Last time I checked, nobody was forced into being a game programmer for a big company. Also, last time I checked, there have been complaints about pay, hours, "crunch" for years if not decades.
So I really have to say, if you go to college and get a degree in game design, and go to work for a company that is known to have a certain pay level and expectation about hours worked or "crunch", that's 100 percent on YOU. If these things are important to you, then go find a company that shows they are in sync with your views.
It's like playing baseball for the NY Yankees. They still to this day have a rule about facial hair. It's a pretty dumb rule, but it's public knowledge. If you join the team and complain that it's not fair and you want to grow a ZZ Top beard, well, that's on you.
And as far as game development, there are quite literally hundreds if not thousands of companies to work for. You can even start your own company. So all the complaining about the big bad executives ruining games or careers is kind of dumb IMHO.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
if the level of capitalism we are at cannot provide fair hours, decent wages
The problem is that "fair" hours and "decent" wages are very open-ended terms. No matter what the hours and wages are, it will always be easy for someone to demagogue them as not good enough.
One huge advantage of capitalism is that if you don't like the wages or hours at your job, you can quit and go somewhere else that is more to your liking. If no one will offer you wages and hours that you're satisfied with, then the problem is that your labor isn't productive enough. That can be due to government interference that makes you less productive, as can happen with excessive taxes or regulations. Sometimes the problem is that people simply expect to get paid more than they produce, and no economic system can deliver that to everyone at once.
Yet in some cases, people do produce far more than they are paid, but the benefits are not distributed as equitably as they should be perhaps.
Excessively high executive salaries are just one example but clearly the human tendency to take advantage of the situation is why laissez-faire or naked capitalism rarely works and government intervention is necessary to ensure some level of equity in the system.
How much intervention is very debatable of course, too much or two little can both lead to situations of political strife and civil unrest.
The problem is, how do you know how much someone "should" be paid? Or to get closer to your formulation, how do you know how much someone "produces"?
A lot of workers can look at their own situation and see something to the effect of, I'm getting paid $20/hour, but my employer is billing out my labor at $80/hour. Where does the other $60/hour go? I'm getting ripped off here!
Unless you're running the business in question, there are a ton of expenses that the business has that you're not aware of. A lot of other employees have to be paid to do things that aren't directly billable to customers. Buying a building, vehicles, desks, tools, or whatever else makes sense for the business in question costs money--and often a lot of money. Paying taxes and complying with regulations can cost a lot of money. Marketing can cost a lot of money, as can trying to ensure that customers actually pay what you bill them.
I'm not saying that capitalism always pays people what they're worth. Quite the opposite: no system does that. Figuring out what people are worth is a really hard question. That executive who gets paid $20 million per year might well be underpaid if he makes the business $50 million per year more profitable than most other executives would be. Or if he's bad at his job, $0 per year could be severely overpaying him.
Having central experts try to determine what everyone ought to be paid in order to be fair has been tried pretty extensively, most notably in the Soviet Union. It was a disaster. Real world experience shows that capitalism is far better at allocating labor efficiently than central planners in a command economy.
That's not to say that there's no role for government regulation. I don't think that it should be controversial to say that excessive government regulation is bad. What very quickly becomes very controversial is the question of what exactly constitutes "excessive" government regulation.
gotta say this to the first poster, SOCIALISM is simply when the workers own the means of production, there is nothing about socialism that takes freedom away, get outta your right wing echo chamber and you will be more free.
I thought the article was about having to much expectations about games...maybe I am wrong
In theory, maybe, but all practical efforts at actually implementing socialism have had some people at the top telling everyone else what to do. And those people at the top generally became very, very wealthy, even as most of the people lived in desperate poverty.
If you want to go "no true Scotsman" fallacy and stick to a hard definition that excludes all real-world systems that have ever been labeled as socialism, then it's a system that cannot possibly exist, so it is irrelevant to the discussion.
Greedy assholes have been oppressing workers for thousands of years. "There's nothing new under the sun." If you pull your head out of your ass for a moment, you'll see how greed is ruining everything, even our ecosystem. Without laws and regulation, these coporate MOFO's would crack the earth in half to save a nickle.
