Related topic: People Make Games has had really great coverage on Rockstar's illegal firing of the developers working on GTA 6 because of their unionization efforts
I don't work in games, but I am a software developer and a member of the Communications Workers of America. I've also taken leave to help workers in games organize.
I'm seeing a lot of ideological takes that are disconnected from the reality of unions with software developer members today. If anyone has questions about the CWA or game worker organizing campaigns, I'll do my best to answer.
This thread is filled with so many anti-union takes that you have to wonder if they are paid bots.
If you assume that most of the crowd that visits this website works in tech or tech-adjacent fields, how can you be against an entity whose main objective is to safeguard and work for your interests over your employers? Unfathomable that people are willing to do so much against their own best interests. Or...they are bots.
>We've created an all-new Games Rules Engine (GRE) that uses sophisticated machine learning that can read any card we can dream up for Magic. That means the shackles are off for our industry-leading designers to build and create cards and in-depth gameplay around new mechanics and unexpected but widly fun concepts, all of which can be adapted for MTG Arena thanks to the new GRE under the hood.
At the time, this claim of using "sophisticated machine learning" to (apparently?) translate natural language card text into code that a rules engine could enforce struck me as obviously fake. Now nearly ten years later, AI is starting to reach a level where this is plausible.
In their letter, the union writes:
>Over the past few years, pressure has ramped up from leadership to adopt LLMs and Gen AI tools in various aspects of our work at WOTC, often over the explicit concerns of impacted employees
I'm curious if this would include fighting against turning WotC's old fanciful claim into a reality as the technology matures?
The Arena card engine is based on CLIPS [1] and not modern LLM-based tools. Magic cards are written in a very constrained language (usually called "card templating") that lends itself very well to machine-parseability.
There was an era about 10-15 years long where that was true but modern cards often fall back on very loose language that they tighten up with rulings prior or sometimes after release. See the language behind the "Prepared" key word in the newest set for a striking example.
I don't think Prepared is ambiguous at all. It has its meaning defined in the CR (722) and every card that uses it has either a clear trigger condition or the "enters prepared" replacement effect. It's just a new designation and there are plenty of those already, including ones that are 10+ years old (Renowned, Monstrous, Level Up).
It's a parser + (de)compiler and rules engine which I'm trying to get to 100% coverage over all Standard/Modern/Vintage/Commander legal cards. About 23000 of them are partially supported, while 15k currently work in full (~3k more than what MTGA currently supports, IIRC). It also allows for P2P 4-way multiplayer which Arena unfortunately does not :/
I understand why workers in the video game industry want to unionize. They like the industry but the standards are shit. I do not see how unions will catch on in the video game industry.
The ability to unionize has very little to do with the ideology of the workforce and everything to do with the structure of the industry.
Unions tend to catch on when labor is irreplacable, workplace is large and centralized, if they can halt critical operations beyond their industry (ie railroads, ports, etc), there is low exposure to competition/off shoring, etc. The video game industry itself is not very ripe for unionizatoin.
I'm not sure that's true. Surely doormen, janitors, and security guards are not "irreplaceable" and can't "halt critical operations beyond their industry".
That's all labor that can only be done "here and now." Can't just have Indians do it over the internet. And replacing the workers at a moment's notice is usually complicated by the striking workers harassing and attacking the replacements. Again, hard to do that when your replacement is on the other side of the globe.
You cannot simply transfer Magic the Gathering to overseas workers and expect any kind of usable result. It will be from an entirely different cultural framework.
If everyone at a game developer goes on strike, there is basically no amount of outsourcing or scab labour that can replace them. This is actually probably true of basically all software
Just refusing to share passwords into key systems would be enough to significantly halt any attempt to bring on an entirely new development team
Yes but what happens? The video game is not maintained or released. Society doesnt care that much. It's not critical and there are millions of alternatives.
Some historically powerful unions have enjoyed their power because their strikes not only stop their employers making money, but also impose great inconvenience on many people downstream of them.
If truckers or dockworkers go on strike there's no food on the shelves, if coal miners go on strike the lights go out, and so on.
As a consequence of this, employers are motivated to make a deal not just by missed opportunities to make money, but also by politicians, other powerful capitalists, and public opinion.
Of course there are plenty of unions where this isn't the case; theatres and hollywood are unionised despite the fact nobody freezes or starves when they go on strike.
Game developers are, I think, closer to the hollywood position than the dockworkers position.
I think there are some professions where Unions make sense, like for Pilots and Teachers, as a 30 years of experience teacher can be replaced with a 2 years of experience teacher, so we need unions to protect the experienced Teacher or Pilot, but when it comes to what MTG Arena does, I dont see much value on the union existing, perhaps someone can provide some valuable insight
A lot of HN repliers think that they, out of thousands of other employees, are that One Captain Of Industry that has sufficient bargaining and negotiating power to stand toe to toe with a huge employer. And therefore, a union could never help tech employees as a class.
My big gripe with unions is the unwavering protection of their worst performing members.
Eg, that they necessitated so called "rubber rooms" like these in the NYC public schools, where teachers got paid to do nothing while waiting on arbitration.
I doubt you'll find many people in favor of how bad cops get protected by police unions either. At least in the US I'd much rather a broad social net so my health care and retirement weren't so directly tied to my job than a union specific to my trade.
A lot of the salary figures I see thrown around for tech employees in the US are pretty wild [1] - $200k, $400k total compensation without even getting 'Senior' in the job title.
That's in a country with a median household income of $84k [2]
I think it's understandable why someone would feel they were doing well at bargaining and negotiating if they were taking home 4.7x as much as their neighbours and loved ones.
Folks in the games industry by all accounts have really shitty pay and working conditions so I can 110% understand why they'd unionise.
Salary is only one of many workplace issues that organizing can help with. Those US tech people who make $400k, that's great for them! But how is their mental health / burnout? How good is their health insurance? Are they getting enough vacation time or time with their families? Are they regularly expected to work 12+ hour days? Do they have their weekends? Do they want to Work From Home but can't get it? What about permission to moonlight or work on side projects? Do they have satisfying autonomy at work or are they just churning through JIRA tickets?
Collective negotiation power can help with all of these, if we let it. It doesn't just stop at compensation.
I have gotten a lot of mileage asking from these types once we get to the “I can negotiate my own raises” by asking them how many times they’ve actually tried negotiating much less succeeded.
The big assumption here is that the Union's interests are, in fact, aligned with You, the Worker.
If they're not, then you're just caught between two powerful, unaccountable entities. You have to join the Union, after all. I see a lot of folks in Education who feel that the Union simply Exists and does not really help them (their employers being rather sympathetic as well).
When they are, of course the Worker benefits. Healthcare and Airline employees seem to fall into this camp.
I think on average it's a safer assumption that the union made up of your peers are more aligned with your interests than the owners of the company are.
