Employees at Bethesda Game Studios Unionize(twitter.com) |
Employees at Bethesda Game Studios Unionize(twitter.com) |
And how would it be different with a union? Hold a strike to force the company to keep the studio open?
Thanks to globalization, ever changing regional differences in interest rates, corporate taxes, forex, labor costs, real estate prices, govt freebies/subsidies/laws etc etc, companies make decisions that have nothing to do with product produced yday or its quality.
In corporate wonderland, execs aren't trained (or given the time and resources) to use their imagination or think too deeply about how to respond to All these external forces. They are expected to avoid complex or unpredictable solutions and React as quickly as possible before the competition takes advantage of the external changes. Its automatic and highly predictable behavior how execs will respond.
The only way to slow the instant (bordering on mindless) reactions down, is to add Delay. Which buys people time on both sides of the equation to think. Now obviously its hit or miss whether any thinking happens and creative solutions are found. But its a starting point in having some sort of say in a process people on all sides have lost control over, due to global not local changes.
With how expensive AAA development has gotten maybe that’s the stakes now, and a reason so many are taking the modern Hollywood playbook of churning out sequels and remasters.
The really egregious “no reason” closure was Tango Gameworks, makers of Hi-Fi Rush.
The studio was owned by M$ though. There's no reason they couldn't have kept all those people in-house and just moved them on to some game with a tried and true IP attached to it.
That being said, I think unionization would be the best thing that’s ever happened to this industry. Video game development sounds like hell.
I want to steelman microsoft's position here, and I can find many reasons:
1. The financial loss of the product (Redfall) was large enough that keeping that business unit itself was a risk. They need to show wallstreet that something is being done.
2. While there are talented people at the studio, they are unable as a corporation to be able to figure out what went wrong, ie who do they need to fire and who can they keep.
3. Their current business model precludes just moving people to other products for some reason, they don't want to disrupt those other products with a reorganization, this just isn't how they run studios, they want the teams to be colocated, etc.
While sure its bad that the studio lost its job I really don't think it's no reason.
Even worse if you give them severance for like 6+ months of wages. Like you couldn't figure out how to reassign them with that long of a timespan?