Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts
gtaforums.com
gtaforums.com
CWA is a big, traditional, national union (think phone company employees, health care workers, flight attendants) that has voted to set aside a portion of their dues to help organize us, their fellow workers in the tech sector, which I consider a truly beautiful act of solidarity. They are having some successes, which seem to be building.
Getting plugged in with the training and, almost as importantly, a CWA organizer, is a great first step if you know you'd like a union but don't know where to start.
https://www.marketplace.org/2023/01/03/gen-z-is-the-most-pro...
https://thehill.com/business/4854173-union-approval-surges-p...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/12751/labor-unions.aspx
https://news.gallup.com/poll/510281/unions-strengthening.asp...
Somehow this is seen as "more progressive."
Freeriding
If a union negotiates better conditions at a workplace, who should be subject to them? Everybody, of course IMO
But what of people who never paid union dues?
There is no nice tidy solution to that tension, only messy ones that impinge on a freedom somewhere
It is worth unionising, voluntarily
You could also vote no on a unionization vote, or just not join. I'm sure your loyalty will get a special consideration when the next round of arbitrary layoffs (coupled with record-breaking profits) happens.
I do wonder what country American Airlines operates in then…
https://viewfromthewing.com/american-airlines-fired-two-flig...
They could surely have paid their dues and left the union and kept their jobs (or could have never joined the union to begin with).
[1] https://americanairlines.gcs-web.com/node/42651/html#:~:text...
Per the APFA contract[1] employees are forced to join the union within 60 days of assignment as a flight attendant. This is technically considered a union shop (not a closed shop) because it doesn't require people to be union members before being hired.
Under the Taft-Hartley Act a lot of states (and in some situations, court decisions) have made this illegal[2] via right-to-work laws but airlines are covered under the Railway Labor Act (45 U.S.C. § 152)[3] which allows it (upheld by the US Supreme Court in Railway Employes' Department v. Hanson, 351 U.S. 225)[4] .
So, I was wrong and the employees had no choice but continue to be union members and pay dues or be fired because of airline-specific labor law.
[1] https://www.apfa.org/contract/ [page 237, 35-10]
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act
[3] https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=(title:45%20section:...
[4] https://www.loc.gov/resource/usrep.usrep351225/?pdfPage=1
They kind of did, with their sudden pivot from primarily making singleplayer games to almost exclusively making F2P GaaS titles the instant they got a taste of lootbox money. Half-Life 3 and Portal 3 will never happen because Valve makes 100x as much money with 1/100th of the effort by peddling Counter Strike skins.
No official announcement yet.
Simply raising the $1800 transaction limit and $2000 balance limit would have been far less disruptive, but that may have put Valve in financial regulators crosshairs. There's surely a reason why they chose those numbers in particular.
Yes, they are loot box whores but so is everyone else.
Steam is a community, social media, and a store. The community is what they built and that community is extremely loyal. That community is also what developers are paying for.
In Gaben, we trust. I have 20 years of experience saying Gabe won't fuck me over to increase EBIDA by .5%. Are they perfect? No, but they are lightyears better than most of their competitors except GOG in terms of putting consumers first.
They had to be sued to get them to offer refunds
They had to be sued to get them to remove forced arbitration clause
I keep giving Valve my money because they keep giving me good value for that money and a trustworthy environment to spend that money in. I have no loyalty. I also buy games from Humble Bundle and GOG.
I'm not excited about the prospect of losing my 4000 games but the literal only options available for consumers right now are "Pay money and get a game that we can take away at any time, fuck you over, do all sorts of bad things, and we demonstrably hate you", or "Pay money to get a game and a refund period and a bunch of features and maybe when Gabe dies we will do that other thing"
There is no alternative. GOG is run by the same people who released CyberPunk2077 as a bug ridden mess to please upper management, so they even have evidence of already straddling that line right now.
Lol Valve is taking a cut of a ridiculous amount of video game sales while releasing no games.
I like some of their work on the linux support side, but they have sold out as much as Apple has if anything.
Ah yeah unregulated illegal underage gambling, the great resistance. Gabe could shutdown the whole thing with 1 click, all the sites are using the Steam API, but they don't and you know why.
Valve did a lot of things good but they are also the original source of a lot of bad things from lootboxes to skin gambling to the FOMO battle pass cancer of modern gaming.
Until people stop buying games from these places nothing will change.
