Bethesda Game Studios workers have unionized

Seeing the rebirth of unions in tech companies might be one of my favorite things about this timeline.

Not nearly prevalent enough or fast enough, let's gooooo!
A few years ago a tech friend literally couldn’t comprehend why he would want to be in a union.
- Check again, maybe it was me.
I'm at a tech company. It's nowhere near prevalent, nor do I think many employees actually want it. I'd love for it to happen, though, and IMO the first place it should happen is the video games industry.
- Agreed. I think we're in the, "fuck around and find out," era of tech company unionization, and I'm fortunate enough to work for a company whose legal team is smart enough to know that a reasonably happy, fulfilled, and compensated workforce is significantly less likely to even start discussing unionization, and so I don't think that my company will see it anytime soon, if ever (which I also think is fine, for the record). But to your point, with the way that the vast majority of the video game industry treats their employees, I hope that every single one of those large game companies ends up joining a union, because the employees deserve better.

next up: microsoft closes bethesda game studio, reassigns all assets to other departments.

... still glad to see it though. i'd love to see tech giants brought low by all the workers just withdrawing their labor.

This is what’s next for Bethesda, but it’s smart of them to only unionize after Bethesda has started on their next “independent” project. It all depends on how ES6 does. If it isn’t a smash hit with decent reception, Bethesda will be absorbed into Microsoft I guarantee it
- If it depends on how ES6 is received they still have another 6 or 7 years
- Considering the assholery that Obsidian went through with New Vegas, I fully expect the higher ups to do everything in their power to fuck up TES6 if it means the end of the union, one way or another.
- Though with a union, they have an organization set up where they could tell ms to go fuck themselves and start a new studio, especially with non-competes losing their teeth recently.

As a decades-long Bethesda fan, I think this might improve product quality from what we saw in Starfield. It's clear that somebody needs to be able to talk back to King Todd.

Maybe if they're not so alienated from their work, we'll see more of other people's creative vision.

Starfield is Todd Howard making his Homer Simpson car. It’s a pile of shit no one wanted.
- What are you talking about, he revolutionized the walking simulator. Now you can jump real high too. And instead of traveling places you just loading screen everywhere.
- I do think that's more Emil Pagliarulo's car than Todd
to be fair, a forest fire might improve product quality from what we saw in starfield
- Fire is a natural and necessary part of many ecosystemsm. It keeps parasitic insect populations down, stuff like ticks and chiggers, and some plant species rely on fire to prepare the soil for seeds and even is required for some plants to release their seeds. In dry ecosystems like the western USA it also consumes old dead plant material, reducing the fuel available for future fires and reducing fire severity overall. Many foresters and fire fighters advocate for increasing prescribed burns, essentially forest fires that we light on purpose in cooler and wetter times of the year to consume the fuel without risking a catastrophic fire that is difficult to control. I just think that's neat.
This is the first thought I had. Capitalist apologists would probably say the exact opposite, that owners need to be able to abuse workers to get more and better work out of them, but that's basically never true. Owners owe so much to their workers' creativity - even in fields where you wouldn't expect - and they are deeply unaware of it.
This will be great for the workers, but I don't think it will necessarily fix the issues in Bethesda's organization when it comes to game development (and it won't make them worse either).
Given what we know from Starfield, Bethesda is really lacking when it comes to planning: they aren't doing a good job at establishing a compact vision for the final product which also results in having issues to establish an agile workflow to get from start to finish. In the best cases, this results in ludonarrative disonance where the story isn't really supported by the mechanics of the game (example: Fallout 4's story incentivizes the player to hurry up and look for their son, but they assign a lot of resources into making sandbox mechanics such as those related to base building); in the worst cases, this results in teams returning the ball to each other all the time because they aren't properly coordinated to build things in the way other teams of the studio needs them, which loses a lot of time and becomes even more glaringly obvious the larger the project is.
The silver lining is: this problem isn't so noticeable when the designers have the template of Oblivion in their minds and they're making Skyrim, but it was going to be completely exposed when making the jump to a new IP (and thus a new universe), with a new engine, with some large design jumps such as ceding ground to dynamically created areas; so ES6 doesn't have to be as much of a low point as it has been Starfield, as long as they're conservative in their design choices. I'd vastly prefer the leadership of Bethesda to be completely reorganized, which would allow them to innovate by taking well measured risks, but I don't have much hope for that scenario.
- Either way it's a good thing, a major company unionizing could lead to the whole industry unionizing

Good for them

Congrats! Now you guys can use collective bargaining to ensure you're paid for every single bug you code. This is huge!

Seriously though, unions are good for the industry, I'm happy to see this is continuing at ever more software companies.