All of my friends that are teachers do admit their union has flaws, but also are very grateful to have strong contracts, benefits, and people willing to fight for them when the school system tries to screw them over.
Is that actually the case for the tech unions that actually exist, though? Historically, the people pushing for tech unionization were doing it for ideological reasons, not in response to the relatively recent layoffs, etc. and you can see this in their leadership.
I have a pretty simple litmus test for them: are they opposed to H1B hiring, and would they have defended James Damore when he got ousted from Google for basically being autistic? I think the answer for many of them is a resounding no.
It sounds like you’re just as ideologically in your opposition if you’re bringing up James Damore.
On opposing H1B as they are implemented now I agree with you, but in a hypothetical world with tech unions James Damore would still be advocating for large swathes of fellow union members to be removed. He was being misogynistic not “basically being autistic”.
I think that Damore was stupid for writing and posting it internally and disagree with portions of it, but almost all of the reactions I saw to his manifesto were to third-hand misrepresentations of it or willful misreadings of it. (e.g. him referring to population statistics on neuroticism being interpreted as him saying that his female coworkers were neurotic). I think your reply is the perfect example: he wasn't advocating for women to be 'removed', he was arguing that DEI efforts to try to get a 50/50 male/female balance are fundamentally misguided because not as many women want to work in tech as men.
But whether or not you agree with him, you should agree with the idea that one of the primary jobs of a union would have been to give him a fair defense regardless of whether the union leadership likes him or not. I don't think any of the tech unions would do that.
edit: Let me put it this way. Suppose you make an post in an internal politics discussion forum saying that you oppose the H1B program as it is, and then get fired because people claim that you hate immigrants and want your fellow coworkers to be deported. Do you think these unions would defend you?
Uh, how? This might be a country thing but you don't have to join any union in my country. You do, if they represent your interests. Big companies have multiple, competing unions, and the anarchists (which refuse state subsidies and are fully self-funded) are pretty good at what they do.
If you have to join a union isn't that essentially a racket?
You just described why workers should want a union. But that's not what determines whether or not unions will catch on in the industry. Thats determined by the structure of the industry. If its not critical and there are plenty of replacements waiting to take your job, unionization just wont take off on a large scale.
A union's objective is to protect and safeguard the interest of its members. As long as it does that, it adds value, regardless of what anyone else (especially those not in the union) thinks whether it has value.
Well generally the workers who make these games actually care about the game and want to make a good experience for the players. The execs however, only care about how much money they can make off of the product.
Having a union (assuming that the union is run well),
- ensures a better product for customers
- ensures better working conditions for workers
- ensures better pay and benefits from workers (at least in programming roles, the games industry is generally underpaid compared to developers in other industries)
- provides protections against undue firings and layoffs
I would be curious to know why you don't think a union would be good for these people.
The ability to unionize has very little to do with the ideology of the workforce and everything to do with the structure of the industry. It wont work out in video games because it's not a critical industry and there are plenty of people willing to do the work.
That logic doesn’t make any sense to me. Game programming, art, and even marketing are highly specific niches within those broader fields. You can’t pick any random programmer off the street and get them up to speed on game development overnight (let alone your specific crazy custom engine/architecture, as often seems to be the case).
1) Nothing critical is lost if a video game team stops working. Society doesnt need it and there are lots of alternatives.
2) There is already a major labor surplus for video games. It's famously hard to get into and low paying because of it. There is no doubt someone else is willing to step in.
The criticality of the industry, for whatever subjective measure you’re using there, doesn’t matter for union forming.
It’s the leverage that the nascent union has over the company owners and management, who presumably still want to make money.
That being said the video game industry does have a deluge of naive young people willing to sell their bodies and souls for their dream, so I don’t have high hopes for this group.
>stable and/or well compensated, high status job. Not exploited/abused much.
Oh, they definitely deserve a union.
>unstable and poorly paid, low status job. Abused and exploited often.
Hmm… their job doesn’t really seem “cool enough” to have a union. They should just take it and shut up. I mean, they’re losers after all.
I’m sort of joking but it’s interesting how so many people “gatekeep” unions when people in unglamorous lines of work need unions more than almost anyone else.
Presumably employees were unhappy. It's rare that unions spring up when everyone is treated well and paid fairly.
I can't speak to this particular group, but Hasbro (parent company of WOTC) has been a horribly short-sighted steward of Magic and DND, so perhaps this will encourage other WOTC divisions to unionize as well.
> Our Free Time is Our Own: Currently, if an employee makes anything creative in their free time, with their own resources, Hasbro may claim ownership. What we do in our free time should not be dictated by the company; neither should what we make in our free time be owned by the company.
How common is this in creative fields?
From my perspective this seems outlandish. Imagine doing FOSS work or a side project on your personal computer and your company tries to claim it. Odd...
Most employment agreements for tech companies have a clause that says that the employer owns everything you do while you’re working for them. And if you’re on salary, as opposed to working by the hour, there really is no “free time.” In practice no company is going to go after you for anything that is non-competitive, and doubly so if it’s also open source work. But yea, if you’re inventing competitive products in your “spare” time, companies could go after you.
> have a clause that says that the employer owns everything you do while you’re working for them
Good companies will have a clause that says the employer owns everything you do in the relevant field of the company while working for them, explicitly naming that field.
If you work for a logistics company, you would be able to write your own video editor without any worry. If you work for a not-shitty company.
I’ve worked at 12 companies in Silicon Valley and they all had variations of such language, whether huge Fortune 50 corporations or 4-person startups with the ink still wet on their incorporation filing. Yes, the better ones have a clause that restricts the claim to competitive work, but not all do. Smaller companies will be more flexible with you, particularly if you’re a key hire. At larger companies, it’s typically take it or leave it. HR has forms that must be signed and they sure aren’t going to involve the legal department for you. And to be clear, nobody is going to come after you for a completely orthogonal work product. There’s no point because they can’t monetize whatever orthogonal thing you created and it would cost them lawyers fees for no return. But I have seen companies try to enforce those contracts before. I have not ever seen one go to court. They typically settle before they get that far, but rumors were that IP was given to the company. The employee left in any case and redid the work outside.
> Yes, the better ones have a clause that restricts the claim to competitive work, but not all do.
Yeah, this is my whole point. The rest of your comment, I agree with. In practice you're unlikely to have an issue for something orthogonal and especially something financially worthless.
But you might. There are a lot of people out there that have predatory attitudes towards IP, especially among C-level or would-be-C-level.
And companies that restrict to competing IP do exist.
It’s certainly shifted toward restricting the scope to competing IP, but that’s only in the last 15 years or so. Prior to that it was definitely more all encompassing. But yea, companies are becoming more enlightened as key employees push back and the companies figure out that they don’t really want your orthogonal ideas anyway. But back in the day, particularly when many employees might only work for a maximum of three to five companies anyway, it was extremely common to have “we own everything you create” clauses.
All of my employers have let me specify my personal projects are mine. Maybe I've been lucky but I wouldn't work at a place that doesn't allow me my own life.