The issue is trying to force (or likely, continue) bad practices when they're clearly not working and then lacking the leadership to realize that a retaliatory layoff is only going to make things worse.
(But I may also argue the point they never sold out in terms of being a game studio as opposed to a publisher.... "So when's Half Life 3 releasing?")
They also take an absurd cut of developer income and saddle devs with costs that they don't always want. (Selling on Steam? Valve takes 30% and forces you to moderate the forums on your listing page that you cannot opt out of.)
They also have an internal culture that's been fairly regularly criticized as being pretty uncomfortable for women and minorities.
Valve has done some cool stuff, but let's not lionize them too much. They are probably better than an average company, for sure, but it's important to remember that they are also sketchy in some very gross ways as well.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/blogs/company-town-blog/sto...
Steam is much much easier for Valve.
I am not saying it has a value, but 30% seems a lot.
Of course, in the end that 30% we end up paying it ourselves.
I never had issues with GOG or Epic (where I buy less to be honest), but that might be me.
But Steam has the network effect. They launched first. Of were the first that successfully did it.
Steam also has a solid update/beta pipeline. Game companies post blog posts about new game updates so you keep up to date with development. They also did an amazing job with SteamOS which feels rock solid.
I’d suggest that it’s cheap, at least historically compared to just about any other product that’s been sold. If I had a popular marketplace platform that basically sold my product without much need for human intervention on the transaction, that has real value. Honestly 30% seems like a bargain to me.
In marketing and sales of the product, any human that touches the process ultimately is getting a piece of that transaction. We may not have physical media, but that was actually probably the least of the expense associated with software products back in the day. Consider the army of people needed just to wholesale to retail, coordinate distribution, distribute…
My recollection from those days is that if the dev got 10% royalties of a purchase price they would have been ecstatic. If you offered them 70%? They probably would have thought “what’s the catch?”
The up front risk you take on Steam is $100. It still ends up being a meaningful risk because the numbers show almost nobody makes that back, because developers are so interested in selling their game on steam that the market is outright supersaturated.
>Of course, in the end that 30% we end up paying it ourselves.
I used to buy video games at walmart. Unlike games I bought at walmart, Valve has done things that retroactively add value to games I bought decades ago, like remote play together, adding internet multiplayer to games that never even thought about it, and a controller system that allows pretty much anything you can think of. Games that had zero controller support for a decade just do now, no extra download, and the required configuration is often the single button press to select whatever configuration someone else made. Valve created an entirely new software platform for games that makes it so even games that are utterly broken on modern systems can work again, and it's just built in. If I buy a game today, I'm pretty confident I can play it in 20 years. An actual system for sharing digital games with other accounts, with large caveats.
Refunds, despite Valve only offering them because it's the law in several countries and they were losing court cases, are not a thing for physical game purchases here in the US. Once you take off the shrink wrap, you are fucked.
Steam has built in support for Beta branches and old game versions that the game dev can enable. Steam has built in support for DLC, and market systems for trading and selling digital "goods", not that I really think that's a good thing but some people seem to. Steam has fully built in support for cloud saves.
Steam has a fully integrated "friends" system, and that system is convenient for the end user and includes features like screen sharing and voice chat and gifting people games.
Steam offers fully integrated mod management for at least a large subset of all possible mods for any game.
Like I cannot stress enough how even if video games were 30% more expensive in steam (they aren't, devs distributing through steam are making a larger portion of the profit than they used to), retroactively adding functionality to games I bought a decade ago and producing a system that makes it very likely I can play these same games in 20 years is so worth it. Everything else is just a bonus. Their hardware also shows great value per dollar, so the "They are overcharging" narrative just doesn't track.
Meanwhile, steam avoids problems that plague other digital storefronts. Easy returns (again, forced on them), their launcher mostly respects my resources and doesn't destroy my computer every time there's an update, the way Valve negotiates terms they have a much better setup: Even if a publisher or developer pulls their game, as long as you bought it before then you can always install it and play it. Transformers Devastation was pulled from the store years ago and cannot be purchased by anyone I think anywhere, but I can still download and play it on a new machine because that's the contract Valve got Activision to sign. The game literally doesn't have a store page anymore.
Fuck Valve's child gambling profits and invention of loot boxes, but their distribution business is unambiguously the most respectful of the consumer and developer. Only GOG with their work towards preservation and lack of DRM comes close.
