@@CyberSquatch773 There's a lot of different idea guys, writers, designers, producers, developers and on and on. Find a niche and get good at it, for me it's writing.
You mean Naughty Dog, the people who made a game where you play as an IDF stand in murdering Palestinians stand ins? The studio where the lead director directly participated in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinans during his military service? Color me shocked
I'm Indian and a 3d animator. Trust me i have seen how bad the work conditions are at the "outsourcing studios". Which is why its so funny to me how the western games media that does so much virtue signaling and activism ignores stories like these where actual real harm is being on a large scale by corporations. Most of these "journalists" in the west are anti capitalists who say they hate big corporations and yet they refused to talk about stories like these. I take it back, its not funny. Its sad, pathetic and hypocritical. I am glad you guys covered it and for the original reporting by people make games.
They say they are anti capitalists while being the biggest corporate bootlickers around. You'd be right about it being pathetic, but this kind of behavior does not deserve even pity, only condemnation
The west's virtue signaling is only to make themselves feel better, never forget that. I do hope the working conditions for you and every other person in these outsourcing studios gets better.
If it's any consolation anyone informed knows these companies are all liars, it's only normies and leftists that fall for the virtue signalling. The good thing is though even the normies are clicking onto everything and they pay attention to what informed gamers are saying about these studios and the staff in particular. This goes back to rants I regularly have about their workflow and I am very eager to get any details I can on these companies if only to point and laugh at them and have my prejudices confirmed. It's not that these studios won't fix them, it's they can't. It's looking like that they hire the blue hair leftists in order to do all their marketing work and pay them very well to keep them happy and shilling for the brand while they attack the real fanbase and then outsource to third world labour who do the real dev work in the background. This also explains a good deal about why there are so few patches after release and nothing ever gets fixed or changed. I am somebody who does programming and 3D art and I am salivating at the idea of all these studios going bankrupt and I hope there are plenty of disgruntled employees making recordings and notes of the kind of workflow they've got going.
The Western gaming industry is full of hypocrisy. Outsourced studios have terrible conditions while the Western studios pat themselves on the back for being progressive and having "diversity". As a non white, they don't bother putting males like in their games. It's a grotesque industry.
@@heavyartillery-qm5hu It is just the western that needs to colapse, Japan is doing fine with Fromsoft, Capcom and nintendo. Recently even Korea with Stellar Blade and then China with Black Myth
Forget outsourcing, that's way too expensive. Just think of how much cheaper games would be if we had slavery. The race to the bottom takes place in a septic tank.
@@Spectacular_Insanity thats literally what the democrats argued back in the day when republicans tried to end slavery around the time of hte civil war. But who would pick the cotton!
It's worth noting that outsourcing to Indonesians who are then abused is a massive issue for Tech as a whole. It needs to be addresseed at a much wider level than just videogames
Years back when I worked at call centers and ended up helping to train the people overseas who would end up replacing me and my coworkers, I watched one of the Philippines agents get actually slapped for speaking their native language while on break by a manager. I can only imagine how badly others get treated that they get away with that would get lawsuits stateside.
@@Eltener123 It's a global thing and not limited to Indonesia. The good news is that it won't be long before AI will take over those jobs. The bad news is we won't know what humans will do to earn money, yet.
@@MyAnalyser Why would we even need money at that point? If AI is able to automate everything, money becomes nothing more than a means to power. As if it isn't basically that already lol
@@krytenfivetwothreep2485 yeah in a perfect world profits from ai will be used to sustain people thru universal basic income. In our world tho some billionaire will buy his 9th yacht and fired employees will starve
A random investor doesn't care about long term sustainability when a new get rich quick scheme happens on practically a monthly basis. They will pull out on a moment's notice and leave the company scrambling to stay afloat.