This is also something I try to ask for - generally I get the "that's fine" from the hiring manager and HR, but both times I've then had to push back and get it added to the actual supplied contract. And that was very much not easy.
And even then there's normally a "Sufficiently Different Sector" requirement for those personal projects - which makes sense, but it is inevitably worded vague enough that it would likely require going to court for pretty much any project to show it's not directly related. And that would be near prohibitively expensive for me as an individual if the relationship actually became adversarial.
Common enough even in tech that I've both had contracts try to demand this, and had contracts explicitly rule it out being presented as evidence of how great the company was.
Seconded. I had to be very careful to work on side projects completely divorced from my main job for a spell, and had to get legal approval first.
The common attitude of companies is that they’re paying for the whole of your life inside and outside of “work”, and these Unions are a response to that encroachment (and associated under-compensation in general).
Good on them. Best of luck negotiating a fair contract!
When someone is empowered to work remotely, and is salaried and not held to specific hours, then it's very hard to identify what work is "theirs" and what work is "the company's" in a legally consistent way. Yes, it's usually obvious from context, but context doesn't always carry to a court of law. It can be particularly messy because the kinds of open source projects one contributes to often overlap with the work they do in their day job.
So most companies which are salaried and allow WFH will usually ask employees to explicitly list any project they work on which they don't want owned by the company, with the expectation being that everything unlisted is owned by the company. It's a bit cumbersome, but generally the least bad option.
At our company we have a form to file if we do work outside of hours on OSS or pet projects, and to the best of my knowledge nobody has ever had their application denied.
edit: it's important because it's symmetric - not only does this define what _isn't_ property of the company, it defines what _is_. So if you come up with a clever solution to a problem for a company purpose and introduce it into an OSS project, it doesn't come back to haunt the company.
No, it's really only companies that don't care about being shitty that do this. It's a callous lack of regard for employees that leads to the situation you describe, though you're right that it's not uncommon.
Any halfway decent company will restrict in the contract to IP that's related to the company's area of business. If you write logistics software, the company will say "we own all logistics software you write". You can't create a competitor. But if you work for a logistics software company and decide to go write a video editor on your own time, the company wouldn't own that.
> If you write logistics software, the company will say "we own all logistics software you write". You can't create a competitor. But if you work for a logistics software company and decide to go write a video editor on your own time, the company wouldn't own that.
The problem is there's no clear legal definition of what "logistics software" is. A video editor is a seemingly obvious example of what is not, but what if you came up with a novel optimization technique which is not necessarily only applicable to logistics? Could you spin off that software into a separate business? What about something more fundamental, like tooling? Think about something like Slack, which was just meant to be an internal messaging tool created as part of the development of a video game. Imagine after Slack took off, that an employee claimed that because they had written Slack at least partly outside of working hours and it was not "video game software", the company didn't have ownership of the software.
This is why the common approach is that the company owns everything except anything explicitly carved out, it avoids ambiguities like this.
Yes, you're right. The common (lazy) approach for companies that don't give a shit is "we own everything because it might be complicated to introduce ambiguity and we own you anyway".
Having carveouts for obviously not-related software is easy. At a decent company populated by reasonable people, if you wanted to work on something you felt fell into the grey area, you would ask and get a written okay. Which is how it also works at many of the shitty companies! The difference is that the shitty companies there's never a route to do anything, however unrelated, without running it by HR. Because they think they own you.
> Imagine after Slack took off, that an employee claimed that because they had written Slack at least partly outside of working hours and it was not "video game software", the company didn't have ownership of the software.
On the contrary, using a nonzero amount of working hours to work on something pretty clearly makes it company property.
> The difference is that the shitty companies there's never a route to do anything, however unrelated, without running it by HR. Because they think they own you.
"Shitty" companies have legal obligations to include these kind of clauses though, because investors and board members don't want to deal with a situation where there's exactly this ambiguity about what counts as "obviously not-related software". HR exists to protect the company. What counts as obviously non-related to you may not count as obviously non-related to a board member who hears about the new optimization algorithm you wrote and realizes the company can monetize it.
> On the contrary, using a nonzero amount of working hours to work on something pretty clearly makes it company property.
How recently have you seen a tech employment contract where you were obligated to work exactly 8 to 5 with a 1 hour lunch break? Flexible hours means any hour is potentially a "working hour".
> > On the contrary, using a nonzero amount of working hours to work on something pretty clearly makes it company property.
> How recently have you seen a tech employment contract where you were obligated to work exactly 8 to 5 with a 1 hour lunch break? Flexible hours means any hour is potentially a "working hour".
Not what I meant. In the Slack example, it was planned work within the company, made using company resources. Working on something for internal company use that the company has a Jira ticket for is pretty blatantly on the side of "Company time".
> "Shitty" companies have legal obligations to include these kind of clauses though, because investors and board members don't want to deal with a situation
Not wanting to deal with something isn't a legal obligation not to do it. I don't want to deal with filing taxes but that doesn't mean I now have a legal obligation not to file taxes. It's just laziness.
Also worth noting - the company may not mind you doing that work today but without anything in writing the company may come after you in the future. This is particularly relevant when you're on salary and work for a company that may be acquired or experience significant board turnover. I've had several employers who were very pro- side project and pro-OSS explicitly state that they'll approve anything that doesn't compete with the core business, but get it in writing for my own protection in ideal future of post-acquisition.
> When someone is empowered to work remotely, and is salaried and not held to specific hours, then it's very hard to identify what work is "theirs" and what work is "the company's" in a legally consistent way
It's easy. Work done on company issued hardware belongs to the company. Everything else does not
Can't speak for creative fields, but it's remarkably common in tech. It was tolerable when wages meant we could afford rent or possibly a home and job security was excellent, but that's no longer the case, and thus folks are starting to push back on that excessive overreach.
See also "anti-moonlighting" and "anti-social media" clauses. Hell, I've seen the odd story of folks being fired/disciplined for their dating profiles before. If the government doesn't tell them no, companies will take every inch they can get.
My first job after finishing my undergrad degree was performing quality analysis on corn starch. As a condition of employment, I had to sign a paper saying anything I invented related to corn was property of my employer.
It's extremely common in lots of creative and technical fields. It is usually restricted to work related to the employer's field and the employee's function, but one could imagine some employers of folks in the creative arena being a bit more... expansive in their interpretation.
This is common in Germany at least in the scope of patents and inventions. That is, if you make any invention at have it patented or market it outside of your job, your employer owns that patent and the profits ("Arbeitnehmererfindungen"). Luckily, a slow beaurocratic government works sometimes in our favour, as they never updates the law to apply to software, and software is not patentable in Germany or the EU - so we can work on side projects in software without that affecting us. But if you are a mechanical engineer, you are screwed.
Whatever you do in your spare time is up to you and your employer has no saying over it, unless he can prove that it negatively impacts your job performance.