Unions work in ancap just as well as IRL, thus I support unions.
Regulation doesn't work IRL and doesn't exist in ancap.
Why do people here hate ancap again?
- If regulation didn't work, corpos wouldn't fight so hard to dismantle them every step of the way. If they didn't work, we wouldn't see things get markedly worse every time they're removed.
  And ancap just sounds like all the worst bits of libertarianism taken to their illogical extreme and would produce one of the worst possible societies imaginable so why do any people here not hate ancap?
- Ancaps are like monotheists to anarchism's atheism. You've given up MOST oppression and hierarchy but for some reason you still worship the inequalities of capitalism.
  Abolish all hierarchy, end all oppression.
- Because many ancaps don't agree with you about unions. Are you sure you're not a market anarchist?
  Not everyone here is an anarchist.
- Unions don't work without a central state.
  If there isn't an organization larger than a corporation making it keep to a line, a corporation will end up as a monopoly. If a line of work for certain skills is completely monopolized by one company, a union can't ever get bigger than them to enforce anything. Its a stalemate that the company can end by training scabs and a union can't end at all. That's assuming the company doesn't just start murdering Union heads which is probably the first thing they'd start to do without an organization larger than a company to call on.
  Of course, maybe we could unionize everyone into a people's union, for the purposes of having a bigger entity than a corporation that can defend the people. Pay some Union dues to them to get some police-equivalent people to make companies toe the line. But corruption exists and while the USA isn't really for the people today, that is pretty much how the USA started.
  Unions as we know them rely on regulations like anti-monopoly laws to exist.
  Although for the record I don't hate anarcho capitalism, I just think it's more of an ideal. A more realistic but comparable system would include a government to protect union rights and prevent oligarchical behaviors while still being mostly hands off on an industry with a Union, letting the union enforce safety and related guidelines.

Better be careful they don’t clip through any windows.

Finally some good news out of Bethesda

next up: microsoft announces development of Bethesda's next game will be largely outsourced

And I doubt the studio will see the end of this decade under Microshit‘s umbrella. Nonetheless I applaud the employees. Their success might be short lived but it‘s a success all the same.

5.5 years? No way they'll shut down this quickly. The next Elder Scrolls alone will carry them into 2030. (As much as I would enjoy you being right though...)
- You assume TES6 isnt going to be pure trash like FO76 and starfield but... um.... I dont share that same outlook. If anything TES6 will be the final nail in the coffin when the masses get their hands on it and see the buggy outdated mess they get.
- 5.5 years?
  Might be just enough for another remaster of Sykrim.
- Or Microsoft will just close the studio and outsource the IP. It's how Bethesda got Fallout.
- If starfield is anything to go by, the new elder scrolls might be a step back from modded skyrim.

This will help standardize contracts across the business and ensure things like credits, benefits, etc are done in a systemic way

✊

A glimmer of hope in dystopyan world. Starlight Glimmer of hope.

~~Gamers~~ prolitariat did unite and push back against exploitation.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

More than 200 developers at Bethesda Game Studios, the studio behind hit franchises like The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, have unionized with the Communications Workers of America (CWA).

241 workers, including “artists, engineers, programmers and designers,” have signed union authorization cards or “indicated that they wanted union representation via an online portal,” according to a CWA press release.

Microsoft has recognized the union, the CWA says; the company has already recognized unions formed by Activision QA workers and ZeniMax Studios QA workers.

The CWA describes this as “the first wall-to-wall union at a Microsoft video game studio,” meaning that all eligible job titles will be represented by the CWA instead of just one type of worker, according to the CWA’s Catalina Brennan-Gatica.

(Until now, all of the unions at Microsoft-owned studios have only been formed by QA workers.)

Microsoft didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

The original article contains 165 words, the summary contains 147 words. Saved 11%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Damn I needed some good news bad, that is fantastic!

best thing bethesda has done this decade

Well it's not the company that did it, it's the workers

Hell yeah good for them.

Forgive my ignorance, but what is a union supposed to mean/represent in this context? What benefit may the employees get from unionizing? Has this actually ever worked before?

Worked for cops, teachers, and iron workers
It's why we have a 40h work week and safe factories.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fire

Can't slow down something that's not moving.
That said, I'd rather play a union made TES6 than another non-union Starfield.

Okay...but what about making a good game.

Eh. One good game or a sustainable industry?
The big studios are lost anyway, the best they can do now is be a starting place for worker reforms
- Why not both.
That's the neat thing about workers' rights. Workers have more interest in making good products than investors, especially in artistic fields. Investors will gladly sabotage a product's quality for the sake of personal gain and move on to the next company with goodwill to exploit, but for workers a job well done is inherently rewarding.
Unionization directly leads to better games with more artistic merit.
Better compensation and working conditions typical result in improved productivity and higher quality goods.