Unionization of Game Developers

[Jayce]

It's easy to demonize publishers, but the fact is, I think Romero proved that the inmates running the asylum isn't often the answer either.

It's just Sturgeon's Law again - 90% of publishers are asshats because 90% of the general populace are asshats.  I really don't know what is causing the crisis of project management in the gaming industry, but I would suspect it has something to do with the aforementioned passion that people have for programming and doing art for games making them more accepting of whatever it takes to be on board such an enterprise.  A union would not help that -- it would either not represent the will of the workers, or it'd just be a large amount of developers who care too much to push back on manangement instead of a lot of individual ones.

That, and the fact that while software development is HARD, gaming software development is HARDER because the end result might be bug free but not fun, or fun but not bug free, or neither fun nor bug free, at which point you launch and cut your losses, or do the whole thing over again until it's fun and doesn't crash.

In short, I think it's partially the nature of the beast.  Things might get better, but the basic problems may always be with us.

[schild]

That, and the fact that while software development is HARD, gaming software development is HARDER because the end result might be bug free but not fun, or fun but not bug free, or neither fun nor bug free, at which point you launch and cut your losses, or do the whole thing over again until it's fun and doesn't crash.

I don't even want to get into the mistreatment of QA. Those people should be raking in cash money for the detail work they do. If it weren't for them, every game would come out looking like Shadowbane.

[MaceVanHoffen]

I don't even want to get into the mistreatment of QA. Those people should be raking in cash money for the detail work they do. If it weren't for them, every game would come out looking like Shadowbane.

Here here.  And it's not just games development either.  I work in the business sector, doing a lot of AI work for financial processing and forecasting.  That's basically another way of saying that my management often has the typical "I don't understand it, so it must be easy" attitude.  If it weren't for the QA people holding back the barbarians, Rome would have fallen already.

[Furiously]

Something needs to be a catalyst for changing the industry. Long term I don't see unions being the best thing, but the threat of unions is often enough to make some changes. So my advice. Organize a union.

[Alkiera]

I don't even want to get into the mistreatment of QA. Those people should be raking in cash money for the detail work they do. If it weren't for them, every game would come out looking like Shadowbane.

Here here.  And it's not just games development either.  I work in the business sector, doing a lot of AI work for financial processing and forecasting.  That's basically another way of saying that my management often has the typical "I don't understand it, so it must be easy" attitude.  If it weren't for the QA people holding back the barbarians, Rome would have fallen already.

My spouse works in QA at a major company.  Her complaints with management sound almost exactly like the cries of beta testers for the average MMO... "No, you can't release that!  It only does 3/4 of what you say it does!", etc.  Yet stuff still gets released, "for the good of the company".  'Cause screwing over your customers doesn't make them mad and stop purchasing from you.  Or something.

Alkiera

[bhodikhan]

What power do the publishers have?

Well. They can just move to Bangalore India. Every day I read about new 3D shops setting up there. If Hollywood is doing it then the gaming companies can as well. The producer of the movie LOTR just signed a deal with a shop in Bangalore (rather strange considering WETA in NZ did such a good job)

Mr.  Barrie M. Osborne, producer of well-known films such as Lord of the Rings and Matrix, plans to set up an animation studio in the country. This will be in partnership with Madhusudanan. N, a renowned Chennai-based visual effects specialist...

A union would just push more jobs elsewhere.

[Pococurante]

Unionization of knowledge workers is a pretty recent event.  In fact for those paying attention the last presidential election exposed that the "new" generation of unions for knowledge workers is finally recognized as a growth area and is a force no longer the tail on the blue-collar union dog.

The new guys brokered themselves a lot of power during that election - next cycle it will be very interesting to watch.  What is particularly interesting is that knowledge workers voting patterns tend to parallel traditional GOP Platform policies - something fairly antithetical to the idea of individual worker rights that gave birth to Unions to begin with.

The unions of the 1970s had nothing in common with those of those 1920s.  And the difference now from then is already itself a yawning chasm.  But then even the average air conditioner repairman has as much training as any low-level programmer.

[HaemishM]

It's easy to demonize publishers, but the fact is, I think Romero proved that the inmates running the asylum isn't often the answer either.