I own 4000 games on steam. That's about 3900 more than I would have ever bought in a world without Steam. Their wishlist system is a direct driver of sales that wouldn't happen otherwise. When the Epic Store launched, it didn't even have a damn shopping cart.
That was exactly my point. Distributors like EA or Activision will charge you because they took that risk. It wasn't Nintendo or SEGA.
Valve is like Activision, not like Nintendo.
Nintendo charged you because they lost money on the consoles. Valve looses no money.
That's actually a very easy choice to make.
I think they're being sued over delisting someone for this last I checked, even if their public policy might not interpret their MFN that way
So does Apple. Despite this, they are both engaged in rent-seeking (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking), which has a harmful effect on everyone but them.
Imagine if roads weren't public, but were built by a single private company. You have a business that moves goods by truck. You can use the private company's roads, but only if you pay 30% of the profit of your goods to the company that owns the roads. It only takes 2% of the profit to maintain the roads; the other 28% is profit (rent) for the road-owning company.
You could choose not to use the roads. But then the only way to deliver the goods is by parachute (which may be possible, but isn't practical). So you use the roads. But this means you have to jack up your prices to make any profit for yourself. Competing is much harder (tighter margins), and your customers are paying more than necessary. Everyone's life is harder, except for the road company.
This doesn't match with the definition of rent-seeking at all, as described in your wikipedia link:
> Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth.
To my knowledge, Valve has not manipulated public policy or economic conditions to maintain Steam's dominance. Steam hasn't pushed for legislation to prevent competitors, it hasn't prevented developers from selling their games on other platforms, and it doesn't even prevent you from installing non-Steam games on Valve's own proprietary hardware and operating system.
Would the PC video game market be bigger or smaller without steam?
While I hate always connected DRM, and lamented the death of physical media when steam got huge (and also refused to get a steam account for years for that reason), we would have multiple shitty stores if steam didn't exist, I think.
Look at epic and all the other distributors. Their stores are terrible and that's with the inherent competition of going against steam. Imagine if they were the only game in town. . .
Happier is a fine place to be. They are both still too high. Not everything has to be binary -- I can think Valve is offering some utility and also think that Valve is charging too much for that utility.
The fact that Gabe has a billion dollars worth of yachts probably suggests that maybe, just maaaaaybe, that 30% could be lower and Steam could still provide you the same level of marketing support and player base.
The sales you will miss are what steam brings to the table
That is not a good argument though. Try building your own distribution and take some of those billions.
You are welcome to start your own progressive game market place for PC. Go undercut him and charge 5% fees. You literally just need to dump game files on a CDN right? How hard can it be? /s
I do find it odd that this account is new and the type of posts it leaves. Seems almost like an LLM...
You don't get to decide that. Apple's price is not set by free market competition, Valve's is.
https://9to5mac.com/2025/05/19/apple-may-lower-app-store-com...
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/11/apple-announces-app-s...
I'm not sure how any of that is sketchy or gross. As far as marketplaces and platforms go, this is quite reasonable, and there are many successful games which are either not on Steam, or are cross-listed on multiple platforms, or are cross-listed on both Steam and the developer's own distribution channel.
I'll give you lootboxes, they are pretty shitty.
Fun fact: Nintendo's revenue split on WiiWare was 60/40, and required minimum downloads to even get your revenue out of Big N.
Source?
The medium link says nothing about women and minorities specifically. It's a critique of flat management structures in general.
It seems like the flat management structure allowed an ad-hoc hierarchy of cliques to form in the office anyway, pitting entrenched teams of old-timers against new hires, but implicitly. When you think of the lack of support for TF2 over the years, this is illuminating.
It's astounding that Valve/Steam are still as successful as they are in spite of this culture.
Additionally, when I actually look into the alleged statistics of claims that "Valve is primarily white and male", the numbers ... don't actually look that bad? We shouldn't expect any company to fit national demographics exactly.
Allegations of unpaid labor: https://web.archive.org/web/20160209211205/https://www.reddi...
> They also take an absurd cut of developer income
30%-20% is by no means "absurd", given the incredible value that Steam provides to developers: content delivery, payment processing, cloud saves, ratings, game tags, social integration, wishlisting and sale notification, search indexing, game discovery, a bunch of incredibly useful APIs including networking and input, Linux compatibility, and many, many other things.
In fact, 30% of revenue is well under what it would cost me to implement all of the features that I want from Steam as a developer, unless I somehow won the jackpot and ended up selling millions of copies (in which case I would end up only paying 20% of revenue anyway).
