- 0 Posts
- 45 Comments
He literally might not know, he was working on another continent lmao
Like I said, the only people who can tell you if they were forced to sign whatever employment contracts they signed or what those contracts entailed, are the people who were fired. I don’t think they’ll be speaking up about any of that, though, given that the union busting is an ongoing legal matter and there’s still a non-zero chance of getting their jobs reinstated.
But nobody was extorted into working there lol, they volunteered.
We’re not talking about some village where people are forced into working the only job available so the boss can demand whatever. We’re talking about people who chose to work at a particular company and knew the deal they were getting before moving. You don’t change countries for a job without doing your research on cost of living first.
Also, Dan Houser has been living in the US for decades. He’s a writer, not an HR specialist. Why does he have to be familiar with the exact situation of the UK labour market? Why does he get the blame and not the UK itself for having shit laws?
I swear some people just want to hate whoever’s name sticks out when we truly don’t know who knew what or what these employees salaries were.
Uh I’m pretty sure as creative director, he didn’t see anyone holding a gun to anyone’s head forcing them to sign a shit contract.
Why exactly do you think they were being extorted before any of this? If someone worked for a company for several years, I’m assuming they actually liked working there. Before someone at Take-two saw that there were a bunch of people at their subsidiary who’d unionized, some of whom were foreigners on visas and some locals. Why is the problem for you not that a bunch of people were fired for unionizing, but the fact that some of them weren’t born on the island they were working on?
But even his brother is not top leadership at the organization. Any direct orders from their superiors at Take-two still take precedence over what Sam Houser says. In fact it’s currently suspected that the order to fire came from Take-Two.
They’re rich beyond the average person’s imagination, but not “early Google employee” rich, let alone “started multi-billion dollar company” rich. They started as regular employees that, after making the first few golden geese, got given stock options so they wouldn’t leave.
Turns out the big 100 hour crunch for RDR2 was just Dan Houser, Lazlow and 2 other senior writers and for about 3 weeks. Apparently the crunch used to be a bigger issue earlier on, but got improved after GTA V.
Senior Code Content Developer Phil Beveridge concurred that “work practices have definitely improved. Crunch on Red Dead Redemption 2 has definitely been a lot better than it was on GTA V, where I was pulling a month of 70+ hour weeks (while being told by my boss at the time to go home…).”
As I understand, the issue at R* wasn’t ever really anyone’s boss saying “you gotta work 70 hour weeks”, it was more “the senior staff works 100 hour weeks and maybe if I only do 40, I’ll not be seen as a team player”. Which is still toxic, but if they’ve taken steps to reduce it, perhaps things aren’t as bad as they seem.
The games industry is so bad because of the deadlines. The whole public announcement of “we’ll release game on date X” is a huge problem, as is the fact that games make most of the money just after release, so you gotta have a new game out every few years if you want to keep the lights on - a problem R* no longer has since they’ve brought in billions, so I’m sure Take-Two has loosened the leash a bit on that front at least.
Hell, I’m a regular software engineer and I’ve worked 60-70 hour weeks. Not because I was forced to, but because the deadline was near if not passed already, the customer was getting unhappy and I knew it’d look great for my next salary review. I suspect if I was working on a public project, essentially a work of art, that millions of people will get to see and I saw my boss work 100 hours a week, I’d also be motivated to work 60 or 70 for a while. So I can kinda understand how some R* employees say there was no forced crunch time and others say they felt like they were expected to crunch.
Honestly, the Houser brothers have just always struck me as creatives who are super passionate about their work. That’s the type of person that can work ridiculous hours without even realizing it and it could bend one’s expectations of what others should do, but it doesn’t seem to me like they’ve ever expected everyone else to work as much as they do, nor has either of them (or even the brothers combined) become a billionaire off over 20 years in senior leadership at a company that literally prints money for its parent company.