@@kombatwombat6579 why did you ask if there is a beef here? don't you know how to use search engine? You should work at EA. Almost all of EA game developer don't know how to use google search image nor google earth
I worked for Ubisoft in Serbia (around 2014/2015), worst job I ever worked. I guess Serbia have some worker protection, but still their policies were still terrible. Like promissing full salary (plus pension) payments as soon they open full studio. But when they openned studio they said, now you need to wait 3 years to get full pension payments.
Ubisoft isn't all that good to work at, although in the recent years they got better (after the Black Flag fiasco, at least in Bulgaria). In Bulgaria officially and legally people are not allowed to crunch. We have laws regarding maximum overtime people could work, as well as the pay for it. People who worked on Black Flag and did overtime were paid adequately, but their overtime pay was subtracted from the bonus they got for shipping the game. As far as I know, that only happened with Black Flag and none of the games the studio worked on after that, and apparently it got a lot better. Not sure how it is now - my friends that work there aren't complaining, apparently salaries have gotten better, but with their financial situation I'm not sure the studio here will last.
Indie games made in countries not traditionally associated with game development like Czechia, Poland, China, and others: Wonderful, a sign that games have gone truly global. AAA games made with cheap labor like just another exploitation-powered cheap, shoddy consumer product: Far less so.
@@SimuLord remember how both miside and atomic heart are made in russia? I am still murderously angry that i cant just bring tiny mita with me, god damnit
@@premc8071 Not traditionally in the classic "US and Japan make everything" sense. Other than CDPR, you never really heard about games from Poland until very recently.
@@SimuLord depends on meaning of your words " you never really heard about games from Poland until very recently" bc there are some games that could be popular and not recent like Frostpunk from 11 bit studios or dying light from techland and sure there are some less known games like This war of mine ( but it sure was heated about war and those situations when it was published) or green hell. Those games arent strictly associated with poland but they sure are from there
@@lethn2929 it's alot of work but i've been trying to do it. Making your own game is unsurprisingly really hard, and will likely take me years until i get something working lol. But at this rate, anything is better than what these companies churn out.
@@Crablover132 I disagree, games developers and their journalist hacks have fooled you and everyone else into thinking it's hard, depending on the genre it's not difficult at all with modern software, don't get me wrong, it's not the 'easiest' thing in the world, but it's entirely possible. I wouldn't advise for example doing a simulation game or RTS for your first game because that takes a lot of code lol. Never forget, Notch made Minecraft while he was working part time in an office.
In the 1990's Nike was making Jordan's with less than 7 cents in labor where workers were literally beaten with sticks. People still bought Jordans. 'I wanna be like Mike' is what people remember.
Brandoville case actually blew up pretty spectacularly here in Indonesia, everybody was talking about it for weeks. I have a few friends who are quite close with Christa (one of the victims) and the level of abuse she received were absolutely horrifying. Worst part is, the mf who abused her (Cherry Lai, the owner) isn't actually Indonesian herself but came from Hong Kong and she managed to fled the country. What a POS.
I’m more than confident that you could tell your yearly Cod/2K/Madden consumer that they can only get to have their games if we regularly sacrificed children, kittens and puppies to a giant blender and they’d just shrug and say it’s not their problem unless their favorite streamer or sports player tells them it’s a o problem.
They have got to be the most dim-witted gamers in the history of video games. Annually the same game with minor iterations and tons of exploitive microtransactions.
Make no mistake though, you see this kind of willfully-blind consumerism in many spaces and it didn't happen by accident. People have been deliberately made to feel so bad about their own, immediate circumstances that they haven't the mental capacity to truly care about anything else, and they retreat into escapism and consumerism to cope. Everyone knows we're screwed and no one has the energy to do anything about it.
Greedy corpos and facilitating governments. Tying subsidiary companies to their parent/employer companies and mandating the work conditions and pay must be on par with American labor laws would eliminate this cheap labor market.