> and saddle devs with costs that they don't always want. (Selling on Steam? Valve takes 30%
Which you already mentioned, while somehow conveniently omitting the fact that the cut decreases to 20% if your revenue is high enough.
> and forces you to moderate the forums on your listing page that you cannot opt out of
This is the single possibly objectionable thing here.
> They also have an internal culture that's been fairly regularly criticized as being pretty uncomfortable for women and minorities.
~~Allegations~~ mean nothing. Are there successful lawsuits?
> Valve has done some cool stuff, but let's not lionize them too much.
Valve is incomparably better than every other major game distribution platform, which is the comparison that we're making. You are very intentionally making manipulative and dishonest points to try to paint Valve as worst than it is. Which makes sense, because you're a throwaway account.
We should be ok with pointing at the shady parts of things we like and going, "It would be better if it were not so shady."
Valve is good in many ways! Valve would be better if it didn't profit from getting kids to gamble on skins!
If they don't like the culture, then they should work elsewhere.
I hear Google is hiring.
Nothing worse than joining a company you contributed zero to building from the ground up, then unilaterally deciding the culture needs to change according to your whims, right now.
You might feel uncomfortable working in a black barber shop. Or a cat cafe with pet allergies. You've contributed nothing to their business, they shouldn't have to change for you.
You should feel empowered to have a voice in the products of your labor. And you should feel empowered to have a voice in the culture that produces those products.
Your employment is "at will".
You are not entitled to any item in your list of demands.
You are, however, free to leave at any time for something more suited to your tastes.
I don't have an opinion on Valve or allegations Valve is doing that. I just find it very strange to say it's entitled for a black to want to be treated as equally as a white.
Assume a white guy voluntarily takes a job working in a wig shop that only sells black women's hair care products. He's going to be uncomfortable at some point. Does he have a right to not be uncomfortable? Should the company culture change, should they stop selling wigs and ditch their customers until he becomes comfortable?
No. The easiest solution is he should work elsewhere. He took the job knowing exactly what was involved. So no, you are not entitled to not be culturally uncomfortable.
Can you point to the word entitled in my posts? Or are you putting words in my mouth?
Can you point to any demands? Or are you arguing against something I didn't say?
Hello LLM.
For all intents and purposes it's "functioning" for me. You can search for a game, hit buy, put in your credit card number, then download/play it. I've seen some spurious arguments about how it lacks a cart or reviews, but it's a stretch to claim the lack of them makes them non "functioning". I never bulk buy games, and for reviews I can go to steam or metacritic.
To be fair most online storefronts don't have that. Amazon/walmart at best have "categories", which epic also has. Even online content portals like spotify don't have tags, preferring something like "more like this".
> but it's baffling that no other store gives at least the same amount of those features to you. Even though they could.
The better question is why storefronts don't directly compete on price. We see with airlines that consumers are willing to put up with hellish conditions to save a few percent on airfare. Those features are definitely nice, it's just unclear how they can avoid the free-rider problem if there are competing storefronts.
edit: after some additional search tweaking this is most likely in reference to Wolfire v. Valve, which is now a class-action suit.[0] The argument seems to be that Valve is engaging in anticompetitive behavior by disallowing developers from reselling Steam keys for their games for lower prices on other platforms, not selling the games themselves on other platforms. So this may or may not be what the parent post was referencing.
[0] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/wolfire-and-dark-catts-antitru...
Apple is a firm technical gatekeeper to their ecosystem. Steam is not at all analogous to that for PCs.
Gamescope is even fully open-source, so you could remove the steam deck UI, and still run any game with the same performance benefits of not running it inside KDE. Of course also, you could flash a new OS on the device itself if you wanted to entirely remove Valve’s presence.
Changes get wiped because (as you mentioned) it's an a/b partition; when you switch partitions you lose the changes.
You can actually enable an overlay for root changes, but this causes other issues - you get to choose if you want to track packages you've installed, or packages that are in the base system. It's either in the overlay and you keep your changes but not the base system changes, or it's in the base system and you lose track of changes made in your overlay. - updates to the base system of packages that have been uninstalled in the overlay can cause inconsistencies like orphaned files (the new system update includes extra files from this package that haven't been removed by your uninstall. Hopefully some other package doesn't take this as a sign that an optional dependency library is fully installed, the linked subdependencies might be missing) - updates to the base system can be overridden in specific files that were modified in your overlay, causing packages to become non-functional - imagine rebuilding a library 4.5 to add a feature (or updating to v 4.7), then the base system updates that library to 4.8. All other software now expects version 4.8, but instead your overlay is providing 4.5. better hope it's only a minor patch update and not an update providing a feature, or worse, a major breaking update.