It’s basically true that everything about employment is a negotiation and if you don’t like the deal at one place you can try to negotiate it differently, or work elsewhere. Of course, unionization is a legitimate move in that negotiation.
every IT and dev gig I've been at / around basically said "anything you create is ours and we have ROFR on any LLCs or companies you found"
in practice that is either unenforceable or else a giant waste of the company's money, but it's CYA in case someone doing engineering or creative work decides to rip it off elsewhere.
like Meta ain't gonna try to steal your local cupcakes at the farmer's market side gig
A clause like this is pretty standard in software company employment contracts, at least in the California/Silicon Valley zone. There’s sometimes an exception for explicitly named items that pre-date your employment but sometimes they try to claim ownership of stuff you made before joining the company too.
Typically there’s a way to declare things that you are working on before you start at the company to prevent them trying to sue you for rights to prior work.
In contrast to Google, Microsoft, my former employer, probably has (had?) the best policy amongst big tech: moonlighting wasn't just tolerated, but actively encouraged! (...provided it runs on Windows, of course) ...because it's basically free training/experience if it means exposure to new APIs/platforms/libs/concepts - and definitely helps the morale levels of folks who love to build things but who ended-up with an extremely narrow-scoped job at the company (e.g. PMs who don't get to write code, or SDETs and SREs that only get noticed by management when they don't do their jobs).
During the launch of Windows 8, Msft's moonlighting policy was also part of their Windows App Store strategy: we were all heavily encouraged to make an "Windows Store App-app" so that SteveB could claim MS had N-many apps in its app-store, because that's how Leadership thought they could build credibility vs. Apple's established app store (of course, what actually ended-up happening was hundreds of cr-apps that were just WebView-wrappers over live websites).
In contrast, I understand Apple might have the worst moonlighting policy: I'm told that unless you directly work on WebKit or Darwin then you have to deactivate your GitHub account or else find yourself swiftly dragged onto the proverbial Trash.
Unfortunately IP assignment agreements are very common, even in non-creative roles and fields. Many many many companies have overly-broad employment agreements in the US, mostly because they know few people will challenge it and that the legal protections for workers are basically nothing. I personally will never sign an IP assignment agreement that isn't explicitly scoped to apply only to work hours and company-provided equipment. What I do on my own time with my own equipment is my own business.
I've seen it in a couple software developer contracts here in Norway. I find it despicable and have always gotten it removed from any contract before signing. I don't get why it's even legal to have in contracts. I certainly hope it's unenforceable.
It depends on the juridiction, it might not be legal or enforceable in Norway but it definitely is at least in California.
There is the famous lawsuit of Mattel suing Bratz, on the basis that the Bratz creator started to work on his new dolls while being employed by Mattel.
I'm not sure how it ended, but it wasn't dismissed right away and they spent years in court.
> There is the famous lawsuit of Mattel suing Bratz, on the basis that the Bratz creator started to work on his new dolls while being employed by Mattel.
That's at least reasonable considering Bratz is a competitor.
If the Bratz creator started working on them while working for a company that made water filters, that would not be reasonable.
I hate unions, but I've noticed they only form when there's some sort of abuse. Treat employees well, and this isn't a problem.
Also, flip the hierarchy: a business that puts employees first and profits for owners last can often have a shit ton of profits for owners. Executing isn't easy and requires wisdom and work - but that's why owners are paid the big bucks.
If owners can't hack it... Then it's a skill issue. Get gud.
> a business that puts employees first and profits for owners last can often have a shit ton of profits for owners.
Owners can make 100x that shit ton if they put profits for owners first, so why wouldn’t they do that instead? Out of the goodness of their own hearts?
To me, this comment is a bucket of contradictions.
Why do you hate them, when you recognize that they are general the result of abuse? I'll cop to unions not always being great; the rules can be counterproductive, or sometimes limiting, but they are up to the union members, so at the end of the day there is some kind of reason for them.
And the second paragraph - barring ESOP or employee-owned co-ops a union is pretty much the only game in town other than crossing your fingers and hoping the company owners, or board, or stock market are capable of pulling their head out of their ass. this can be a big lift.
In other news, with common sense and widespread honor, dignity and honesty, every form of government can work beautifully well, from anarchy to plutarchy to democracy to dictatorship, either using capitalism, communism or any other -ism.
I wonder why in America it doesn't happen in the tech sector for devs specifically (as there is Alphabet Workers Union), beyond the typical reasons of American anti union sentiment like corporatism, bootstrap mentality etc, despite which there are many unions in the US like UAW, police and teachers unions etc.
For tech, it's largely a different set of reasons, like high wages, no real grievances per se, and the ease of transferring to other companies, plus the work is all virtual so there is no reason why companies cannot outsource to another area where the union has no power, if the workers are just on their computers for work anyway. This latter reason is actually exactly why Netflix is investing heavily in South Korean productions.
The point of a union is not prevent layoffs and role reduction in force. It is to make sure that the company has done its absolute best to find another solution to the problem (that they're trying to solve with layoffs) and ensures that the company is accountable for all their decisions.
This just limits hiring in the first place as we see in European branches of (generally, American) tech companies. And regardless, what solutions can be found by the union?
I think some of it is that "union" has a different meaning in the US vs (eg) the EU. US unions are explicitly adversarial and tend to use the strategy (usually associated with capitalism!) of optimizing for short-term union benefit above all else, using brinkmanship and value-capturing tactics. EU unions, according to my weak understanding, are significantly more collaborative and more likely to be amenable to compromise if it contributes to the health of the corporations or institutions.
My naive view: in the US, unions are all about creating another set of assholes to counterbalance the existing assholes. In the EU, there's at least some thought towards "hey, maybe we shouldn't all be assholes?" (Or at least, not all of the time.)
That doesn't address your question of why it doesn't happen in the tech sector, but perhaps my anecdotal opinion is widespread enough to be added to your (already good) set of hypotheses?
It’s because the capitalist class has successfully persuaded the proletariat that they shouldn’t join a union. The US has been very successful at concentrating created wealth into a small number of people.
> beyond the typical reasons of American anti union sentiment like corporatism, bootstrap mentality etc, despite which there are many unions in the US like UAW, police and teachers unions etc.
As I said for tech workers it's a different set of reasons.
I think tech largely falls for the same anti-union propaganda as a great number of the rest of the USA. You'll see HN commenters in this article repeating much of this propaganda.
I understand that Europe doesn't have many mandatory union arrangements.
In Canada, unions are often shop-wide with no mechanism to opt out, which makes them very sticky and allows them to grow predatory if they can maintain enough corruption or apathy. I'm led to believe that many US states have similar problems, but that's only based on how American unions are portrayed in news and fiction.
And what has that really bought them? The wages are laughable compared to the US where you'd THINK us non-unionized tech workers would be paid minimum wage. And the famous European healthcare and long vacations are more a function of the government than anything the unions have explicitly bargained for.
