In 1997, Mindscape fired the entire Lego Island team the day before release. The team that just made a custom engine for their much-hyped and soon best-selling game that would garner sequels for years to come. The painfully obvious reason was the promise of giving people more money if the game did well.
Nothing has changed.
Unionize and fuck these corporations.
Even outside unions - pro-rate everything. No more hard cutoffs where some bastard can promise the world, get 99% of what they promised it for, and then give nothing.
There’s legal protections against retaliating against unions. How much teeth those protections have will vary wildly, but there are protections that do exist
Relevant law for Washington USA where Bungie is: app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=49.36
You can’t fire someone explicitly for being in a union, but you can still fire the union. If they fired the whole team, there’s no power left with the union. They can’t sue for being punished for forming a union, and they can’t threaten to quit or strike in solidarity, because the company doesn’t plan to keep any of them.
Ain’t just gaming. I dropped a note on a home tech forum while being visibly female and very rapidly realised i’d forgotten how fucking neckbeardy rank amateurs are
I’ve been a network/systems engineer for 25 years, my fellow pros would never be so gauche.
It’s weird with devs. Most of us are fine but there’s definitely a sizable number of “tech bros” that absolutely are misogynistic. And it’s probably worse than I realize not being the target of it.
Also, a disturbing number of misogynistic people in web design/web dev needing help from technical support. It was rather shocking and educational for me, as a cis male, to work as a support supervisor. I never anticipated the level of sexism and harassment that my female techs faced on a daily basis.
Everything from asking of they want to do porn to “can I talk to a man”. I had several techs that had to change the names that they used for customer communications to male or neutral ones due to the severity on the unending sexism despite regular warnings to the customers that this behavior would not be tolerated.
Working sysadmin gets you four times more abuse because it’s the crux of ‘mean person won’t let my idiot arse run rampant on a system because they’re mean and i hate them’ and ‘fuck youse wimmen don’t tell me what to fucking do’
Well in my observation the weaker players are quite often the more toxic ones. The “what a safe” spammers in rocket league are often the ones getting carried.
We are going to be seeing a lot of this over the next few years. And it is mostly the same as “EA bought and killed all these studios” back in the day.
The live game market is more and more crowded every year and Destiny 2 is winding up the same arc it has been in since Destiny 1 (I think?). It is hard to tell what the reality of “45% below the full-year outlook” means, but player retention HAS been falling and that is a good indicator.
If Bungie had stayed independent or stayed at MS they would likely be in the same place. Well, at MS they would have gotten gutted with 343 last year.
Its similar to HBS getting gutted under Paradox. I still think it is bullshit that, of all studios, HBS was not given the chance to “fix” Lamplighters considering their amazing track record in that genre. But also? I don’t know a single person who was excited for Lamplighters League. We all heard “Harebrained Schemes is making a new game” and immediately got our hopes up for something like Shadowrun or Battletech. And then we got LPL which… is fine. But, regardless of whether they were at Paradox or independent, that would have likely led to massive layoffs because of the flop.
And we are going to see a lot more of this, same as we did in the 90s and 00s. Between economic uncertainty, increasing interest rates, and just general “flops”. Because EVERYONE thinks “extraction shooters” are the next big thing. But… we are increasingly seeing questions of whether Tarkov is even particularly successful. Same with lots of other games. And publishers are less likely to say “Well, you’ll get it right next time. here is another couple million bucks” in the current climate.
I disagree with the conclusion. My experience is anecdotal, of course, but I’ll share. I’m a gamer female with a husband and grown son. Husband is gone now, but the three of us gamed quite extensively together and separately for years, playing various MMORPGs and MOBAs, among other things. My son is exceptionally good at gaming, I am mediocre and consider myself a proud “filthy casual,” and my husband was absolute dogshit - to the point I had to leave my chair and go help him by taking over the controls to get him past certain difficult hurdles (and my son does the same for me on occasion).
My husband’s ego was never threatened by this. He never took his frustration out on me. Why? Because he was a decent person who was confident in his masculinity.
In the end, lack of skill does not cause misogyny. I believe misogyny springs from the same source as the lack of skill: a tiny brain.
Not saying I agree or disagree with the author. However you being his wife did not result in “female-initiated disruption of a male hierarchy” (their words) so it’s not really an argument against their hypothesis.
(Of course your husband being nice and not a dickhead probably also plays a role)
It shows how stupid and against your own best interests this kind of thinking can be.