How can user have an optional one-stop-shop that is sustainable for the long-term while not being “evil”.
11 percent. That is the charge back rate in gaming. The "overall" stat for all transactions is something like 3 percent.
Card processing isnt free. There are fees, and supporting card processing still has more humans in the loop than one needs. Never mind all the technology that comes with running the dam platform.
Is 30 percent a lot. It sure is. Valve isnt a charity, this is how they chose to make money.
Meanwhile, AWS has a 30+ percent margin and I dont see CTO's lining up to run hardware...
1. source?
2. How does that justify a 30% rate, when presumably it's clawed back from developers?
>Card processing isnt free. There are fees, and supporting card processing still has more humans in the loop than one needs. Never mind all the technology that comes with running the dam platform.
Again, nowhere near 30% though
>Meanwhile, AWS has a 30+ percent margin and I dont see CTO's lining up to run hardware...
30% margins on renting hardware is totally different than a 30% tax on transactions, and it's disingenuous to imply they're comparable. At the very least amazon needs to spend the other 70% on running servers and investing in datacenters, whereas valve doesn't. It's studios that are actually doing the development. Valve just is charging 30% on top of that. To take an extreme example, compare the 2-3% fees charged by visa vs the ~15% gross margins that car companies make. Even though that's 5x higher, I doubt many are outraged about car companies' profiteering.
For some reason, people in tech live under the illusion that everything nontangible should be literally free
Strawman.
- Tiktok was not first. Before it was vine and youtube.
- Google was not first. Before it was yahoo and altavista.
Plenty of todays big companies were not the first in their area.
Definitely not comparable to Apple, which is forcing all iPhone users to use their own app store.
Case and point: Valve doesn't have a union.
You have to be very misguided to believe that the c suite in most companies is not engaged in n adversarial relationship with its employees, whether those employees are unionized or not.
This isn't a given, this is just an opinion, and one you didn't bother trying to argue for.
Many systems do function much better with adversarial units in them. Governments have the adversarial units of checks and balances. Companies have the adversarial forces of the market. A news paper has the adversarial units of editors to their writers.
In any case, a longtime friend of mine was senior graphics programmer on GTA5, and I was very close to interviewing with Rockstar in Edinburgh at his recommendation. But then I remembered how gamedev burnt me out at age 19 (my first job, at Lionhead), and how I've never been burnt out since, and decided against it. Been in offline rendering since then and never looked back.
Rockstar North is based in Edinburgh as you say, why wouldn't English be at a high level?
[0] Performance in other languages... well, I suspect it's still going to be quite variable, which is another valid criticism that has been levelled at the more popular mainstream models over the past year or two.
There are a few famous movie scenes where somebody deliberately uses perfectly reasonable English sentences but with such a thick accent that most English users cannot understand it, but once you know what they said you can play that sound back and yeah, that's what they said, you just couldn't understand the accent e.g..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs-rgvkRfwc
Indeed the joke is that people keep repeating what the hard-to-understand bloke said even when it's perfectly obvious what he said, because if you can understand it then you can't tell whether it was hard to understand.
That's not even Scottish, the bloke in that scene is from Somerset, which is the far side of the country but exactly like Scotland most people in Somerset don't talk like that most of the time, but some of them do, some of the time and to them it's normal, that's just how you say words.
I know plenty of people from the area this forum post is about and everyone has a high standard of English... even the people with thick local accents and non-native English speaking Europeans.
Does Rockstar hire lots of non-European people to work in Edinburgh or something?
E.g. someone who grew up playing piano might be able to play at an incredibly advanced level, while also being terrible at reading or writing sheet music.
The science around skills acquired during childhood/adolescence vs. learned skills is interesting. For example, I would not be surprised if non-native speakers, on average, have a better handle of the difference between effect/affect, there/their, etc.
That’s from training system rather than age.
You’ll rarely catch me mixing up there and their because I’ve learned those words reading them, and in written form they’re very distinguishable.
I couldn’t write a poem to save my life though, because I can’t tell which words in English rhyme - the written form of an English word isn’t trustable.