They might have been declining since then, but more recently I'd point to when they introduced Dr. Who, Transformers, My Little Pony, and a whole bunch of other crap into a game about wizards fighting in a fantasy world.
In the short term all the franchises have proved incredibly popular (just like in Fortnight), but in the long run I think it means the death of the game (just like where Fortnight is headed).
It is both true that there has been an OSR revival, and that D&D is more popular than ever -- just with a much broader and culturally normative audience.
Also: Yes, Hasbro did some shit, but they also had to relent and CC their SRD. This all happened years ago.
I say this as a committed Pathfinder player who hasn't seen a good reason to return to D&D (PF2e is good enough). D&D is doing numbers and no one cares that us nerds moved on because of weak tea from the previous decade.
D&D had a massive player revolt a while back in response to WOTC (at the requirement of Hasbro) trying to take ownership over everything players create in the D&D universe, breaking their long-standing promise to all of those creators and players.
Several of the top D&D people who were advocating for players resigned around this time.
WOTC/Hasbro since relented under this pressure, but the bridge was already burned. My group hasn't played a D&D campaign since. We switched to Pathfinder 2e and found that it was a better system altogether.
That was 1999. Invasion came out that year. Innistrad, Mirrodin, Ravnica, and other settings all came out after Hasbro's acquisition.
Every year seems to be the best-selling year so far. Magic: the Gathering is Hasbro's primary revenue source.
And look, I don't like the sheer amount of product they're pumping out every year now. But I realize I'm clearly in the minority opinion based on sales.
Awful news and a sign that WOTC has lost control of the company. The writing has been on the wall for WOTC for a while now, and this will exacerbate their decline. Amazing how unionists seize the body of their host when it is weakest.
EDIT: it is incredible how hostile HN is now to ant-union sentiment. None of the would-be founders here would support unionization at their companies. :)
This is a cancer that needs to be addressed as quickly as possible by firing them all. It is a toxic ideologically that should not be allowed to permeate.
>Layoff Protections
Businesses need the ability to layoff employees when markets change and projects are no longer viable.
>Remote Work Protections
Data has shown proven benefits of in person time and in a competitive environment such as gaming every advantage matters.
>Generative AI Protections
AI is revolutionizing all industries. If you refuse to use it to disrupt yourself someone else will.
These demands are very dangerous to the company and should not be considered.
Companies often expect employees to give advance notice of termination of employment, but employers do not feel beholden to their employees to reciprocate. This is unreasonable.
> Remote Work Protections
Many companies showed improved productivity when people were given flexibility. Claims to the contrary are often not backed up by actual data outside of cherry-picked results chosen by those in managerial positions.
> Generative AI Protections
MTG is a creative endeavor, and its output is protected by copyright. Copyright is, so far (thankfully), only enforceable when the media is produced by humans. Protections against the use of generative AI are not only good for workers' long-term productivity, but also for legal purposes.
---
I think maybe you should stop licking boots and start understanding why any of our society works today at all. As a hint, every protection you have ever enjoyed (40-hour work weeks, pensions or retirement funds, health insurance guarantees, mandatory paid time off, health and safety regulations, and so on) was paid for in blood by someone a company decided was not more important than profit. Unions are a fundamental capability by workers to ensure their own safety. Shockingly, I think it more reasonable to rely on the interpretations of those working in these jobs who want to unionize than some random person online who thinks "no wait, but think of the poor endangered company! :("
I am skeptical there is any customer benefit from unionization and it makes me concerned that MTG Arena might not be around for long term. As a big customer, I am worried about my investment in the platform with this announcement. MTGO still exists, I wish it had a better client.
Have Magic customers been clamoring for Magic's employees to unionize for the past 30 years? This benefit you purport strikes me as purely hypothetical and possibly wrong: if they can't downsize when they need to, they could go out of business completely.
Found the Pinkerton bot account lmao. It's confusing why tech people are so suspicious of unions. We all benefit from unions even if we're not in them...
You say he's a bot because he's suspicious of unions, yet you acknowledge plenty of tech people are suspicious of unions. Seems like you dont think he's a bot at all and you're just trying to delegitimize his viewpoint without actually confronting it.
It's likewise confusing when people think unions are always A Good Thing no matter what in all circumstances.
I'm glad the employees are exercising their rights to organize. Whether this turns out to be good for the business and for customers remains to be seen over time.
Any time people want to unionize, it's good for the customers even if it means the business goes under.
Sure, they won't get to be customers any longer if that happens, but at least it will increase the likelihood that the products they have available are not the cause of other people's suffering.
Not sure about "all." High earners generally do not benefit from unions as they can make more negotiating their own labor value versus participating in collective negotiation which is more likely to drag their compensation down towards the average, even if it's still higher than average.
> High earners generally do not benefit from unions as they can make more negotiating their own labor value versus participating in collective negotiation which is more likely to drag their compensation down towards the average, even if it's still higher than average.
High earners benefit from unions if union rules are made which benefit high earners.
The most well-known example of a high-earner union is SAG-AFTRA and they provide benefits to established performers, the big one being name exclusivity. e.g. even if your real life birth certificate says your name is "Tom Cruise" you cannot advertise your name as "Tom Cruise". Obviously, actors are still negotiating their own pay.
Another good one is the NFL Players Association which capped the rookie pay scale in 2011 to ensure the salary cap was going more toward veterans, people already in the union. However they still independently negotiate their compensation.
I don't know what people would want out of a tech union specifically but the idea that "union = payscale based on seniority" just plain isn't true.
Tech workers are fungible while actors or athletes are not though, so they should better be compared to more blue collar worker unions and here it is the case that wages are generally normalized.
> Tech workers are fungible while actors or athletes are not though
Strongly disagree with this, and I'm in 'tech management' now so I'm not saying this out of self-preservation.
Tech workers are similar to athletes in skill disparity IMO. A handful of superstars makes a massive difference. Look at those superstar AI developers who are allegedly getting 8 or 9 figure compensation from Meta etc. They're still technically "just" tech workers.
Those 8 and 9 figure employees are the exception that proves the rule, as I am talking about the vast majority of tech employees who largely fall within the middle of the normal curve. Athletes as well are far fewer in number and simply cost less overall (less than 2000 in the entire NFL).
> Those 8 and 9 figure employees are the exception that proves the rule
??? This doesn't make any sense. There's a hell of a lot more background actors, which you can call fungible, than there are Tom Cruises, but they're all covered by SAG-AFTRA. "Tech workers are fungible except for the ones that aren't" is tautological and doesn't support your argument.
Sure it does. I'm talking about the majority of tech employees who are fungible while you for some reason are talking about the few that aren't, I'm not sure why they're relevant to this debate. I'm sure there are some very rich tradespeople but they have unions too for the regular worker. And as I said, it's more appropriate to treat tech unions like blue collar unions over specialized unions like actor or athlete ones. And if we do so, wages will be depressed.