He was never the owner. It’s a 45 billion dollar company, his net worth is said to be like 250 mill. He was paid a very high salary since he was one of the original employees of that subsidiary, and given some stock in the parent company as bonuses, so he’s set for life and richer than most of us will ever be, but he never had any real say in the parent company’s decisions. Take-Two is known for being absolute scum. They don’t just own Rockstar Games, they also own the companies behind the Civilization series (which has Paradox-like DLC scumming) and the Borderlands series (remember when BL3 was Epic exclusive on PC?).
Technically if you’d started at, say, Microsoft as a software engineer or other similar role when he started at Rockstar, and stayed there until 2020, you could honestly be richer. Same for Google, some of their earliest employees became billionaires from the stock options. The Houser brothers made Rockstar famous, but they were never ownership class.
You don’t have to threaten to deport your workers if you sign the contract beforehand though? Once they’ve agreed to the salary, they’ve agreed to it. Did they make less than a pureblood Brit in the same role? Perhaps. We don’t know that. But generally speaking, you don’t go importing labour unless you literally can’t find enough locals anymore. The bureaucracy nightmare isn’t worth the cost savings otherwise. Particularly because a lot of countries don’t allow you to pay the imported labour less than you’d pay your purebloods in the same role. Exception of course being people from countries with whom you have freedom of movement (so anything intra-EU is allowed)
Also, it’s not like he was the CEO or something. He was the creative director. I swear some people just want to be angry at everyone.
How’s this a fyigm situation? He left 5 years before this particular thing happened, he had no say in it.
Now if he has actual need for these employees in his new company, I could see him hiring them there, but his new studio is in California and those employees were sacked in the UK, meaning they need a new job in the UK to keep living there. He also currently has fewer employees than the amount that R* fired. That’s how small that shop is.
His brother, however, is still an exec at Rockstar. He, along with the rest of R* and Take-Two leadership has a lot to answer for.
I hope you’re right. But it kinda seems like they’re planning on releasing 4-6+ with an Assassin’s Creed kind of cadence rather than the current one.
But you’re also talking to someone who actually appreciated Cyberpunk 2077. I’m happy they made it, even if it’s not completely what they promised. It’s fun to explore, there are some pretty deep mysteries to unravel (and of course the answers are all hypotheses), and most of all, they gave the Witcher series a break. IMO creatives need a break from doing one series all the time. We got 3 Witcher games, increasingly good ones at that. I doubt the fourth one would’ve beat the third if they’d made it right after 3.
We have capitalism here in Europe too, and don’t get me started about the work culture in Japan.
I think there’s something else in the US. It’s a lack of cultural diversity. Yes, the country is a mixing pot of cultures, technically speaking - but it’s also kinda not. US mainstream media (I don’t mean news, I mean games, movies, etc) in general is quite homogenized. It’s also a huge export, so of course people in other countries get influenced by a lot of it too, but we have a lot of our own culture, which doesn’t much influence the US, but influences us.
I blame the death of mid-budget movies for the death of American media diversity. Which of course is largely due to Netflix et al. So capitalism is still the root cause, but it’s also the extreme cultural dominance of the US. Whereas here in Europe most movies and TV shows get made with the expectation that they’ll be watched by people of the country where it’s made, so it can afford to be jankier, American media has the expectation of being consumed around the world - so it’s a bit more generic and polished.
Well definitely that too, I just mentioned the part that’s also the pretense in case of Russia. Of course Russia is also trying to dial back rights for everyone but rich men (white is default there anyway).
I can actually say I’m not in the US market myself, largely because of the recent developments - there’s a type of incredibly niche enterprise-focused software for a particular industry in the US market only, that I’m very familiar with, could (with help of course) build a significantly better competitor than any of the incumbents, and best of all, the current players all are incredibly expensive, so I could charge half, or even less, and have no trouble paying staff. But I’m just not doing it, despite it being a potential ticket to becoming a multimillionaire later in life.
Trouble is, among the people I’d have to move to the US with myself, and whose help I’d like in the project (so family members who’d live with me and potential engineers to help me), there are some women and LGBTQ folk. We’re all white so ICE isn’t as much of an issue as it would be for someone of darker complexion, but the whole eroding women’s and LGBTQ folks’ rights issue would be a problem for those close to me, therefore a problem for me.