An interesting example is natives with different accents making different mistakes - Latino Spanish speakers for example commonly confuse c and s while writing, as it’s a similar sound.
Spain's dialect however pronounces those letters very distinctly (their famous “lisp”) so to Spaniards it’s obvious which one to use.
Shoot the messenger if you want, but the evidence is literally ubiquitous.
I'd use a local LLM too to make sure the original prompt does not leak and can't be connected to the published output.
Why can't this style of management just take hold at a game company?
I suspect that hollywood has a pretty similar release cycle, and I've never heard of the dysfunctional management in that industry. (maybe it is normalized? maybe people don't expect a job after a movie is done?)
GTA V is dated. It's 12+ years old.
Like imagine if MindsEye had thirteen years of anticipation before it came out.
[1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/gta-6-delayed-once-again-to...
Also, with apologies for the whataboutism, we unfortunately finance thugs all day every day (my internet provider, German government and pension, Deutsche Bahn, etc are massive extortionists); it's not really black and white.
I write this out of pure sympathy for the incredible work that I know gamedevs do, I'm not associated with Rockstar at all.
That is why that logic is broken. You’re just supporting the next wave of abuse for GTA7 not helping out employees.
In fact, even the people who made the game (did the actual work, not managers, advertisers, etc.) don't get to decide.
Correct me if I am wrong but the programmers, designers, artists have already been paid and any money from sales goes to the company and its execs/shareholders.
(And yes, employees can also be shareholders but they almost always own such a tiny share it does not really matter. In a just world, ownership would be distributed automatically according to time_worked * skill_level.)
EDIT: I might have overstated by saying it doesn't work but it definitely doesn't have the same level of effect as people collectively saying "this behavior is wrong and you will be punished for it, regardless if I buy the product" (for example by editing laws). It also doesn't allow any control over how the money is distributed among those who worked on it (compared to for example adding a law that limits absolute/relative spending on marketing - whether you think it's a good idea or not).
https://rollingout.com/2025/05/07/target-ceo-salary-drop-ami...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/dougmelville/2025/08/21/the-qui...
> The Quiet Part Out Loud: Target Ditching DEI Cost The CEO His Job And Investors $12 Billion
So, it would not be hard to impair Rockstar with a coordinated, sustained economic retaliation campaign against them. If it kills the company, we help workers find other jobs and shareholders learn a lesson about capital allocation. Poorly run companies die all the time, some just need to be helped along.
Some companies may share a profit. I heard that Activision used to pay some of the revenue from Call of Duty to the developers, although I can't confirm it. And it was a long time ago, not sure if they still do.
1) A lot of people would immediately stop contributing to open source. In fact i ahead have because ML is being used to launder my work to use it without resourcing my licenses. Same with any other area where people share their work for free. It would all be monetized by those with access to better advertising.
2) Anything published would be immediately scooped up by the big players. How would a small competitor like Nebula compete with YouTube if YouTube took all its content and offered it for free with ads?
3) How would you even know who the original creator was if those stealing the work stripped away attribution? They already do but at least you have some limited ways to fight them.
2) what do you mean "scooped up"? What's to stop a small platform from providing the same content that a large platform does, if we've done away with intellectual property?
3) I'm confused. If you're paying somebody to create a proposed work, and then they create it and get paid for doing so, and then nobody is allowed to restrict access to it, where does the theft come in?
Huh? That doesn't make any sense. "Vote your wallet" does not mean throw money on the ground haphazardly and pray that it finds its way to the appropriate home. It means hand the money directly to the person you want to have it. There is no way to avoid deciding who gets the money. That's the only choice you get to make.
(And, the very next post is the forum admin confirming that the poster is indeed a rockstar employee.)
They make so much money, why can't they play nice and treat their employees like human beings?
I don't recall reports of Valve (Steam, also super profitable) stooping. Is Rockstar a genetic relative of GAFA, because this is more like what I've come to expect from Amazon.
Rockstar, and owner Take-Two (largely owned by institutional investors--well known for their historical championing of workers rights and fondness of unions), both seem to have your typical corporate hierarchies, where executives are fairly and correctly compensated for being more productive than over 200 software engineers combined.
Executives make more money because they are the only ones with the power to set wages. Workers do not have the power to set wages.
Firings reduce expenses, the equation above explains the rest. Of course, that's only in the short term, but that's what exec bonuses are given out on!
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/COST/costco/revenu...