> Sure it does. I'm talking about the majority of tech employees who are fungible while you for some reason are talking about the few that aren't, I'm not sure why they're relevant to this debate.
Because I gave examples of unions which contain and are beneficial to high wage earners, and you dismissed them as irrelevant because tech employees are "fungible" except for the ones who aren't. Except those unions also contain far more "fungible" employees (background actors, backups, practice squad players) than they do star actors and quarterbacks, so it's a close comparison. There's currently 2,314 members of the NFL Players' Association but only 32 starting NFL quarterbacks.
Fungible means all employees are the same, that's the exact definition of fungibility. If certain employees have a measurably different impact on delivery, that is the definition of non-fungible. Just because most employees deliver near-average performance does not change this--it's tautologically expected!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnuipPQDd_w
I don't work in games, but I am a software developer and a member of the Communications Workers of America. I've also taken leave to help workers in games organize.
I'm seeing a lot of ideological takes that are disconnected from the reality of unions with software developer members today. If anyone has questions about the CWA or game worker organizing campaigns, I'll do my best to answer.
If you assume that most of the crowd that visits this website works in tech or tech-adjacent fields, how can you be against an entity whose main objective is to safeguard and work for your interests over your employers? Unfathomable that people are willing to do so much against their own best interests. Or...they are bots.
https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/feature/everything-you-nee...
>We've created an all-new Games Rules Engine (GRE) that uses sophisticated machine learning that can read any card we can dream up for Magic. That means the shackles are off for our industry-leading designers to build and create cards and in-depth gameplay around new mechanics and unexpected but widly fun concepts, all of which can be adapted for MTG Arena thanks to the new GRE under the hood.
At the time, this claim of using "sophisticated machine learning" to (apparently?) translate natural language card text into code that a rules engine could enforce struck me as obviously fake. Now nearly ten years later, AI is starting to reach a level where this is plausible.
In their letter, the union writes:
>Over the past few years, pressure has ramped up from leadership to adopt LLMs and Gen AI tools in various aspects of our work at WOTC, often over the explicit concerns of impacted employees
I'm curious if this would include fighting against turning WotC's old fanciful claim into a reality as the technology matures?
[1]: https://www.clipsrules.net/
It's a parser + (de)compiler and rules engine which I'm trying to get to 100% coverage over all Standard/Modern/Vintage/Commander legal cards. About 23000 of them are partially supported, while 15k currently work in full (~3k more than what MTGA currently supports, IIRC). It also allows for P2P 4-way multiplayer which Arena unfortunately does not :/
The ability to unionize has very little to do with the ideology of the workforce and everything to do with the structure of the industry.
Unions tend to catch on when labor is irreplacable, workplace is large and centralized, if they can halt critical operations beyond their industry (ie railroads, ports, etc), there is low exposure to competition/off shoring, etc. The video game industry itself is not very ripe for unionizatoin.
If everyone at a game developer goes on strike, there is basically no amount of outsourcing or scab labour that can replace them. This is actually probably true of basically all software
Just refusing to share passwords into key systems would be enough to significantly halt any attempt to bring on an entirely new development team
If truckers or dockworkers go on strike there's no food on the shelves, if coal miners go on strike the lights go out, and so on.
As a consequence of this, employers are motivated to make a deal not just by missed opportunities to make money, but also by politicians, other powerful capitalists, and public opinion.
Of course there are plenty of unions where this isn't the case; theatres and hollywood are unionised despite the fact nobody freezes or starves when they go on strike.
Game developers are, I think, closer to the hollywood position than the dockworkers position.
The bigger the company is, the more power they have typically.
If you want to make more money or get better benefits or otherwise negotiate a better contract, you need more leverage.
Unionizing is one way to gain more negotiation power by negotiating together with your co-workers instead of individually.
It also makes it easier to address cross cutting concerns like safety and fairness.
Eg, that they necessitated so called "rubber rooms" like these in the NYC public schools, where teachers got paid to do nothing while waiting on arbitration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reassignment_center
That's in a country with a median household income of $84k [2]
I think it's understandable why someone would feel they were doing well at bargaining and negotiating if they were taking home 4.7x as much as their neighbours and loved ones.
Folks in the games industry by all accounts have really shitty pay and working conditions so I can 110% understand why they'd unionise.
[1] https://www.levels.fyi/?tab=levels&compare=Google%2CMeta%2CA... [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
Collective negotiation power can help with all of these, if we let it. It doesn't just stop at compensation.
If they're not, then you're just caught between two powerful, unaccountable entities. You have to join the Union, after all. I see a lot of folks in Education who feel that the Union simply Exists and does not really help them (their employers being rather sympathetic as well).
When they are, of course the Worker benefits. Healthcare and Airline employees seem to fall into this camp.
All of my friends that are teachers do admit their union has flaws, but also are very grateful to have strong contracts, benefits, and people willing to fight for them when the school system tries to screw them over.
I have a pretty simple litmus test for them: are they opposed to H1B hiring, and would they have defended James Damore when he got ousted from Google for basically being autistic? I think the answer for many of them is a resounding no.
On opposing H1B as they are implemented now I agree with you, but in a hypothetical world with tech unions James Damore would still be advocating for large swathes of fellow union members to be removed. He was being misogynistic not “basically being autistic”.
But whether or not you agree with him, you should agree with the idea that one of the primary jobs of a union would have been to give him a fair defense regardless of whether the union leadership likes him or not. I don't think any of the tech unions would do that.
edit: Let me put it this way. Suppose you make an post in an internal politics discussion forum saying that you oppose the H1B program as it is, and then get fired because people claim that you hate immigrants and want your fellow coworkers to be deported. Do you think these unions would defend you?
Uh, how? This might be a country thing but you don't have to join any union in my country. You do, if they represent your interests. Big companies have multiple, competing unions, and the anarchists (which refuse state subsidies and are fully self-funded) are pretty good at what they do.
If you have to join a union isn't that essentially a racket?
Having a union (assuming that the union is run well),
- ensures a better product for customers
- ensures better working conditions for workers
- ensures better pay and benefits from workers (at least in programming roles, the games industry is generally underpaid compared to developers in other industries)
- provides protections against undue firings and layoffs
I would be curious to know why you don't think a union would be good for these people.
There's not a lot I can say that isn't covered in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_union
2) There is already a major labor surplus for video games. It's famously hard to get into and low paying because of it. There is no doubt someone else is willing to step in.
A union represents workers in a company, nothing to do with society. If workers strike the company stops making money, that's their leverage
It’s the leverage that the nascent union has over the company owners and management, who presumably still want to make money.
That being said the video game industry does have a deluge of naive young people willing to sell their bodies and souls for their dream, so I don’t have high hopes for this group.
Oh, they definitely deserve a union.
>unstable and poorly paid, low status job. Abused and exploited often.
Hmm… their job doesn’t really seem “cool enough” to have a union. They should just take it and shut up. I mean, they’re losers after all.