Note, I never said developers should be running the show without any change in their skillset. I said developers need to realize that they have to learn good business practices and learn how to run a fucking business. Romero had neither. He was literally an asshat lunatic trying to run an asylum. Part of the good business practices involves realistic project scheduling and management, but the part that the developers really need from businesses is how to deal with money, how to price things, how to make the deals that either put the box on the shelf or open a your distribution channel some other way.

In short, developers need to learn to be part suit or they will continue to suffer at the hands of the publisher's tit, a tit which is all to often being sucked dry and given with a backhand bitchslap to the collective face. Publishers have allowed developers to be fucking lazy, and as a result of the developers foisting off that responsibility, they've also lost the profits that they should be getting.

[Typhon]

So your suggestion is that human's magically evolve into creatures with spines, but no egos?

It's more then my lack of any suggestion what-so-ever, I'll grant you that.

I think globalization is changing the playing field, and rules that hold true in markets with a limited supply of labor are temporarily relaxed or non-existent.  During these times labor from different areas will have wildly different views on what "respect" means vis a vie work schedules and compenstation.  It costing very little to ship digital product reduces the cost of geographically diverse labor in ways that have never been seen before.  Additionally, there being essentially instantaneous communication between geographically diverse labor further reduces the cost of distributed tech labor.  The high-water mark of "respect" is therefore the lowest common denomitor of all labor markets that a business it willing to go to.

I don't know what the answer is.  I have no suggestions on how to make it better.  I haven't read any suggestions in this thread that haven't been tried and failed, or amount to anything more then wishful thinking. (yes, it's much easier to snipe, then to come up with a useful suggestion, apologies)

The only opinion I have is that the next 20 years are going play out in a way unlike any seen before.  While I dispise the news media more then lawyers and almost as much as politicians, I think our best hope lies with reporters doing whats right and continuing to hammer away at stories that highlight how unfun/unfair it is to work in the gaming business.

[Pococurante]

I don't know what the answer is.

Unionization is a good step though.  The point of any cooperative is to mass the resources of a demographic to make their voice known and influence their environment.  True, unions like any organization made up of people will often become inefficient/corrupt and eventually are replaced by other organizations more willing to meet evolving needs.

Until there is a framework for a cooperative though there are no choices for the individual aside from suck it up, move on to another industry, or even completely change careers.

General Observation:  The philosophy "I hate unions" is right up there with "I hate government" and "I hate religion".  Venting is cool but as a philosophy it sucks.  In the real world such blanket statements show a flaw in the individual's worldview that hopefully shakes out as they experience more of what the complexity of life is really about.  The original unions were enormously critical to creating all countries' modern middle class - the fact that they became fat-dumb-complacent simply means individual organizations ran their lifecycle and are being replaced by organizations that actually work.

[HaemishM]

The only opinion I have is that the next 20 years are going play out in a way unlike any seen before.  While I dispise the news media more then lawyers and almost as much as politicians, I think our best hope lies with reporters doing whats right and continuing to hammer away at stories that highlight how unfun/unfair it is to work in the gaming business.

Try the next 5 years. And if you are relying or even expecting the games press to really put any kind of pressure on publishers to stop being complete cockmunchers, you haven't been paying attention to the rotten state of games journalism. As in, it's just about all on the take. It has no scruples, no ethics, and no qualms about giving fellatio in game reviews for continued free game copies, sweet sweet advertising dollars and continued exclusives. The games press has no moral backbone whatsoever.

I'm not asking devs to lose their egos as they gain backbones. Art is 50% ego anyway, and should be. But what they don't need to do is let their ego fuck themselves out of a good deal. See Romero and Ion Storm for clarification. That man could really have changed the industry, but he didn't try to learn how to run a business. And so Daikatana was born.

Fuckhead.

[Typhon]

And if you are relying or even expecting the games press to really put any kind of pressure on publishers to stop being complete cockmunchers, you haven't been paying attention to the rotten state of games journalism.

Not relying, just hoping.  Reporters reporting on unfair/unethical business practices seems the least far-fetched impetus to change the industry.

See Romero and Ion Storm for clarification. That man could really have changed the industry, but he didn't try to learn how to run a business. And so Daikatana was born.

In the end John wasn't a visionary.  He wasn't even a good businesses man.  He just was involved with a bright bunch of people at the right time and got alot of noteriety and money.  He had dreams, but no vision... and he had long hair.  I think he is not important enough to waste teh hate on.