AAA or indie has no meaning for me; when I see that only talent, skill and choices made, matter. Look at SpaceBourne 2, made by 1 dev (or is so claims), and has done a better job than other indie or AAA companies have in the same genre. Just because you have millions of dollars to blow, doesn't mean your product is going to be good. Take a look at Dual Universe, Star (Scam) Citizen, Cyberpunk 2077, etc.; and realize the mess they are after so much money was blown making them.
People have always been greedy. That's not in dispute. The real question is, what are you going to do about it? Complaining about it doesn't do a bit of good, nor does telling people that they shouldn't be greedy.
It's like playing baseball for the NY Yankees. They still to this day have a rule about facial hair. It's a pretty dumb rule, but it's public knowledge. If you join the team and complain that it's not fair and you want to grow a ZZ Top beard, well, that's on you.
The problem with that example is that people get drafted and then don't get to choose which franchise they'll be part of. People could theoretically switch careers and not play baseball at all, but that's an awful lot to ask. If you're talking about people who sign as an unrestricted free agent, though, then I'd completely agree.
gotta say this to the first poster, SOCIALISM is simply when the workers own the means of production, there is nothing about socialism that takes freedom away, get outta your right wing echo chamber and you will be more free.
I thought the article was about having to much expectations about games...maybe I am wrong
I had a very interesting conversation with ChatGPT a couple of months ago trying to understand this.
gotta say this to the first poster, SOCIALISM is simply when the workers own the means of production, there is nothing about socialism that takes freedom away, get outta your right wing echo chamber and you will be more free.
I thought the article was about having to much expectations about games...maybe I am wrong
That is the textbook definition, it is never the way it ends up.
Games are shit as Hollywood movies are shit and western comics are shit.
Colleges just expel useless workers due to the "least common divisor" that education (based on marxism by the way) has been running for decades has finally achieved its goal (not the intended one but the unavoidable one). Then companies go to that pool of useless people and instead of hiring by merit they hire by quotas (another form of marxism) making an already huge issue (subpar education) a homungous black hole of ineptitude and entitlement.
As all writers, producers, developers, project managers die, retire or leave the replacements are but a pale shadow. The people that made those industries huge made it there through the grinding merits of the free market in all its stages (from education to hiring) and ended with the best of the best. Motivated, eager to do things and not entitled to anything. Entrepeneurship is a skill that its almost lost nowadays in our society.
So yeah. Capitalism is the issue. The lack of it for the last 3-4 decades. Now enjoy what socialism (in all its forms) brings to the table because this is it. Expensive, scarce an subpar things.
Enjoy it and stfu.
p.s: They keep buying foreing studios or keep outsourcing to workers from others countries where they havent lost the edge (they work hard, they are professionals and dedicated workers) and fallen in that trap. Sadly is not enough but it gives us a couple of games each year that still makes us remember when gaming was good.
gotta say this to the first poster, SOCIALISM is simply when the workers own the means of production, there is nothing about socialism that takes freedom away, get outta your right wing echo chamber and you will be more free.
I thought the article was about having to much expectations about games...maybe I am wrong
That is the textbook definition, it is never the way it ends up.
The same goes for Capitalism though. Both have an ‘ideal’ version and reality. The idea that one is better then the other is an illusion, both can strengthen the others’ weaknesses actually and 100% of either one ends up with massive problems in society.
But about those big games…
/Cheers,
'the only way he could nail it any better is if he used a cross.'
Kyleran on yours sincerely
'But there are many. You can play them entirely solo, and even offline. Also, you are wrong by default.'
Ikcin in response to yours sincerely debating whether or not single-player offline MMOs exist...
'This does not apply just to ED but SC or any other game. What they will get is Rebirth/X4, likely prettier but equally underwhelming and pointless.
It is incredibly difficult to design some meaningfull leg content that would fit a space ship game - simply because it is not a leg game.
It is just huge resource waste....'
