French video game developers staged the first-ever industry-wide strike this week, rallying against deteriorating working conditions and significant job cuts.
French video game developers staged the first-ever industry-wide strike this week, rallying against deteriorating working conditions and significant job cuts.
It is amazing to me that developers now are paid more and given more time, yet developers from 20 years ago made way more with way less. Games come out now and the graphics might be great, but the gameplay and story is garbage, bug-riddled, etc. For an old game with a smaller dev team, smaller budget, and only like 1 or 2 years of development time, that is completely understandable. These days we get games that take 6+ years to develop with 150+ person studios and budgets averaging over $100 million per game, and we genuinely see these games get massively outperformed by 20 year old games in almost every way.
What do they hope to achieve with this? I understand they want more pay, but if their work output does not reflect that they are deserving of more pay, then they’re going to end up jobless anyway. Businesses are not charities, and work output that is subpar cannot sustainably be given bigger pay. That’s just rewarding lazy or bad work instead of rewarding good work. If part of their terms do not include “shareholders have no say in the product at all” (which is impossible, by the way, that’s not how that works), then they cannot possibly look to achieve anything other than getting a possible extension for a short time before ultimately being cut loose.
The difference is that developers in the past were much more involved in the games. Nowadays, they are just following instructions of a few people and their scope is extremely limited.
At the same time, if a game does not sell well, they are the first to be punished, not the ones who designed the game.
Moreover, the games are not designed only by passionate people. They have to think about DLCs at the beginning, deciding which part of the whole game must be cut and how to frustrate gamers just enough to buy them. It’s no more an add-on for a game that sold very well, or adding things that could not fit into the game at the time.
Ubisoft has also a structural issue because it optimized everything too much. All their games are similar, because it’s easier to use again and again the same game structure than trying new things. Their teams are built for developing such games. Sadly, when they try they generally fail (like the last Prince of Persia or Mario & Rabbids).
But as I said, it’s not the fault of the developers themselves, but the people managing them. And those have too many constraints from people who want to make as much money as possible. Bugs are acceptable, games should be filled a with DLCs from the start, and repeat the same formula for every game so that production cost can be as low as possible. And if it fails, it’s the developers’ fault who just followed orders, even he can’t have a say about the game.
It goes further than your oversimplification ; i don’t know where you live but in France workers have rights that they fought for thanks to unions and collective actions like these, and quality of output is not the sole metric to “deserve” just pay.
Nom de Dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperies de connards d’enculé de ta mère, je vomis dans sa chatte puante, t’arrache la tête et te chie dans le cou.
You see, it’s like wiping your ass with silk, I love it.
Yeah this is Lemmy so I can’t say your votes turned out unexpected. But you’re right, all this will do is make their job end quicker. There’s no money to give, Ubisoft is dying as is.
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It is amazing to me that developers now are paid more and given more time, yet developers from 20 years ago made way more with way less. Games come out now and the graphics might be great, but the gameplay and story is garbage, bug-riddled, etc. For an old game with a smaller dev team, smaller budget, and only like 1 or 2 years of development time, that is completely understandable. These days we get games that take 6+ years to develop with 150+ person studios and budgets averaging over $100 million per game, and we genuinely see these games get massively outperformed by 20 year old games in almost every way.
What do they hope to achieve with this? I understand they want more pay, but if their work output does not reflect that they are deserving of more pay, then they’re going to end up jobless anyway. Businesses are not charities, and work output that is subpar cannot sustainably be given bigger pay. That’s just rewarding lazy or bad work instead of rewarding good work. If part of their terms do not include “shareholders have no say in the product at all” (which is impossible, by the way, that’s not how that works), then they cannot possibly look to achieve anything other than getting a possible extension for a short time before ultimately being cut loose.
LOL. Classic Lemmy.
The difference is that developers in the past were much more involved in the games. Nowadays, they are just following instructions of a few people and their scope is extremely limited.
At the same time, if a game does not sell well, they are the first to be punished, not the ones who designed the game.
Moreover, the games are not designed only by passionate people. They have to think about DLCs at the beginning, deciding which part of the whole game must be cut and how to frustrate gamers just enough to buy them. It’s no more an add-on for a game that sold very well, or adding things that could not fit into the game at the time.
Ubisoft has also a structural issue because it optimized everything too much. All their games are similar, because it’s easier to use again and again the same game structure than trying new things. Their teams are built for developing such games. Sadly, when they try they generally fail (like the last Prince of Persia or Mario & Rabbids).
But as I said, it’s not the fault of the developers themselves, but the people managing them. And those have too many constraints from people who want to make as much money as possible. Bugs are acceptable, games should be filled a with DLCs from the start, and repeat the same formula for every game so that production cost can be as low as possible. And if it fails, it’s the developers’ fault who just followed orders, even he can’t have a say about the game.
Have you read the article ? Here’s two articles from the STJV website with their demands, translate at your convenience:
https://www.stjv.fr/2025/02/gg25-greve-generale-du-jeu-video-quelles-revendications/
https://www.stjv.fr/2025/01/gg25-greve-generale-du-jeu-video-pourquoi-pour-qui-comment/
It goes further than your oversimplification ; i don’t know where you live but in France workers have rights that they fought for thanks to unions and collective actions like these, and quality of output is not the sole metric to “deserve” just pay.
fr*nch punctuation 🤮
You see, it’s like wiping your ass with silk, I love it.
This post show so much ignorance for how games are made these days…
You should probably start caring about video games before you talk about them
Yeah this is Lemmy so I can’t say your votes turned out unexpected. But you’re right, all this will do is make their job end quicker. There’s no money to give, Ubisoft is dying as is.