In regards to unionizing - In my opinion, union's just change the barrier to entry.  They just add more talentless cock that young talent needs to suck before they get a chance to make a game.  Unions tend to reward time in the business (any business), rather then talent.  Until someone figures out a way to fix that, I'm anti-union (this also seems to require that human's spontaneously evolve).

From a purely theorectical perspective, unions form when there is a breakdown between those who wish to buy services and those who wish to sell services.  As such, they represent a less efficient business model.  I am unaware of a case where unions were formed to improve the total operating capacity of an industry (by improving the abilities of individual actors, teamsters, etc).  Unions don't form to make better workers, unions form to force employers to improve working conditions.  If the focus was changed, and was proved to improve excellence or capacity in an industry then I'd have to say they were a good thing.  Instead, they just seem to be in place to keep those in the industry (and who have been paying dues the longest) at the highest possible wages for the longest possible time and make a buck for those in charge of the union.

[MahrinSkel]

In the end John wasn't a visionary.  He wasn't even a good businesses man.  He just was involved with a bright bunch of people at the right time and got alot of noteriety and money.  He had dreams, but no vision... and he had long hair.  I think he is not important enough to waste teh hate on.

The biggest reason why Romero deserves Teh Hate is that he was such a high profile flameout of the "Design Is Law" philosophy, where the vision of the designer was allowed to drive the process so completely that any compromise with the reality of what was actually technologically and logistically possible was treated as a betrayal of the entire founding principle of the operation.  Since Design is *not* Law, and ignoring reality doesn't keep it from biting you in the ass, it blew up in a very big way, leading to the shitpiles that were Anachronox and Daikatana.  Meanwhile, Ion Storm Austin under Spector was willing to work within the limitations of the process and the hardware, and actually produced a novel and interesting game (Deus Ex).

But he discredited the entire concept that Designers should be allowed to drive development.  Keep in mind that a lot of industry people *wanted* see it discredited (not just execs, but the entire system built on the mythos of the code cowboy and the six-month crunch), so anything less than everything Romero touched turning into million-sellers was going to be treated as a failure.  But because it was such a complete failure, even suggesting that designers should have more decision-making power is a sure way to get the designated adults (producers and senior programmers) rolling their eyes and ignoring everything else you say.  Even pointing at DX doesn't help, as they'll point out that Spector was a Producer, not a designer, and anyway, didn't the sequel suck balls?

Designers need to get a lot more disciplined and realistic, managers as well as visionaries, or we're never going to get out of this rut.

[Arnold]

That, and the fact that while software development is HARD, gaming software development is HARDER because the end result might be bug free but not fun, or fun but not bug free, or neither fun nor bug free, at which point you launch and cut your losses, or do the whole thing over again until it's fun and doesn't crash.

In short, I think it's partially the nature of the beast.  Things might get better, but the basic problems may always be with us.

That shouldn't be happening.  The game should be fun and bug free before teh shiney is even considered.  Far too much emphasis is placed on graphics these days.  The games should be built on pen and paper (or at least text/crude graphics) and perfected in that state before even thinking about graphics.

[Margalis]

That shouldn't be happening.  The game should be fun and bug free before teh shiney is even considered.  Far too much emphasis is placed on graphics these days.  The games should be built on pen and paper (or at least text/crude graphics) and perfected in that state before even thinking about graphics.

That may mean you are moving your ship date back by a year or more. You want to start any sort of content creation as soon as possible so you can finish your game on a reasonable schedule.

That said, I do think that even very early alpha builds of games should have the fun already there. Look at Master of Orion 3: It was past the original ship date and the game still wasn't fun, and they just kept hoping they could patch the fun in in the last few months. A fun game should be fun with placeholder content.

[StGabe]

I think the clearer alternative is less legal bullshit and more reasonable practices among employers.

That shit just doesn't happen if you don't group together and use your collective bargaining power.  That's what unions are all about.  Are all the implementations perfect?  Heck no, but that's humans for you.

Living in Europe, where unions and labor rights are taken much more seriously it's like holy shit: these people can hold down good jobs and have a life too.  Frigging amazing.  6 weeks vacation per year is seen as a right, not some impossible dream.  The average hours worked per week in Europe is decreasing.  The average hours worked per week in America?  Increasing.  We work more per week than any other industrialized nation (I believe even more than the Japanese who are supposedly such workaholics).