This has been permeating every industry and every market for decades. i feel like every service i use or interact with has gotten qualitatively worse since i was younger. sure they have fancy new tools, and optimizations, but everything is more expensive the people often get paid less, and do more work, and have less downtime. everything just seems miserable. we are l living in cyberpunk dystopia already. they just didnt bother to give us the cool metal arms and head computers. why waste the money on us cattle?
Unpoppular oppinion. Crunch culture was what made games good. To make good games, you need the kind of passionate enough people who would push past the crunch and enjoy doing it. People without that passion won't be able to make good enough games, and while the passionate people doesn't need the crunch to be passionate, the crunch is the perfect filter to make sure the unsuited people doesn't go into game dev.
@@Niyucuatro agreed, people are treating art as an office job because you use a pc to do it. A game developer has vast knowledge on maths, programming, 3d spaces etc. a different job in IT isn't incompatible, if you don't want crunch.
Just proves the point AAA got too big, has far too many career CEOs that know nothing of creativity who have pushed out truly creative minds. To be honest it's reminding me of how Atari almost killed off gaming in the US with the same bs mentality back in the 80s! Funnily enough just like in the 80s it's the Eastern devs that are pushing the medium forwards again and tbh I think they're going to save the industry and probably rule it again until the western AAA publishers get their acts together... or collapse!
All that is old is new again. Investors will decide that the returns don't justify the huge risks in gaming, they'll pull their money out, the industry will collapse, and then Nintendo will release a Mario game and save video games.
We'll see if they do save it again. They're already censoring old animes and credit card companies dont want you buying manga so to me it seems like the western bs is infecting them too.
@@SimuLord Nintendo saving video games. You mean the Nintendo who sued palworld for petty reasons? Nintendo who hasn't innovated in decades and has basically pumped out the same game since their existence? The same Nintendo who fights fan events aggressively? Nintendo who goes after fan projects with their mob of lawyers?
This is the exact thing that happened to Hollywood. I have a lot of friends that used to work at Disney, Pixar in animation Etc and it's all gone, they work for foreign studios making pennies now.
The same for the QA departments too. I work at a UK based games QA company. It's slowly doing each year less projects, always being told we charge too much. Were paid minimum wage as testers they just can't complete with the companies in poorer countries
Yeah... who needs testing anyway. Isn't that why they're suckering all of us to buy early release games (at full price!) so they can get buy with large sections of product testing ? Just have your user's test em!
I wish UK companies would learn to compete on service instead of price. They'll never win a price war with poor countries with no employee protections, so why even try? Every services company I deal with now wants a premium to deliver a substantially worse service than they used to and it's always because there's a new corporate overlord managing the purse strings. I can only guess what QA is like, but if it's anything like vulnerability scanning actually having a knowledgable employee to triage bugs for me would be a godsend instead of me having to manually deal with hundreds of low quality reports and arguing with worse-than-chatgpt "support" personnel who need to get rid of me so I stop messing up their metrics.
the real ghost developers are the studios having to call their sernior White developers back to finish the mess of a game the diversity hires cannot put together.
Guessing it's something like ghost writers. I'd give them the benefit of the doubt given how terrible the industry seems now, but vague doomposting is kind of an annoying trend on social media lol
The reason they didn't talk or say anything is that people do not care, just as they don't care about how well janitors or other low paying jobs are treated, people don't even care about the devs of the main studio we see daily people supporting crunch in studios like rockstar because if crunch is needed to have games like GTA V and RDR2 than people will even support that, support and outsourcing studios are invisible
Whenever game developers become publicly traded, the curse begins. As a public company, they are expected to grow profit. To do so, they either have to grow revenue or cut cost. Doing both at the same time is extremely hard and not realistic for the games industry. So these companies often resorted to cutting cost, since it’s an easy way to please the stock market. After they’ve cut costs for a while, they lost the infrastructure and talents to make good games. Ubisoft and EA have been good examples of this.
Also, the market is heavily saturated/there are not many new users to go after. Thus, there’s a need to further monetise their existing user base to continue meeting shareholder and market expectations.