Gdemami absolutely not being an armchair developer
It's like playing baseball for the NY Yankees. They still to this day have a rule about facial hair. It's a pretty dumb rule, but it's public knowledge. If you join the team and complain that it's not fair and you want to grow a ZZ Top beard, well, that's on you.
The problem with that example is that people get drafted and then don't get to choose which franchise they'll be part of. People could theoretically switch careers and not play baseball at all, but that's an awful lot to ask. If you're talking about people who sign as an unrestricted free agent, though, then I'd completely agree.
True. but I was looking more at the free agents. Didn't think about the rookies.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
gotta say this to the first poster, SOCIALISM is simply when the workers own the means of production, there is nothing about socialism that takes freedom away, get outta your right wing echo chamber and you will be more free.
I thought the article was about having to much expectations about games...maybe I am wrong
Except it isn't "the workers", it's "the people". There is a huge difference between the two.
"The people" indicate it's owned by "everyone".
"Everyone" is represented by a "governing body".
That "governing body" dictates what is needed in "society".
This means that nothing is private property, and nothing is made unless it's deemed necessary by "the people". This isn't my opinion, it's fact backed up for a hundred years of examples.
This is why socialism will never work on a large scale. Different people have different needs and wants.
That said, small companies make a decent product that reaches a smaller group of people. AAA companies take that idea and make it available to the masses. AAA companies generally overload the market until everything sort of resets when something new and groundbreaking is created. I think it's all necessary for the evolution of any product, including gaming.
Jesus tap-dancing Christ, do you people not see any shade of color but black and white?
Tell me you know nothing about economies without telling me by reducing things down to "either this or it's socialism all the way down."
This is the real reason we can't have these kind of discussions. It's also the reason we can't have nice things. I am not kidding.
It's almost like Scandinavian and other EU countries with sensible mixes of social programs that would make socialist countries jealous and sensibly regulated capitalism don't exist.
Hell even here in Canada I'm jealous of the prescription and dental programs coverage in France that puts our pinko healthcare system to shame.
But in this forum those are known as "nanny states" cause we're tough and rugged, amiright?
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
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“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
In the end, it comes down to us, the players....we are the ones that pay for it...we can decide whether to give these companies money or not...yet we are the first ones pre-ordering when Diablo 4 or some other new shiny game is announced.....Until people vote with their wallets, it is going to be more of the same.
If Diablo 4 sells 10 copies instead of 10 million dont you think changes will be made? Our friend Bobby koprick (or however his name is spelled) still gets his 30 million a year until you all stop buying these things.
"Time to harass an irrelevant coder online, play anyway, and then get excited about the next $70 pre-order on your queue, because that’ll be different. Surely."
THIS is the culprit right here... the rest is just... talk. When WE will realize that society is OUR mirror and WE made it, only then WE will live in a better world. Until then... look in the mirror, I know I am.
It seems there is some meaning behind this motto/cliche... "United WE stand, divided WE fall".
None of this has anything to do with capitalism. Its about a free market, player choice and the big problem in every debate - mass media. You need to criticize the idiotic media that constantly push stupid concepts. Of course also the problem is the government that doesnt do one thing that it should and ensure and open and free market without monopolies.
Naturally as every good communist the problem is capitalism and people simply expect too much.
Obviously as I am an idiot I need self entitled communists to tell me what I should expect and think.
I don't see the premise, the problem. Some "big games" are great,
some have failed. In the entertainment world this is common. Some
big-budget films flop, some are big hits. The market is fickle and quick
to move to the next new thing.
Capitalism and
socialism have nothing to do with it. Some socialist systems work very
well (German train system for example), some fail. Some capitalist
efforts succeed and make huge profits, some fail and suffer huge losses.
No it's never going to happen. People say I won't buy and then go right on and buy it.
Let's face it, the marketing really works on a large number of gamers, no amount of crabbing by those of us on the fringe is likely to change anything.
At day's end these are small money buying decisions for those who decide to buy / play games regardless whether they know for sure or not whether the quality or game play warrant their purchase.