And are we earning good rewards for this?  Not really.  Average wages for middle class workers are increasing at a better clip in Europe too  (post figures if you think I'm incorrect here, it's been a while since I followed this closely, but I don't think you'll find I am).  Cost of living is pretty good too.  Overall it basically does what they want it to do.

Europe has its problems too, don't get me wrong.  But having lived and worked there I think I can say that they DO get what they want out of unionization -- a decidedly increased quality of life for workers.

Gabe.

[StGabe]

Here's the problem. People who want to make games don't want to be bothered to learn how to run a fucking business. It's as simple as that. The only reason the industry is so parasitically-attached to these vapid, soulless, marketing-speak cockmeat business types is that the business types know how to run a fucking business well enough to keep it from totally tanking. They know how to play the system. Game developers don't want to learn all the ins and outs of that. They just want someone to automagically come and take those problems away from them. Then they get all pissy when they realize that THOSE FUCKERS NOW HAVE THE POWER THAT YOU GAVE THEM. They control the purse strings, so they control the game. They can tell your developer ass when by hell or highwater your game is going to be on store shelves, whether it formats every fucking hard drive it comes into contact with or not. They are the creators of the "release now, patch later" school of thought, but they couldn't do that if they didn't have the power given over by the developers.

If only it were so simple as that.

First of all, there are a LOT of independent game companies that have people who know a LOT about making a business.  There are a lot of people with MBA's and business experience out there and more than a few are passionate about games and even know people who can make them.  I work for a small game company and I know my boss has 20+ years on the business end of the toy industry (he's former VP at Mattel I believe).

Secondly, you can't do shit without that first infusion of cash.  On top of just developing the game there are huge costs for advertising, packaging, etc.  Some small few might make it through some other distribution scheme but, by and large, the market simply isn't paying for that right now and it just doesn't happen.

Every game dev company out there wants to be independent.  And most of them have savvy business people in their ranks (you can't even get a publisher without this).  So that is not the issue, and if you think it is, you are just living in a different reality than the one that game developers currently populate.  Few companies make it, and yes, those who do are the ones who happen to have really big successes to help them.  The other route, that a lot of companies take, is just being bought up and sucked into the fold of the publisher (like Verant).

In short, most of the smaller game dev companies out there would love to actually have a choice about whether to sell out to a publisher.  But the market rarely gives them that choice.  If you can point out some high profile people who fucked it up, then so be it, but that's their problem and I still say that almost every small game company wants desperately to be independent and isn't doing so just because it is not currently economically feasible and not because they are just ignorant of business or have no spines.

You say later that there are a lot of small game companies and only a few big publishers.  That partially misses the point which is that there is a lot of money and a lot of game companies but the money is concentrated in a few hands.  Aggregates hold more control than clusters of independent groups.  It's why human history is dotted with nations.  That's why organization is key.  By concentrating the bargaining power of a group into one aggregate it can rise up to challenge the concentrated influence of the money-holders.  Otherwise, good intentions aside, the publishers will continue to exploit a consolidation of power/money.

Gabe.

[MaceVanHoffen]

You say later that there are a lot of small game companies and only a few big publishers.  That partially misses the point which is that there is a lot of money and a lot of game companies but the money is concentrated in a few hands.  Aggregates hold more control than clusters of independent groups.  It's why human history is dotted with nations.  That's why organization is key.  By concentrating the bargaining power of a group into one aggregate it can rise up to challenge the concentrated influence of the money-holders.  Otherwise, good intentions aside, the publishers will continue to exploit a consolidation of power/money.

You're really touching on a different, though related, issue: unionization of small game companies as opposed to unionization of employees.

I truly don't think unionizing employees will really fix anything, mainly because of the sheer number of new developers that are eager to please and want that first job in the industry at all costs.  Just look at how many TV and print ads are devoted to two-year colleges and trade schools which specialize in game development.  Such fresh-faced, exploitable young'uns will put up with much worse working conditions than a veteran union-member will tolerate.  A union's collective bargaining loses its punch when a company knows they can just hire younger, cheaper talent that doesn't have any vested interest in joining the union.

However, I do think smaller companies banding together in some sort of trade union might do wonders for dislodging the control that some publishers (EA, M$, etc) have on the market.  If enough of them band together, there could be enough shared capital to go after retail space in addition to online distribution.