I am the full time worker in my family, and happy to be the provider for them. However, I would be a stay at home dad / house-husband so damn fast if my wife got some random job mom making a lot more than me. I do have my priorities in order, after all.
My genuine theory is that many (if not most) people are emotionally stunted or emotionally immature. You don’t get this kind of mentality from someone who is balanced.
Now expand that to every facet of life and you get the world we live in.
There are wealthy women out there, so it is entirely in the range of possibility. My mom’s first husband left her when she started making more money as a lawyer than him. It’s an ego thing.
It was great at first! But after 6-months I was depressed. Guess I’m the sort that requires the structure a regular job provides. Kinda been the same for WFH. :(
That requires a certain amount of intelligence and interest in those things. No disrespect to those people but it you are below average IQ and make a living in a simple job, you cant just contribute to open source software and read academic papers for a hobby.
Believe it or not, cooking, cleaning and childcare full time doesn’t really leave you with much energy to play games, let alone contribute to open source or read academic papers.
It would be interesting to see if it’s really because of how they are as individuals or more about the response to social status thing. Like if they did an experiment where high performers were deceived into thinking they were actually performing poorly, and vice-versa, would the attitudes towards women be reversed or not? The conclusions in OP seem to imply the researchers think they would be.
My hypothesis is that if you’re a piece of shit, that will extend to all walks of life(misogny, sucking at video games) whereas if you are not, the same rules apply(equality, excelling at video games)
By being a piece of human garbage you effectively hamstring yourself in every field.
I assume that stock was in the form of restricted stock units that vest over the course of a few years. I’ve seen this kind of thing play out at a few big tech companies over the years and have seen people lose literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in delayed payout.
They offer these as a “loyalty incentive” so the employee wants to stay while of course offering no loyalty in return when they decide to execute layoffs.
One of the worst instances was one year that virtually all “merit increases” were instead replaced with RSUs that vested in a year. When I had to bring that to my team and tell them what they were getting… Well, not a single one of us expected to see that money. Sure enough, layoffs happened and that potential money evaporated before any of us saw a cent. None of us were unprepared or surprised, but obviously still unhappy.
Plays out in small tech companies too, albeit in a slightly different way.
Got that carrot dangled in front of me at a past job. Company was past start-up phase; self-supporting and doing ok, but not outrageously well. Promises of riches should the company be "noticed" and bought for an outrageous amount.
Of course none of that accounted for the CEO (founder and 85% shareholder) being an absolute crazy person, who would change the development roadmap into making a vastly different product than the one we (the techies) believed in, TURN DOWN THE OUTRAGEOUS SUM BECAUSE HE THOUGHT HE COULD GET A BETTER OFFER, basically run the company into the ground, and wind up selling it for a pittance (which would have made the employees' share a pittance of a pittance).
I mean most of us had already left by that point, but finding out around 4 years after that he'd turned down about $150M and wound up selling out for $3M, that stung a little.
Reminds me of a place I worked for in the 90s. We were the premiere catalog of contemporary radio drama in the country. It was niche, but doing okay. One day, this company comes up to us and says that they’re starting a satellite radio network and if we work on a commission basis, the company will make a lot of money. Only about five people worked there and we all begged and pleaded with the owner to take the offer, but he was nuts and kept saying things like, “there’s GOT to be a catch!” So he ended up passing.
Yes, I am certain that was the case. It was the case in my examples too… Every now and then someone gets through and gets a couple units to vest, but the majority are gone and so is that compensation. It’s disgusting.
I assume they have to cash in some. Or else the SEC comes sniffing around like “you guys have given out 3 million shares over ten years but no one has ever cashed a singled one out, hmmmmm”. So those are likely the rare few. And a few units tracks because they aren’t giving $2m in stock to some entry level tech.
I always liken those practices to the same shit they flash musicians or sports figures during negotiations. Wave a mansion, Lambo, gold, some ladies making all kinds of promised. But in the end, some contractual loop hole says that you’re just “borrowing” it all. Fake money.
RSUs can be a great bonus, but agreed, you definitely shouldn’t consider RSUs part of your total compensation unless they vest quarterly to yearly. If they take a full four years to start vesting you definitely shouldn’t count on that income.
Honestly, consider banning any reward besides cold hard cash. Pay people up-front and in full. If there’s residuals then they’re a percent gross and don’t say shit about employment.
If somebody did the work - give them the fucking money.
Complicated forms of theft should put white-collar scumbags in prison.
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