✊
This is the best summary I could come up with:
More than 200 developers at Bethesda Game Studios, the studio behind hit franchises like The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, have unionized with the Communications Workers of America (CWA).
241 workers, including “artists, engineers, programmers and designers,” have signed union authorization cards or “indicated that they wanted union representation via an online portal,” according to a CWA press release.
Microsoft has recognized the union, the CWA says; the company has already recognized unions formed by Activision QA workers and ZeniMax Studios QA workers.
The CWA describes this as “the first wall-to-wall union at a Microsoft video game studio,” meaning that all eligible job titles will be represented by the CWA instead of just one type of worker, according to the CWA’s Catalina Brennan-Gatica.
(Until now, all of the unions at Microsoft-owned studios have only been formed by QA workers.)
Microsoft didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
The original article contains 165 words, the summary contains 147 words. Saved 11%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Damn I needed some good news bad, that is fantastic!
Hell yeah good for them.
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