Like every maturing industry, gaming is seeing a shift in priorities. From Product > Workers' profit > Company's profit > Shareholders' profit > Personal profit to Personal profit > Shareholders' profit > Company's profit > Product > Workers' Profit Making money is no longer a mean to make more games, making games is now a means to make money, it could be anything else really.
"We are deeply disturbed by the continued backlash we're receiving as we are unable to understand why we are receiving it." ~ Ubisoft whenever they fuck up
The problem isn't that game company CEOs don't know what they are selling, it is that they are selling increasing stock prices and dividends to investors, not games. The Games are just the means, not the ends.
@@fleetadmiraljThis is true for every single company. The objective of a corporation is to maximize shareholder value. This is the first lesson of business school. They’re doing an exceptionally poor job of it though. The elasticity of game demand is wildly variable. A game like Skull and Bones failed because there was no established audience. Whereas CoD can make 3 trash games in a row because there is an established base that always buys. This isn’t infinity exploitative, we’ve seen big franchises die too.
@@fleetadmiralj this is true, but I think its failing now for the games industry because they forgot that theyre supposed to make state of the art high quality experiences
Lets be real, the only reason Ubisoft came out with a limp empty apology and Naughty Dog didn't is because one studio is coming out with a major game very soon and the other isn't
@@FredericoASousa I think it's more Ubisoft currently being the most popular joke in the industry so they have to talk about it for their PR while nobody cares about naughty dogs because people like their shallow movie games
I'll repeat this until I die: ART CAN'T BE MADE FOR PROFIT. Video Games are every single human endeavor rolled up into an interactive story. It's every Art. It's the culmination of Human creativity. It deserves more respect than this, and the people making it deserve to be treated WAY WAY better than this.
What’s even more frustrating is that the core team devs always refused and tried to push back against working with outsourcing teams based in low cost countries. But in the end, the executives won (as always).
Nah, you can still make lots of money with games without absolutely screwing things up. All you gotta do is trust your dev team knows their audience and give them enough time to finish the damn games. Sacrificing quality for short term gain always leads to this result.
@@sparking023 CEO types will ruin everything. Every product imaginable has been taken over and ruined by big corpos and money men. Even most governments simp for and are almost entirely controlled by big business.
This is just the end result of studios being owned by corporations, because in the end the 1 incontrovertible law of corporations is: " *LINE MUST GO UP* " The only studio you can trust is one privately owned.
The exploitation of marginalized countries has long been a fundamental aspect of global capitalism, and the United States is no exception. Industries such as manufacturing and the cruise sector thrive on low wages and poor working conditions in developing nations, all to meet the American demand for affordability, convenience, and quality. Consumer expectations play a significant role in sustaining this cycle. In the gaming industry, for example, people demand quick releases while simultaneously criticizing the final product. This pressure leads to exploitative labor conditions, particularly in countries where regulations are weak, and workers have little bargaining power. Exploitation has been a persistent part of human history, but meaningful change requires a shift in consumption habits. When aesthetic concerns-such as the design of a digital character-take precedence over the well-being of the people creating them, ethical issues are overlooked. Until consumers prioritize fair labor practices over convenience and cost, the cycle of exploitation will persist.
If you deliver subpar quality you get subpar sales. You are correct in saying that there is no benefit to lessening competition, but with games there's always the option of not buying them. Something AAA has been discovering recently as well.
@@Anonihmus2567 I think it's best worded in terms of "This is what happens when profits and cost cutting leads to questionable moral and empathetic decisionmaking by the higher ups". In this case, their greed in chasing profits for as little cost as possible led to them resorting to basically modern day slavery, which itself is immoral.
A moral person doesn't treat a person like a slave... The problem is these soulless AAA mega corps doing business with companies operating in 3rd world sh-t hole countries who basically have slave labour. Would be nice for western governments to legislate against this sort of thing, but gamers can also do something. Don't buy AAA garbage products, they will eventually go bankrupt.
