The people complaining about it being delayed are probably the people least likely to change their minds because of the delays and not buy the game when it comes out. Empty promises about crunch and lost trust won't matter as much to those people when the game comes out. Also, does the general gaming subculture still care about Red Dead Redemption 2's development and the livelihood and mental health costs it caused to its devs? Or Grand Theft Auto V, seven years later? Will 2077 only be remembered in the future as a very good title with no acknowledgement of the unnecessary toil the devs were put through?

One problem is that there is too much hype. No Man's Sky proved that with too much effective advertising you can hype yourself into a corner, not have enough resources to finish the product properly, and guarantee the disappointment of the people expecting too much. Some game developers seem to not know when to scale back their ambitions and align the hype they generate with a time schedule and human resources management that is healthy. There's just too much passion in some game development areas that isn't left unexploited.

For GTA VI, Rockstar will only release a smaller sized game and instead add sizeable updates spread out over time, which makes it sound like they've finally started to learn from the past.

https://kotaku.com/18-months-after-red-dead-redemption-2-roc...

Seems more like GTA V online has ruined GTA forever. The entire point of GTA for me (and many other people) was a compelling large single player open world with a nice story. Now that rockstar has smelled microtransactions it most likely means the next GTA will have single player as an afterthought.

For GTA, that's probably also because later updates has worked extremely well for GTA V. The online aspects of it, with regular new content, have taken over the single-player side by a lot, so it makes sense double-down on that model.

> No Man's Sky proved that with too much effective advertising you can hype yourself into a corner, not have enough resources to finish the product properly, and guarantee the disappointment of the people expecting too much.

They had plenty of resources, and they did finish it properly once they had enough time. The real problem was declaring the game as 1.0 far too early. The hype made that hurt more but it wasn't the cause of the problems. I mean, it didn't even have a real ending early on, or any multiplayer.

> For GTA VI, Rockstar will only release a smaller sized game and instead add sizeable updates spread out over time

Sounds like Windows 10, only with microtransactions.

Maybe a software developers’ union. Big projects like this use a lot of third party tooling; imagine if a decent percentage of those said “we won’t license this to you unless you’re a union shop” or something like that. And said union would enforce humane working conditions.

Us software developers are too smart for organised labour.

And why would companies like Epic restrict their revenues like that? Epic too sees financial gain from their developers working excessive (potentially unpaid) overtime, no doubt. Unions are necessarily devised and lead by workers, not beneficent corps.

> Us software developers are too smart for organised labour

Too smart to from cartels instead of being played off against each other by labor by buyers with greater market power?

Nah, just too many have bought into propaganda being spread from the other side of the negotiating table designed to preserve the existing power imbalance.

That's correct. If you're a software developer and interested in maximizing pay while minimizing stress, you obviously avoid the gaming industry. The only news here is that the company seems to have reneged on the promise it made, but it's not obvious how a union would have solved this problem. Would the union help get the game shipped on time?

The TV and film industries are heavily unionised across multiple sectors--tech, writers, actors, directors, etc.--and it's the norm to complete projects on time and on budget, or with immediate compensation for planning failures leading to overtime/crunch time. Think about the massive amount of content routinely produced for TV and film and tell me how unions make that impossible.

Somehow, the large investors still make lots of money. The primary effect of unions in this space seems to be that they put an actual dollar cost on poor management. When you hear about boondoggles like Heaven's Gate or Waterworld, what you hear isn't that unions screwed it up; you hear about the prima donna director who couldn't get it all "just so" with a couple hundred million to work with.

My employer, a digital services agency, pays hourly overtime of 1.5x. Then the professional PMs we have work very hard to accurately forecast and estimate. I've had crunch periods in which I've been paid overtime, but they're rare because the business has incentived itself to execute on-time and on-budget, mostly by not promising what we can't deliver and expecting the workers to pick up the slack.

When I worked in public sector with a strong union, we didn't do crunch, we accepted that deadlines are malleable and my project managers always anticipated and resolved deadline problems before they became a problem.

Now I work for IBM, and I am expected to work late as much as it takes to ship on time. "On time" is of course completely arbitrary and determined by people who have no understanding of the technical tasks required to ship the project (and most pertinent, don't listen to me when I provide my expert opinion that the timeline is not viable). And they expect to not have to pay me for that overtime.

Not being able to exploit your workers encourages realistic deadlines.

> Would the union help get the game shipped on time?

This is such a weird logic. Since when should the company financial incentives have higher priority over the employees well-being? Arguably, if the existence of the company is threatened by a few delays and that the only solution is to exploit people, it should instead close shop and let people get other jobs that will make them happier.

So no, a union would probably not help the game be shipped in time, and if it did, it would be the shittiest union. And if enforcing humane working conditions against the profits of the employer makes the business unsustainable, this means the business should not exist in the first place.

A union’s role would be to enforce humane working conditions, not to ensure that a company achieves arbitrary financial goals.

> The only news here is that the company seems to have reneged on the promise it made, but it's not obvious how a union would have solved this problem. Would the union help get the game shipped on time?

Quite likely yes, though not directly. Foreclosing avenues that management tends to fall into which are both empirically not particularly effective and also miserable working conditions, like more than brief crunch time, probably does improve delivery, though that's not the main goal.

We don't need a union we need a fucking bar. If you pass a bar exam, you get to charge 350 eur/h like my lawyer. And if you do questionable shit you could be disbarred

What would that achieve?

There’s a definite chicken and egg problem. I think it would have to be a grassroots bottom up thing starting with small vendors, because I agree the big vendors aren’t going to do this on their own. But the small vendors are probably the least financially able to make a principled stand on something like this.

You’re probably right that software devs as a group are generally too egocentric or libertarian minded to engage in any sort of collective action for their own benefit.

I agree. Also, buff dudes spend a long time at the gym and it makes me look bad compared to them so I don't think they should be allowed to go to the gym so much.

Boycotting the game won't do anything, that 0.1% drop in revenue won't be noticed when the game actually comes out