Edit: had to repair this reply to get it past the black box issue
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
No it's never going to happen. People say I won't buy and then go right on and buy it.
Some people say that that they won't buy it, and others rush to buy. There are different segments of the market, and making the segment that pays for woefully incomplete AAA games as small as possible is still desirable, even if "as small as possible" is still pretty big.
I am liberal from a Scandinavian/European viewpoint.
With that in mind, I do believe we are in dire need for regulations. Not necessarily in regards of quality, but when it comes to the gambling/addicting aspects which are implemented just to get more money out of the players who struggle with self control.
AAA is probably not the main culprits here. Mobile gaming and the idea of loot boxes, battle passes and all that is definitely it though.
I find my thoughts about this article are all over the place!
My first thought was.....aren't big games already dead within the MMORPG genre?!?!?!? Since 2014, we have had ONE high budget mmo developed by a western studio. Just one game in 9 years seems like it's pretty dead. And that one game was New World, not what I'd call AAA.
My second thought was.....aren't games journalists at least partially responsible? We've had at least a decade, if not longer, or review scores that are over-inflated and totally inconsistent. AAA used to mean "this is one of the best games ever, top 5%". Now it means the game has a big budget. The link between quality and AAA has been removed, purely by journalists.
Then there is the issue of journalists confusing graphics with game quality, not to mention story. Graphics and story have very little to do with whether a game is good or not, yet those two things are what get good review scores. So, of course studios are gonna chase after those two things, despite it being a waste of money!
My third thought was.....I love AAA games! Mainly because I use the traditional meaning (top quality) rather than the modern meaning (high budget). Why wouldn't I love the best games on the market? Why wouldn't I want a blend of great gameplay, a huge world in which to play, a ton of content to keep me playing, and great graphical design to help make it more immersive?
The problems pointed out in this article really seem to have nothing to do with being a high budget game. I can't even agree that the problem is due to capitolism - though that certainly has an influence.
The problem, imo, is simply that these huge gaming studios don't seem to have developed internal systems and processes for developing massive games.
Games are huge engineering projects. They need strict engineering style processes in order to make it work properly. Whenever I see issues around "crunch", or delays, all it says to me is that the people running the project are incompetent. Anytime you see a studio referring to a game as "art", they've failed. Games are art in the same way that a Lamborghini is art: 99% engineering with a final bit of design flair to make it look appealing.
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Comments
So I really have to say, if you go to college and get a degree in game design, and go to work for a company that is known to have a certain pay level and expectation about hours worked or "crunch", that's 100 percent on YOU. If these things are important to you, then go find a company that shows they are in sync with your views.
It's like playing baseball for the NY Yankees. They still to this day have a rule about facial hair. It's a pretty dumb rule, but it's public knowledge. If you join the team and complain that it's not fair and you want to grow a ZZ Top beard, well, that's on you.
And as far as game development, there are quite literally hundreds if not thousands of companies to work for. You can even start your own company. So all the complaining about the big bad executives ruining games or careers is kind of dumb IMHO.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
A lot of workers can look at their own situation and see something to the effect of, I'm getting paid $20/hour, but my employer is billing out my labor at $80/hour. Where does the other $60/hour go? I'm getting ripped off here!
Unless you're running the business in question, there are a ton of expenses that the business has that you're not aware of. A lot of other employees have to be paid to do things that aren't directly billable to customers. Buying a building, vehicles, desks, tools, or whatever else makes sense for the business in question costs money--and often a lot of money. Paying taxes and complying with regulations can cost a lot of money. Marketing can cost a lot of money, as can trying to ensure that customers actually pay what you bill them.
I'm not saying that capitalism always pays people what they're worth. Quite the opposite: no system does that. Figuring out what people are worth is a really hard question. That executive who gets paid $20 million per year might well be underpaid if he makes the business $50 million per year more profitable than most other executives would be. Or if he's bad at his job, $0 per year could be severely overpaying him.
Having central experts try to determine what everyone ought to be paid in order to be fair has been tried pretty extensively, most notably in the Soviet Union. It was a disaster. Real world experience shows that capitalism is far better at allocating labor efficiently than central planners in a command economy.