[StGabe]

You're really touching on a different, though related, issue: unionization of small game companies as opposed to unionization of employees.

Yes I am, although I think they go hand in hand.  Europe emphasizes both unions AND regulations that protects smaller businesses.  Organization is important for both.

Just look at how many TV and print ads are devoted to two-year colleges and trade schools which specialize in game development.  Such fresh-faced, exploitable young'uns will put up with much worse working conditions than a veteran union-member will tolerate.

I have to say that said exploitable youngin's aren't really denting the game industry in my experience.  I don't know any who actually have jobs making games, for example, although maybe I just don't talk to the right people.  Mostly I think there are a lot of people out there who think, "that sounds cool, I want to develop games", but there are less who can actually do a decent job of developing game software.  Personally I think that such a school or 2 year college is more sad than it is impressive on a resume.

I actually don't know a ton about it, and it might be a bad example, but I wonder how SAG, the Screen Actor's Guild compares.  It is in a very similiar situation in that it represents highly skilled / or valued people in a field where there are literally millions of wannabes who would be willing to do the job for less.  It is also similar in that it represents an entertainment field, has a market dominated by big studios, etc.  Aren't they still able to get a lot done?

Gabe.

[MaceVanHoffen]

Well, I could totally be talking out of my ass, but in my field most developers have 2 years or less experience and often come from a trade school background (not that that matters, but it fits a certain demographic).  Companies that I contract for will often replace older programmers (older being 25+) for younger ones.  It doesn't matter to the companies that they lose knowledge and experience.  It's like a RAID array of employees to them.  It's the biggest reason that I'm selfemployed.

I'm assuming the games industry is the same.  Heck, I'm assuming all industry is the same.  The industry I left (mechanical engineering) definitely works the same way.  But what's a particular problem with software development is that you're dealing with people who don't see themselves as programmers for very long, hence another factor in their willingness to tolerate crap.  They're upwardly mobile, going after middle-management as project managers, designers, producers, etc.  Programming is dying out as a craft or career (if it ever was).  It's hard to convince a person he needs to join a union when he won't be a member of it for very long, months in some cases.  Contrast that with more traditional trades unions, where people are in them for 20+ years.

[Strazos]

I refuse to read threads where StGabe refuses to use the quote function...it just hurts my eyes.

[schild]

I refuse to read threads where StGabe refuses to use the quote function...it just hurts my eyes.

It certainly is very Slashdotty of him, isn't it?

[Strazos]

Fuck /. and their ugliness.

[StGabe]

Fuck /. and their ugliness.

Not a slashdot fan, sorry.  I just like italics.  Don't want to read my stuff?  No worries.

Gabe.

[schild]

[StGabe]

Meh.  :-D

Gabe.

[Margalis]

It depends a lot on the company, I think in general bigger houses tend to churn people over a lot faster. I interviewed at 3DO back in the day and their staff was very young overall. I know a guy who was an artist for EA who said much the same about that.

I think in a big company where you have a bunch of projects running and a bunch of employees it's much more tempting and easy to say to yourself "hey, let's replace everyone making 60k a year with people making 40k a year and we'll double our overall profits!" My impression of 3DO was that the skill level there was very low. (Except in some of the low-level libraries groups) With a smaller company you are forced to see employees as individuals and made to realize that replacing a super-productive guy with a cheap new grad who knows 1/3 as much isn't the deal it seems to be.

With 3DO in particular it's easy to see why the games they produced mostly sucked - low talent produces crap results.

[StGabe]

It's been my impression, not that I have been shopping around, that good talent is in pretty high demand at least around here (LA).  But all I really know is what I hear from a few people and what I heard when I was hired.  If they want to go the cheap route, honestly, they'll just hire some guys in India (and a lot of companies probably are doing this for some bits of their projects).  The reason, I would guess, that this isn't done even more is that having a strong core team, that is talent, creative and central to the company, is important.

But obviously, it does depend a lot on the company, the game, etc.  It also depends on what your role is in making that game.  You could be some poor schlep who's job is just to port code to other platforms.  I also don't have a ton of experience yet or across the industry or with larger companies.  I did get to visit a bunch of the SWG devs in Austin though.  There my impression was that their creative input and talent was definitely taken seriously (but was still trumped by the politics going on higher up in the chain of command).  It certainly wasn't like a bunch of code monkeys sitting around waiting for the next orders from up high, much of the design ideas came from across the team.