While simultaneously growing profit margin:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/COST/costco/profit...
Hence growing annual net income from $2.3B to $8B in the last 10 years.
Do they have a benevolent dictator? Is this a temporary glitch that will be "corrected" when profits aren't looking as good? Are they a monopoly?
I'm genuinely curious.
Because they can.
In the gaming industry the biggest studios get away with running sweat shops because there's endless hordes of brilliant engineers and artists who had always dreamed to make videogames and need a huge name on the CV to move to better places.
Their 10-Ks show they lost a lot of money.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TTWO/take-two-inte...
2025 $-4.479B
2024 $-3.744B
2023 $-1.125B
The meager earnings in years previous to that are beyond wiped out. In fact, expect a lot more squeeze if you work at Take Two or a lot more rent seeking if you are a customer, because based on the stock price movement, the market is expecting a lot more net income.
Edit: looks like they set a ton of money on fire by overpaying for Zynga a few years ago. Customers and employees are going to be paying for that bad decision for a long time.
Managing to lose money on those kinds of profits is arguably further evidence that leadership there is overpaid.
Meta is also in the news today for making 10% of its revenue from scams, as well as for having codified policy that scammers representing at least 0.15% of their revenue must be protected from any moderation.
Business thrives on illegality.
At least under liberal capitalism I have the option of not buying games and of making my own.
Because they want to make great games. It's sad but we've never figure out how to replicate the creative output that crunch and stress triggers. I don't understand it and frankly I couldn't stand it so I left the industry but I won't pretend that we have a solution too the problem.
There's a big difference between people putting extra effort due to real external factors (e.g. company running out of money) and artificial pressure while executives enjoy their yachts.
This is a myth and plenty of amazing games were made without treating people like trash.
That's not how human nature works. Greed doesn't lead to idealism or altruism, it invariably leads to entitlement and more greed. The rich are never satisfied with hundreds of billions, they insist upon trillions.
On another note, heard on Bloomberg today that they've been working on GTA 6 for 10 years at this point. Considering the size of their development teams it's possible that more manhours may have gone into this single title than all video games that were made until the PS1 era combined.
It’s incredible to think about what else has happened during these past 10 years of development. Or think about other decade long stretches and what was accomplished.
Not cutting short what the undertaking of this is, just that the scale of this project spanning a decade is fascinating.
Once the government shutdown ends, I highly recommend the affected American individuals file a complaint with the NLRB via their website: https://www.nlrb.gov/
https://gtaforums.com/topic/1004182-rockstar-games-alleged-u...
https://actionnetwork.org/fundraising/support-rockstar-worke...
Just because some unions aren’t as good as others is not a reason to dismiss unions.
I used to work at a university that was NON-union, but basically ensured our benefits/raises were always at LEAST as good as the unionized university across town negotiated. THAT's a way to avoid unionizing efforts.
I have a teacher in the family - it's been an unequivocal necessity for them - otherwise the city / schoolboard would run roughshod over them - like 1% raises over 5 years, while their coffers are full.
And there's always a few (*&@#$ parents who think they're "all that" who would try to have individual teachers fired just because their 1st grader only got a "B" when they're clearly a generational prodigy... Unions really help with that.
They had several (4 I think?) union-mandated breaks during the day, which I got in trouble for not taking several times. The reason given was if I didn't take my breaks than they could disappear for everyone. I also was willing to do any job given to me, and given that I had some shop and machining experience, was happy to help with any task given, which made me an asset to management as they cold put me in anywhere as needed to help production along, but angered old crotchety employees that didn't want me in their space and were happy doing the absolute minimum to collect their wage.
So yeah, my experience with Unions is they breed mediocracy and pull everyone down that wants to set themselves apart to management. Wages were standardized rather than based on individual accomplishments so there was no incentive to excel.
I'm certainly not "anti-union" but my original comment is that HN thinks Unions are this utopia and in a sober reality they often aren't.
Indeed that's par for the course, there's plenty to dislike about democracy, but the alternatives we've tried are worse for example.
Had I any dependants, I'd definitely stay (just for the benefits! which cost nothing-more for one dude or an entire family).
Started my own residential shop, now-retired; life probably would have been easier had I stuck with commercial, instead.
It seems likely the vast majority of HN has never been a member of a union themselves given the audience, so the obsession feels like a savior complex IMO.
Yeah, unions accomplished a lot of good things many decades ago. But if you think they haven't morphed over those decades and are still automatically a net positive for all workers, I could probably sell you a bridge.