Also the cost of wanting to keep game prices at under $60. You HAVE to go where cheap labor is to keep the games remotely profitable. There is bloat, and could cut team sizes down. But lets not pretend that cost of creating something in the US is the same cost as creating something in Indonesia.
Michael this was one of your best videos yet. It managed to draw up the big picture, show us where so much of it goes wrong and why all of us should care, even it is for different reasons. I also liked your way with words (varied and descriptive, very few repetitions) in this one, nicely done.
I have IDK 1500 steam games and I am not sure I buy one AAA title a year, probably less. You don’t have to buy this slop. Plenty of interesting people and projects to support.
@PavelKrupets In technical execution it is one of the best games ever. However, they created a product that did not align with their fanbase and customer base. That's just terrible business and implies management incompetence. Their response to backlash was also not very good. They need to shape up for the next product or its going nowhere fast.
I stopped expecting game companies to run sustainable business that delivered quality products made by adequately compensated developers when live services got popular, I knew it would burn out eventually as it has, but there was no way to convince people it would happen until it did. Now that reality is setting in and the ceaseless toxic positivity is quieting down, it’ll be more popular to complain about the things I’ve always known to be problems that the industry is only now finally conceding.
That line about looking for creative flourishes in a piece of art made by a human really sticks with me. Almost never do I look at or play a AAA game and think "this has charm", and in the rare times I do, I can't help but think about the 9-figure budget and insane crunch that went into it. Without those human flourishes we don't have interactive art, we have an expensive distraction.
PSA: Though it may seem like Bellular is spinning this story to make it seem like Naughty Dog and Ubisoft were knowledgeable or at the forefront of what happened at Brandoville, these reports weren't known until the studio shut down and really didn't pick up steam in the west due to it being one of many outsource studios these larger developers work with. Really at the end of the day Bellular is just guilt tripping these studios into making a public announcement addressing the situation but talking in a way in which he makes it seems like they caused the abuse. He was even consistent in this video as to calling The Last of Us Part 1 a remaster over and over again when it a remake and the remaster came out over ten years ago. Maybe it was cause some mental ease for the small amount of people who know of the situation (even more now do to his click baiting title).
This is a story that spans decades, starting in the VFX industry. Like mentioned in the video, studios (now game studios as well) simply started outsourcing that work to foreign countries instead of paying people what they're worth. They keep moderate teams in the US and Canada, where they can control their press releases and "take action" on issues that are easily seen by others, while at the same time, sticking their hand in the "black box" as is mentioned in the video to continue saving money through overseas labor. I'm not really sure what the solution here is, other than simply not buying their games and perhaps sending a letter/email to corporate headquarters stating such. The folks at the top HAVE to make more money. It's never enough money. It always has to be MORE. So they likely won't listen to anything unless it dramatically hurts their bottom-line. Perhaps what needs to be introduced is not-for-profit 3rd party body that ensures these businesses are treating all outsourced companies with respect and fair-wages? That however is a whole new can of worms in and of itself, though. This is a tough one.
That 'story' started way earlier in other industries. It started the moment the first business could outsource something to a country with cheaper labor cost etc. The textile industry, car, etc ... This is nothing new and the sad thing is nobody cares.
This isn't limited to South East Asia nor to the gaming industry. It's a global phenomenon that applies to all industries and is caused by Wall Street. Publicly traded companies need to keep improving their stocks to please their investors. It's their fiduciary duty to do so in fact. How they fulfil their fiduciary responsibilities isn't indicated anywhere, nor do any western courts care, all they care about is that said fiduciary duties are fulfilled. Therefore outsourcing anything and everything to countries without worker protections, worst living conditions, etc, is the natural course of action. It's modern slavery, plain and simple, and we(each and every one of us living in a western country) benefit from it on a daily basis. The goods we consume, from groceries to video games, are priced the way they are because somewhere along the chain there are people working in slavery like conditions to enable these prices. Goods that can't be outsourced(at least easily), like say produce(well they can but that's a whole other can of worms and thankfully has a lot of regulation and enforcement on it) are significantly more expensive than goods that can be, like say your shampoo. As long as money talks, which it always will in the foreseeable future, these sort of practices are only continue to grow. Even videos like this or various articles on the subject won't change anything. It will just kick the can further down the road so to speak. If it's not going to be Brandoville studios than it's going to be someone else. If it's not going to be in Indonesia than it's going to be somewhere else. As long as our own western cultures and governments value money over everything else, including human life mind you, than this isn't going to change. All that will change is the actors and locations involved, not the practices themselves.