I’m sort of joking but it’s interesting how so many people “gatekeep” unions when people in unglamorous lines of work need unions more than almost anyone else.
I can't speak to this particular group, but Hasbro (parent company of WOTC) has been a horribly short-sighted steward of Magic and DND, so perhaps this will encourage other WOTC divisions to unionize as well.
It answers a lot of the questions I see being asked in this thread.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic%3A_The_Gathering_Arena
> Our Free Time is Our Own: Currently, if an employee makes anything creative in their free time, with their own resources, Hasbro may claim ownership. What we do in our free time should not be dictated by the company; neither should what we make in our free time be owned by the company.
How common is this in creative fields?
From my perspective this seems outlandish. Imagine doing FOSS work or a side project on your personal computer and your company tries to claim it. Odd...
[1]: https://unitedwizardsofthecoast.com/letter
> have a clause that says that the employer owns everything you do while you’re working for them
Good companies will have a clause that says the employer owns everything you do in the relevant field of the company while working for them, explicitly naming that field.
If you work for a logistics company, you would be able to write your own video editor without any worry. If you work for a not-shitty company.
Three times in my career I've returned hiring agreements with redlines and never once had them questioned or countered.
Yeah, this is my whole point. The rest of your comment, I agree with. In practice you're unlikely to have an issue for something orthogonal and especially something financially worthless.
But you might. There are a lot of people out there that have predatory attitudes towards IP, especially among C-level or would-be-C-level.
And companies that restrict to competing IP do exist.
And even then there's normally a "Sufficiently Different Sector" requirement for those personal projects - which makes sense, but it is inevitably worded vague enough that it would likely require going to court for pretty much any project to show it's not directly related. And that would be near prohibitively expensive for me as an individual if the relationship actually became adversarial.
A handful of states including California disallow this condition.
The common attitude of companies is that they’re paying for the whole of your life inside and outside of “work”, and these Unions are a response to that encroachment (and associated under-compensation in general).
Good on them. Best of luck negotiating a fair contract!
When someone is empowered to work remotely, and is salaried and not held to specific hours, then it's very hard to identify what work is "theirs" and what work is "the company's" in a legally consistent way. Yes, it's usually obvious from context, but context doesn't always carry to a court of law. It can be particularly messy because the kinds of open source projects one contributes to often overlap with the work they do in their day job.
So most companies which are salaried and allow WFH will usually ask employees to explicitly list any project they work on which they don't want owned by the company, with the expectation being that everything unlisted is owned by the company. It's a bit cumbersome, but generally the least bad option.
At our company we have a form to file if we do work outside of hours on OSS or pet projects, and to the best of my knowledge nobody has ever had their application denied.
edit: it's important because it's symmetric - not only does this define what _isn't_ property of the company, it defines what _is_. So if you come up with a clever solution to a problem for a company purpose and introduce it into an OSS project, it doesn't come back to haunt the company.
Any halfway decent company will restrict in the contract to IP that's related to the company's area of business. If you write logistics software, the company will say "we own all logistics software you write". You can't create a competitor. But if you work for a logistics software company and decide to go write a video editor on your own time, the company wouldn't own that.
The problem is there's no clear legal definition of what "logistics software" is. A video editor is a seemingly obvious example of what is not, but what if you came up with a novel optimization technique which is not necessarily only applicable to logistics? Could you spin off that software into a separate business? What about something more fundamental, like tooling? Think about something like Slack, which was just meant to be an internal messaging tool created as part of the development of a video game. Imagine after Slack took off, that an employee claimed that because they had written Slack at least partly outside of working hours and it was not "video game software", the company didn't have ownership of the software.
This is why the common approach is that the company owns everything except anything explicitly carved out, it avoids ambiguities like this.
Having carveouts for obviously not-related software is easy. At a decent company populated by reasonable people, if you wanted to work on something you felt fell into the grey area, you would ask and get a written okay. Which is how it also works at many of the shitty companies! The difference is that the shitty companies there's never a route to do anything, however unrelated, without running it by HR. Because they think they own you.
> Imagine after Slack took off, that an employee claimed that because they had written Slack at least partly outside of working hours and it was not "video game software", the company didn't have ownership of the software.
On the contrary, using a nonzero amount of working hours to work on something pretty clearly makes it company property.
"Shitty" companies have legal obligations to include these kind of clauses though, because investors and board members don't want to deal with a situation where there's exactly this ambiguity about what counts as "obviously not-related software". HR exists to protect the company. What counts as obviously non-related to you may not count as obviously non-related to a board member who hears about the new optimization algorithm you wrote and realizes the company can monetize it.
> On the contrary, using a nonzero amount of working hours to work on something pretty clearly makes it company property.
How recently have you seen a tech employment contract where you were obligated to work exactly 8 to 5 with a 1 hour lunch break? Flexible hours means any hour is potentially a "working hour".
> How recently have you seen a tech employment contract where you were obligated to work exactly 8 to 5 with a 1 hour lunch break? Flexible hours means any hour is potentially a "working hour".
Not what I meant. In the Slack example, it was planned work within the company, made using company resources. Working on something for internal company use that the company has a Jira ticket for is pretty blatantly on the side of "Company time".
> "Shitty" companies have legal obligations to include these kind of clauses though, because investors and board members don't want to deal with a situation
Not wanting to deal with something isn't a legal obligation not to do it. I don't want to deal with filing taxes but that doesn't mean I now have a legal obligation not to file taxes. It's just laziness.
It's easy. Work done on company issued hardware belongs to the company. Everything else does not
See also "anti-moonlighting" and "anti-social media" clauses. Hell, I've seen the odd story of folks being fired/disciplined for their dating profiles before. If the government doesn't tell them no, companies will take every inch they can get.
Whatever you do in your spare time is up to you and your employer has no saying over it, unless he can prove that it negatively impacts your job performance.
I feel like that's .. the reasonable take here? If you don't agree to their conditions, then .. just don't work there?
in practice that is either unenforceable or else a giant waste of the company's money, but it's CYA in case someone doing engineering or creative work decides to rip it off elsewhere.
like Meta ain't gonna try to steal your local cupcakes at the farmer's market side gig
That doesn't mean it is enforceable, though.
During the launch of Windows 8, Msft's moonlighting policy was also part of their Windows App Store strategy: we were all heavily encouraged to make an "Windows Store App-app" so that SteveB could claim MS had N-many apps in its app-store, because that's how Leadership thought they could build credibility vs. Apple's established app store (of course, what actually ended-up happening was hundreds of cr-apps that were just WebView-wrappers over live websites).
In contrast, I understand Apple might have the worst moonlighting policy: I'm told that unless you directly work on WebKit or Darwin then you have to deactivate your GitHub account or else find yourself swiftly dragged onto the proverbial Trash.
It’s called “broad assignment of IP.” Some jurisdictions disallow that clause.
