I like that this article doesn't just talk about the financial side of it, but also at least in part how much harassment game developers get for absolutely no reason. It's clear who the villains here are, and as the crash continues to gain momentum, I think unionizing and banding together no matter where you are is the only choice for survival at this point. Odds are still slim but what other options are left?
I've been making games for 22 years this year, or two-thirds of my life. And I've been getting paid for twelve of those years. I'm in the credits of six AAA titles, and I shipped my first game when I was fourteen. (It was rated 6/10 on GameMakerGames.com)
But for the first nine months of my career, I worked in security software. A local company made a software package that combined security events from different hardware vendors into a 2D overview, and they had outsourced a new 3D version of their management software to a games company. They had now brought that version back in-house, realized it was shit, and needed a Junior Programmer fresh out of gamedev college to tidy things up. On paper, it was a great job. I was paid a livable wage that supported me and my girlfriend, now wife, to write C++ professionally. I learned test-driven development there, and how to write a driver for a device you don't have physical access to. At twenty-three years old, I had a company-provided lunch, discounted health insurance, and a pension plan. But I was miserable. One night, I had a dream that I was in prison. And it was fine for the most part, but it had a strange schedule. Every day I would get up, go to prison, sit there for nine hours, and go back home in the evening. So when I saw on Twitter that a games company had an opening, I jumped on that right away.
When I handed in my notice at the security software company, the CEO wanted to have a chat with me to see if he could convince me to stay. He pointed out that a lot of the work they do is very similar to games, and that they have great career advancement opportunities. He showed off some of the future plans they had for expanding the business and asked if I would reconsider. And I smiled, nodded, and said I had already made up my mind before I came in. Because all of what he said was true. But it wasn't games.
The weird thing is, it's because people so badly need (art, games, stories) what creative work makes, that creative workers are so badly treated. There is an element of moral envy. You get to do something meaningful and express yourself, and it's games, which are also fun! How dare you also want time off and a living wage and health insurance! It's the same thing that happens with teachers and low to mid level nursing staff, in this respect.
Plus there's the related aspect of the passion tax. If there's any reason someone might want to do the job other than money, it will tend to pay less, because skinflint employers figure they can get away with it. So it's both coming and going, from the perceived value of the work intrinsically to both the public and the workers.
This is bizarro topsy turvy idiot logic though. Passion doesn't pay any bills, and shouldn't we reward people doing the valuable jobs more not less if anything? But of course, it's not actually a decision made by the people swept up in the moral envy. That's just one of the layers of cultural baggage locking people into continuing to replicate the status quo every day. The few who are owners instead of workers benefit from this greatly. Resenting each other instead of them is exactly how they hope to keep their clutch on riches.