That's not to say that there's no role for government regulation. I don't think that it should be controversial to say that excessive government regulation is bad. What very quickly becomes very controversial is the question of what exactly constitutes "excessive" government regulation.
If you want to go "no true Scotsman" fallacy and stick to a hard definition that excludes all real-world systems that have ever been labeled as socialism, then it's a system that cannot possibly exist, so it is irrelevant to the discussion.
Fishing on Gilgamesh since 2013
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I paste it here for your reading pleasure: https://pastebin.mozilla.org/NAT0pAyn
That is the textbook definition, it is never the way it ends up.
Let's party like it is 1863!
Colleges just expel useless workers due to the "least common divisor" that education (based on marxism by the way) has been running for decades has finally achieved its goal (not the intended one but the unavoidable one). Then companies go to that pool of useless people and instead of hiring by merit they hire by quotas (another form of marxism) making an already huge issue (subpar education) a homungous black hole of ineptitude and entitlement.
As all writers, producers, developers, project managers die, retire or leave the replacements are but a pale shadow. The people that made those industries huge made it there through the grinding merits of the free market in all its stages (from education to hiring) and ended with the best of the best. Motivated, eager to do things and not entitled to anything. Entrepeneurship is a skill that its almost lost nowadays in our society.
So yeah. Capitalism is the issue. The lack of it for the last 3-4 decades. Now enjoy what socialism (in all its forms) brings to the table because this is it. Expensive, scarce an subpar things.
Enjoy it and stfu.
p.s: They keep buying foreing studios or keep outsourcing to workers from others countries where they havent lost the edge (they work hard, they are professionals and dedicated workers) and fallen in that trap. Sadly is not enough but it gives us a couple of games each year that still makes us remember when gaming was good.
But about those big games…
/Cheers,
Kyleran on yours sincerely
'But there are many. You can play them entirely solo, and even offline. Also, you are wrong by default.'
Ikcin in response to yours sincerely debating whether or not single-player offline MMOs exist...
'This does not apply just to ED but SC or any other game. What they will get is Rebirth/X4, likely prettier but equally underwhelming and pointless.
It is incredibly difficult to design some meaningfull leg content that would fit a space ship game - simply because it is not a leg game.
It is just huge resource waste....'
Gdemami absolutely not being an armchair developer
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
Except it isn't "the workers", it's "the people". There is a huge difference between the two.
"The people" indicate it's owned by "everyone".
"Everyone" is represented by a "governing body".
That "governing body" dictates what is needed in "society".
This means that nothing is private property, and nothing is made unless it's deemed necessary by "the people". This isn't my opinion, it's fact backed up for a hundred years of examples.
This is why socialism will never work on a large scale. Different people have different needs and wants.
That said, small companies make a decent product that reaches a smaller group of people. AAA companies take that idea and make it available to the masses. AAA companies generally overload the market until everything sort of resets when something new and groundbreaking is created. I think it's all necessary for the evolution of any product, including gaming.
Hell even here in Canada I'm jealous of the prescription and dental programs coverage in France that puts our pinko healthcare system to shame.
But in this forum those are known as "nanny states" cause we're tough and rugged, amiright?
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
THIS is the culprit right here... the rest is just... talk. When WE will realize that society is OUR mirror and WE made it, only then WE will live in a better world. Until then... look in the mirror, I know I am.
It seems there is some meaning behind this motto/cliche... "United WE stand, divided WE fall".
------------
2024: 47 years on the Net.
At day's end these are small money buying decisions for those who decide to buy / play games regardless whether they know for sure or not whether the quality or game play warrant their purchase.
Edit: had to repair this reply to get it past the black box issue
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I am liberal from a Scandinavian/European viewpoint.
With that in mind, I do believe we are in dire need for regulations. Not necessarily in regards of quality, but when it comes to the gambling/addicting aspects which are implemented just to get more money out of the players who struggle with self control.
AAA is probably not the main culprits here. Mobile gaming and the idea of loot boxes, battle passes and all that is definitely it though.