And then of course there is the distinct but thematically similar anti-moonlighting clause.
Overreaching but common. Like most things, lawyers will take as much as they can possibly get.
There is the famous lawsuit of Mattel suing Bratz, on the basis that the Bratz creator started to work on his new dolls while being employed by Mattel.
I'm not sure how it ended, but it wasn't dismissed right away and they spent years in court.
That's at least reasonable considering Bratz is a competitor.
If the Bratz creator started working on them while working for a company that made water filters, that would not be reasonable.
Also, flip the hierarchy: a business that puts employees first and profits for owners last can often have a shit ton of profits for owners. Executing isn't easy and requires wisdom and work - but that's why owners are paid the big bucks.
If owners can't hack it... Then it's a skill issue. Get gud.
Owners can make 100x that shit ton if they put profits for owners first, so why wouldn’t they do that instead? Out of the goodness of their own hearts?
Why do you hate them, when you recognize that they are general the result of abuse? I'll cop to unions not always being great; the rules can be counterproductive, or sometimes limiting, but they are up to the union members, so at the end of the day there is some kind of reason for them.
And the second paragraph - barring ESOP or employee-owned co-ops a union is pretty much the only game in town other than crossing your fingers and hoping the company owners, or board, or stock market are capable of pulling their head out of their ass. this can be a big lift.
For tech, it's largely a different set of reasons, like high wages, no real grievances per se, and the ease of transferring to other companies, plus the work is all virtual so there is no reason why companies cannot outsource to another area where the union has no power, if the workers are just on their computers for work anyway. This latter reason is actually exactly why Netflix is investing heavily in South Korean productions.
My naive view: in the US, unions are all about creating another set of assholes to counterbalance the existing assholes. In the EU, there's at least some thought towards "hey, maybe we shouldn't all be assholes?" (Or at least, not all of the time.)
That doesn't address your question of why it doesn't happen in the tech sector, but perhaps my anecdotal opinion is widespread enough to be added to your (already good) set of hypotheses?
As I said for tech workers it's a different set of reasons.
In Canada, unions are often shop-wide with no mechanism to opt out, which makes them very sticky and allows them to grow predatory if they can maintain enough corruption or apathy. I'm led to believe that many US states have similar problems, but that's only based on how American unions are portrayed in news and fiction.
In the short term all the franchises have proved incredibly popular (just like in Fortnight), but in the long run I think it means the death of the game (just like where Fortnight is headed).
The game(s) are more popular than ever, especially D&D
Also: Yes, Hasbro did some shit, but they also had to relent and CC their SRD. This all happened years ago.
I say this as a committed Pathfinder player who hasn't seen a good reason to return to D&D (PF2e is good enough). D&D is doing numbers and no one cares that us nerds moved on because of weak tea from the previous decade.
It's their house now, and it's fine.
Several of the top D&D people who were advocating for players resigned around this time.
WOTC/Hasbro since relented under this pressure, but the bridge was already burned. My group hasn't played a D&D campaign since. We switched to Pathfinder 2e and found that it was a better system altogether.
Every year seems to be the best-selling year so far. Magic: the Gathering is Hasbro's primary revenue source.
And look, I don't like the sheer amount of product they're pumping out every year now. But I realize I'm clearly in the minority opinion based on sales.
EDIT: it is incredible how hostile HN is now to ant-union sentiment. None of the would-be founders here would support unionization at their companies. :)
>Layoff Protections
Businesses need the ability to layoff employees when markets change and projects are no longer viable.
>Remote Work Protections
Data has shown proven benefits of in person time and in a competitive environment such as gaming every advantage matters.
>Generative AI Protections
AI is revolutionizing all industries. If you refuse to use it to disrupt yourself someone else will.
These demands are very dangerous to the company and should not be considered.
Companies often expect employees to give advance notice of termination of employment, but employers do not feel beholden to their employees to reciprocate. This is unreasonable.
> Remote Work Protections
Many companies showed improved productivity when people were given flexibility. Claims to the contrary are often not backed up by actual data outside of cherry-picked results chosen by those in managerial positions.
> Generative AI Protections
MTG is a creative endeavor, and its output is protected by copyright. Copyright is, so far (thankfully), only enforceable when the media is produced by humans. Protections against the use of generative AI are not only good for workers' long-term productivity, but also for legal purposes.
---
I think maybe you should stop licking boots and start understanding why any of our society works today at all. As a hint, every protection you have ever enjoyed (40-hour work weeks, pensions or retirement funds, health insurance guarantees, mandatory paid time off, health and safety regulations, and so on) was paid for in blood by someone a company decided was not more important than profit. Unions are a fundamental capability by workers to ensure their own safety. Shockingly, I think it more reasonable to rely on the interpretations of those working in these jobs who want to unionize than some random person online who thinks "no wait, but think of the poor endangered company! :("
The extreme is, are you only happy when your products are created in sweatshops, or, worse, by slaves?
I'm glad the employees are exercising their rights to organize. Whether this turns out to be good for the business and for customers remains to be seen over time.
Sure, they won't get to be customers any longer if that happens, but at least it will increase the likelihood that the products they have available are not the cause of other people's suffering.
High earners benefit from unions if union rules are made which benefit high earners.
The most well-known example of a high-earner union is SAG-AFTRA and they provide benefits to established performers, the big one being name exclusivity. e.g. even if your real life birth certificate says your name is "Tom Cruise" you cannot advertise your name as "Tom Cruise". Obviously, actors are still negotiating their own pay.
Another good one is the NFL Players Association which capped the rookie pay scale in 2011 to ensure the salary cap was going more toward veterans, people already in the union. However they still independently negotiate their compensation.
I don't know what people would want out of a tech union specifically but the idea that "union = payscale based on seniority" just plain isn't true.
Strongly disagree with this, and I'm in 'tech management' now so I'm not saying this out of self-preservation.
Tech workers are similar to athletes in skill disparity IMO. A handful of superstars makes a massive difference. Look at those superstar AI developers who are allegedly getting 8 or 9 figure compensation from Meta etc. They're still technically "just" tech workers.
??? This doesn't make any sense. There's a hell of a lot more background actors, which you can call fungible, than there are Tom Cruises, but they're all covered by SAG-AFTRA. "Tech workers are fungible except for the ones that aren't" is tautological and doesn't support your argument.
Because I gave examples of unions which contain and are beneficial to high wage earners, and you dismissed them as irrelevant because tech employees are "fungible" except for the ones who aren't. Except those unions also contain far more "fungible" employees (background actors, backups, practice squad players) than they do star actors and quarterbacks, so it's a close comparison. There's currently 2,314 members of the NFL Players' Association but only 32 starting NFL quarterbacks.
Fungible means all employees are the same, that's the exact definition of fungibility. If certain employees have a measurably different impact on delivery, that is the definition of non-fungible. Just because most employees deliver near-average performance does not change this--it's tautologically expected!