There's obviously a lot of differences across strata of the software industry.  There are certain jobs that people coming out of tech schools get.  Personally, most of those guys, I wouldn't trust to fix my computer let alone program my games.  There's a difference between having a certain toolset and being able to apply that doggedly to certain tasks (like your RAID array example) and truly having a talent for programming and at the higher end (where a lot, but not all, of the game projects presumably reside) I do think that is recognized.  There's certainly a lot of difference between this, for example, and the software industry practices you are talking about (particularly the stuff halfway through the article about how top engineers are at a premium even in East Asia).  It used to be that making a good database was a challenging and novel task.  Now there are 80 bazillion database people out there doing that stuff, using existing packages and not actually having to really think about it but rather just apply stuff they've been taught.  And so database work has become a license-plate manufacturing exercise where once it was a creative exercise.  And as such, tech school grads are well-prepared to go out and tackle stuff like that.  But other industries on the frontier of design (and computer gaming, or at least parts of computer gaming, have always been there) need and want more.

Gabe.

[HaemishM]

A trades type union, as opposed to an employee's union, is definitely more along the lines of what I mean. Indy game devs have the fatal flaw in that they are all too often, independent. They don't band together. I remember back in the day, EA was essentially nothing but a bunch of smaller dev houses (well, devs really, but a dev house WAS 1 dev in the day) that banded together to publish games. They were able to produce a lot more as a whole because they had more devs. Indy devs and other dev houses not owned by publishers already, should start looking into this. They should start the process of talking with each other, and not just sharing stories around the convention, but actually working together.

Are you telling me that 3 indy dev houses couldn't offer a retail chain 3 separate games as one package deal (at the wholesale level) and get some respect? As well as pooling a knowledge base, they could also pool resources, just like publishers do, only without the forced sodomy. Let go of the rock star autuer mentality, and work together. And yes, I talked about this recently.

I maintain that many of the developers only use publishers as a crutch or a stepping stone.

[StGabe]

EA was essentially nothing but a bunch of smaller dev houses (well, devs really, but a dev house WAS 1 dev in the day) ...

Your parenthetical remark is really the heart of the matter.  A dev house used to be 1 dev.  The market used to be drastically different.  It used to be possible to actually sell a game that was masterminded and implemented by a 1-4 people.  Marketing used to be less important.  That really just isn't the case anymore. Virtually no games that consumers are buying, on consoles or PC's, are made by less than 20 people.  Even getting those 20 people together to form one dev house almost always implies taking in money from SOME outside investor (venture captialists, publishers, whatever) which implies losing creative control.

Are you telling me that 3 indy dev houses couldn't offer a retail chain 3 separate games as one package deal (at the wholesale level) and get some respect?

They have to package and advertise said game first.  They have to have marketing people there just to sell it.  Etc.  In many ways it is just not nearly so simple as you make it out to be.  The publishers have the machinery to do this efficiently and the small dev houses don't.  And it's not really a matter of, well, 3 of them could just pool their resources and they'd magically be able to invest the capital to ship a retail quality game.  Why don't authors release books directly to the market instead of using publishers?  Why don't recording artists release music directly to retail outlets?  Because the costs to do this, and the current market, make this (95% of the time) completely infeasible.  And it's the same for publishing games.  The steps (read money suckers) in the process to putting out a game that might actually sell more than a handful of copies and generate real revenue are what get in the way of companies going out and becoming independent right away.

The rock star attitude?  I think that's mostly just hype and stereotypes.  What are you basing this on but a few anecdotes?  Again, I repeat, that pretty much every small game studio wants to be independent and there is an ample supply of gamers trained and experienced in business that would help them do this if possible.  It's more the nature of the market that precludes sma lltime independent projects than it is some bizarre irrationality or "rock star" attitude that runs rampant through the independent dev teams.  You have to actually SELL several games before you feel like a rock star and not just some dude that knows how to write some DirectX code or create nifty 3d models.

Gabe.

[StGabe]

I maintain that many of the developers only use publishers as a crutch or a stepping stone.

And I maintain that it is bloody obvious that many or most developers passionately hate publishers and would avoid them if it were at all possible (and it's naive to assume that the only reason they don't is that they are irrational egomaniacs and none of them know a lick about business).

Gabe.

