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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
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.
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.
If it depends on how ES6 is received they still have another 6 or 7 years
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…)
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.
5.5 years?
Might be just enough for another remaster of Sykrim.
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 If anything TES6 will be the final nail in the coffin when the masses get their hands on it and see the buggy outdated mess they get.
neither of those games are pure trash. unless all you ever play is 10/10 masterpieces and nothing worse than that
I didn’t say that.
I expect it to be about as awful as Starfield. However, unlike Starfield (which didn’t sell horrendously by any source I can find, just not great) it has incredible brand recognition behind it. I have no doubts it will sell based on that alone as long as it looks like Skyrim 2 at first glance.
Edit: right after posting I figured out how to formulate what else I wanted to say but couldn’t find the correct words for: “Sadly profitability and quality don’t always correlate.”
next up: microsoft announces development of Bethesda’s next game will be largely outsourced
Okay…but what about making a good game.
Better compensation and working conditions typical result in improved productivity and higher quality goods.
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.
I mean I wouldn’t mind a decent Elder Scrolls game…
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.
Finally some good news out of Bethesda
best thing bethesda has done this decade
Well it’s not the company that did it, it’s the workers
Seeing the rebirth of unions in tech companies might be one of my favorite things about this timeline.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Everyone should know this. The fire he said “This is fine” about was a metaphorical one, after all. But then, Unionization has been important to have in the economic ecosystem as well, so it might just be that greatly-needed wildfire in a forest with too much corporate rot.
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
On that, I agree.
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.
Starfield is Todd Howard making his Homer Simpson car. It’s a pile of shit no one wanted.
I do think that’s more Emil Pagliarulo’s car than Todd
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.
You can jump further too, but only if you rebind the jump button :D
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
Good for them
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!
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This will help standardize contracts across the business and ensure things like credits, benefits, etc are done in a systemic way
Better be careful they don’t clip through any windows.