To be fair, it would’ve been extremely challenging anyway. I have connections in the target industry and I’ve worked towards building an MVP, but the financial aspect of it all is problematic. Money to get certified for a bunch of things, money to hire people because one man can never do everything alone, etc. Can’t get small business loans in the US as a foreigner anymore, etc.
Okay, so
-
Rosetta 2 largely fixed that, for whereever it was feasible to fix. It came out as soon as ARM Macbooks did.
-
They actually made their shit thicker. The M1 Pro/Max MBP is thicker than the 2016+ Intel ones were.
I had an M1 Air, the battery lasted like 20 hours. Most I’ve gotten off any non-Apple laptop has been 6-7.
I thought it was confusing because this is the 3rd changeup to their naming in recent years.
RX 580 to RX Vega 56 and 64 to RX 5700 to 9070. Yes it’s still the intuitive “bigger number better” and “first number is generation”, but I can see how people might be frustrated with it whereas nvidia has consistency.
I hate Elon, Trump and Bezos for reasons other than their expensive hobbies tbf. The company Gabe runs may have what is essentially a monopoly, but it doesn’t engage in monopolistic practices and it gives a lot back to the community, especially if you’re a Linux gamer.
EGS just sucks and Sweeney himself said he’s not interested in improving it, except by paying for exclusives. Which is funny, because Epic Games used to be pretty great for the gaming industry - with their grants and stuff. GOG is cool, but often publishers don’t want to sell their newer games without DRM. Steam is just the de facto best experience for buying games.
I mean yachts seem to be his hobby, he has several. Idk, they can be kinda cool, but only in retirement and on vacations. Day to day, completely useless and cost a lot of money to maintain even when not used. And I don’t think megayachts are as cool as smaller ones because part of the appeal to me is to get away from everyone. I wouldn’t want 100 people on my yacht. Maybe 4-5 of my closest friends, but you can do that with a yacht costing two orders of magnitude less (and even that is if you want a passagemaker. Something that doesn’t have to be able to cross the ocean can be had for well under a million I think)
Supercars are fun IF you track them. Wouldn’t want to drive one in traffic. Much prefer a luxury car for that if I was rich. Of course I think any rich person who owns supercars and hypercars, also has luxury cruisers to waft around in (or to be wafted around in).
HOAs I’ll never get. Fuck anyone who thinks they can impose rules on what I do with my own yard.
Like y’all don’t know what to do with GTA VI.
Wait 2 goddamn extra years or however long until they release it for PC.
The good news is by then I can easily justify upgrading my PC too. Right now it’s hard to justify upgrading from my RTX 3060 Ti, but by 2027 or 2028 when the PC version comes out, I’m sure that there’s something enticing available from all 3 GPU manufacturers (yay, we almost have competition now) and I can get the hell off Nvidia again finally.
Essentially a private company can be owned by a dickhead, or a nice person who’s not all about profitmaxing. A publicly traded company is forced to maximize shareholder value.
Valve as a publicly traded company would quickly become another EA/Microsoft/Whatever, because it’s only the next quarter that matters. Valve under GabeN has been built to bring in large, and yet sustainable profits.
EA’s new owners are going to be the absolute worst. So it’s going to be a worse company than before.
Consider that Erik Prince’s murder-for-hire company is private. So is Xitter now that Melon bought it.
So it’s not that private companies are better, but rather that they have the capacity to be better. And it all depends on the owners.
Isn’t it the same on Windows tbh?
The knowledgeable users on MacOS install Homebrew (or nix if being a hipster) and get most of their cool tools for that.
With Windows, the default assumption is that the user has less money than a MacOS user so all the useless shit on Microsoft Store is cheaper than MacOS, but it’s still money for software that shouldn’t be paid.
I’m not sure how being capped at 30 FPS should change any of those. Probably they went too ambitious with texture resolutions, etc. Which explains 53 GB AND the need to cap it at 30 FPS. And 30 FPS probably has MORE input lag than 60 FPS as most things only get polled every 33.333 ms instead of 16.666 (both repeating of course)