[HaemishM]

The game industry doesn't like sharing. It's dev houses are mostly all concerned (and some rightly so) that someone is going to come in and steal their ideas and their best people leaving them high and dry. Game devs like to be thought of as auteurs, the visionary behind the classics, like the egotistical directors of "flim."

I'm not talking about 1-man dev shops here, but medium-size, non-publisher exclusive dev houses. Guys like the size Bioware used to be, guys like Ion Storm Austin, Irrational Games, Creative Assembly, people like that. Dev houses that have had some moderate success, most of which has been drained away from them by stupid publishers. Put together a label that contains Irrational Games, Ion Storm, and Creative Assembly games, and take that to the retailers.

"Here, EB, you can get Freedom Force 3, Deus Ex 3, and Total War: Assyria, and we'll even give it to you at a lower per unit cost than you got all 3 of those games separtely from different publishers, because you deal directly with us."

Retailers should be all over that, and if they aren't, they haven't been paying attention to game sales figures.

In short, dev houses need to act like the Image Comics artists did towards Marvel Comics in the early 90's, except without all the egotism and cockmunchery. The things publishers contribute to the party aren't that important to the process, and that includes marketing. Money is the single-biggest thing they offer.

All the dev houses I've mentioned are successful. Once their coalition of indy publishing is established, offering similar benefits to up and coming dev houses is just an expansion of their business.

[StGabe]

"Here, EB, you can get Freedom Force 3, Deus Ex 3, and Total War: Assyria, and we'll even give it to you at a lower per unit cost than you got all 3 of those games separtely from different publishers, because you deal directly with us."

That is very far away from the reality of what would be required to directly market to EB.  You would have to convince EB that you have a good game (through a prior record and through paying marketing people).  You would have to package it.  You would have to guarantee a certain amount of advertisng.  Etc.  EB doesn't want to put some Dark Horse on the shelves when it can put up the latest EA releases and have them fly out the door.  And how are the small companies going to offer at lower cost per unit the games that they don't have an existing apparatus to publish in the first place (which means that their own cost per unit is going to be a lot higher).  Think about it: why doesn't Neal Stephenson just sell his next novel directly to B&N?  Is it really so easy to do as you make it seem.

You say, "yeah, well EA and the other big boys basically started by pooling resources of small dev houses".

Ok, well let's stop and think about this a moment.  Are you saying that EA was essentially better and smarter than the small dev houses are now?  And if so, why bother with the dev houses anyway seeing as how EA seems to be so brilliant.  If not ... shouldn't we realize that EA did that then because it was easy to do that then and small companies don't do that now because it's very hard if not impossible to do now?  You give small dev houses so little credit I have to wonder why you even give a shit whether they release games or not.  And in so doing you just reinforce the consumer attitudes that drive this train off the tracks in the first place!  "It's not my fault that all the small game companies are idiots and so I'll just keep buying whatever EA sells me."

Instead of a labor movement maybe we just need a consumer movement.

Gabe.

[HaemishM]

Consumers are barely smart enough to have bowel movements as individuals, much less as some form of organized mob.

It's going to take a lot of small dev houses combined to even get a meeting with EB. Mid-range houses with a successful title or two? Not so hard. Also, EB gives not two shits about the quality of the game. They care about 1) How much will it cost them, 2) how many can you get, 3) is this going to get crazy ass fundies to protest my stores (i.e. adult games), 4) what are their margins? That's it. Maybe how many returns would this generate, but I doubt that's even an issue on games, only hardware.

[StGabe]

1) How much will it cost them, 2) how many can you get, 3) is this going to get crazy ass fundies to protest my stores (i.e. adult games), 4) what are their margins?

And even on a low budget it may well will cost them more from the small dev houses and it will be much less likely to sell (which is probably the most important item and one you didn't list -- EB isn't going fill their store with artsy indie games that no one but hardcore gamers will buy).  The independent group will have higher costs to package and ship units.  They will have much less advertising to build hype to get people to the store (stores like EB live and breath off of game hype).  And they will be lacking the big budget graphics, etc., that isn't just put into games to be evil, but is put into games because it sells boxes.

Consumers are barely smart enough to have bowel movements as individuals, much less as some form of organized mob.

I agree, more or less.  But why are you blaming game developers for this when consumers create the market where small game companies can't sell jack?

Gabe.