For my experience at Teamsters, there was zero incentive for employees to actually perform. Everything was done by senority across the board, and you're literally just aging and waiting your turn.
The insurance was good, the wages were average, and the incentive to do better was non-existent. And yes, firing people unless they did something egregious was much, much harder.
Pretty much everyone I know who works hard does so in spite of their circumstances. Not because of them.
Of the engineers I've worked with, the cooks I've worked with, the waiters I've worked with... the hard working ones don't win. They get taken advantage of and run into the ground. They perform, and perform more, and more, and that exclusively works against them.
And, as you go up the ladder, you can very clearly see the hard work and competence thin out more and more. The people who are successful aren't smart, or hard working, they're just good at maintaining a status quo.
These are not unionized places. So, maybe it's a capitalism thing.
It's exactly what I saw, so take that for what you will. Similarly, I've also worked with white collar engineers in corporate environments, and have experienced the opposite as you go up the ladder. These are generalizations, but I am arguing that certain principles of how unions function in blue collar labor jobs have predictable results.
I think "threatening employees" is a beyond cynical way of describing low performance consequences.
If you can't understand how someone being virtually un-fireable due to performance results in coasting I'm really not sure how to discuss this.
I don't want to presume too much here, but if your reference point is only working with white collar engineers, it's hard to explain how different working in a unionized blue collar environment can be.
https://gtaforums.com/topic/1004182-rockstar-games-alleged-u...
* Has anyone heard of game-buying consumers voting en masse with their pocketbooks over ethical/social concerns about a game/publisher/studio?
(I absolutely don't mean something like the Gamergate psychosis, though that was the first very loosely related event that came to mind. I mean respectable commercial boycotts, for admirable reasons.)
They're in it to make boatloads of cash and will do whatever to whoever is needed.
And no, consumers have never really cared in the gaming space. They won't do anything differently because of this.
Consumers almost never care outside of isolated causes du jour or when it directly affects someone they know. Look at all the self-proclaimed socialists and progressives walking around with iPhones manufactured by Foxconn, a company known for treating its employees so badly there were inquiries into the suicide rates of their workers at one point.
While I have my concerns about unions, they are absolutely necessary in many cases. Companies are not your friend, nor are your fellow consumers most of the time.
It's the truth though. It doesn't matter if the product was produced as a result of slave labor, union-busting, corporate government coups, extensive pollution, monopolistic behavior, manipulation either of or from the government, theft of natural resources, etc.
People just go 'la la la I can't hear you' and buy whatever they want.
And to some extent I don't blame people for doing that. To really dig into the actions of even a single company could take months of careful research. And given how convoluted the ownership charts can be, you may end up finding that 3/4 or more of what you buy is from a company with despicable practices - I mean shoot look at what Nestle owns.
I don't know if there's a solution. Even if you got people to do all the hard work (ha!), it would be hard for people to get around it.
That's a really good point. With the way modern supply chains work, it may not even be possible to really know if you're buying something that was ethically produced or not.
Also, I may be misremembering, but there was something pertaining to esports supressing the hong Kong riots.
/r/gaming post that wasn't only about product: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/154ko01/why_is_bliz...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blizzard_Entertainment#Hearths...
What was done was blatantly illegal, EVEN IF the people weren't fired for union organizing, which Rockstar will have a hard time explaining away since they fired only people involved in union organizing.
The fired employees in the UK (not sure about Canada) will get back pay and penalties once the unavoidable legal process finishes.
I'm sure, however, Rockstar will consider all of the sanctions they'll receive as price of doing business.
Despicable.
The chances of a company turning around are super low, adding a union makes it harder. Just run.
That is not a fact.
Unionising can be good for everybody
What ruins organisations is greed, or hidden agendas
This is a nice summary of the central issue with unions in the U.S. A rational person can quickly see why people are clamoring for unions in the U.S. and also why American companies are so resistant.
Most of your post was complete non-sense but this last line really does take the cake.
One can only hope this employee survived.
Also the narrative and dialogue is ever so slightly overated in Rockstar games because the competition is quite nerdy/square in that department as are most of the audience. The ending of Red Dead II was actually quite trite, especially in terms of dialogue and narrative (in my opinion) even though the game is incredible overall. It is honestly still very far from a Tarantino script.
I genuinely cringed at the end of RDII due to the dialogue just feel the need to mention that again...