I've seen this first hand with Keywords studios. I use to work in the Riot Games Player Support NA office for several years, and after our contract switched hands multiple times, it ended up with them. They were incompetent, rude, and had no idea what they were doing with our team. In the end it didn't matter though, as our support team was closed and farmed out to another country (I believe Manila). I'm glad to have left before then, but them and Riot Games will happily ruin lives to save a few dollars.
This is one of those issues we can trace directly back to the 1980s economic policies that have ultimately been maintained. Allowing wealth to concentrate to the very top of income earners to the point they can manipulate the market and squash innovation. It’s only a matter of time before every industry collapses because of these short sighted profiteering schemes
Future historians will study the Information Age Collapse the way historians today study the Bronze Age Collapse or the fall of the Western Roman Empire or even, more recently, the end of the Soviet Union. It is one of those odd inevitabilites of life that systems are cyclical...heck, it might just be baked into the codebase of Earth's programming if we look at things like the Permian extinction event or the asteroid that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs.
No, outsourcing is not "terrible" itself. That's a Compositional Fallacy. Abuse of employees is a non-sequitur to the question of for whom the work is being done. The issues listed in the video have more to do with the outsourced studio's internal labor practices (and laws of the nation they reside in). Also, it is not up to the employee to dictate what the value of the job they do is. That is up to the Free Market. To assume otherwise is the Fallacious Labor Theory of Value (which is flawed because, A. it is the customer purchasing the labor that determines what the value of that labor is to them, a worker who demands $5 million dollars to make mudpies all day isn't going to get anyone to buy their product/service at that rate; and B. laborers can *destroy* value and don't just create value, as observed by Robert A. Heinlein in Starship Troopers when one of his characters pointed out that an inexperienced chef can take the raw ingredients of an apple pie (which start out with some value of their own) and destroy it by burning the pie in the process of trying to create it.
@ problem is, it's not costing them less money. all those AAA companies use outsourced staff, and the prices aren't going down. cutting costs for more profit is all we've been hearing about.
@ yeah, just many things in themselves that aren't bad in theory, but in reality, they are. i've worked as an outsourced employee for two companies in the game industry, and now i work directly under a game company. the benefits, respect, and recognition i get for my work is way higher and better than when i was employed by outsourcing companies. worse yet, we are seeing companies that index outsourcing companies, making employees thrice removed from the actual product they're making. it's a nightmare and worse for employees, always.
@@GreyWolfLeaderTWyes, outsourcing IS terrible by itself. The whole reason why work is outsourced is to reduce costs, so, free market and all, now any contractor will bid below what the thing they have to make actually costs, and they compete. It's a race to the bottom and it's guaranteed to be a bad time for everyone involved. The kicker? quality also drops. Nobody wins.
The Issues ive seen over the last 20 years have been the following; - Outsourced companies, that are much smaller than AAA studios are expected to keep up with AAA work loads despite having smaller teams. - Crunch times introduced as a result of short term investment games over long term dividends. - Media circuit protecting poor working conditions from scrutiny. - products made a result of contempt for the customer rather than reverence (I.e the customer is always right, the majority) - Firing or allowing the resigning of veteran talent which HR let go too easily, causing the industry to sign up thousands of amateur developers who aren't ready for big projects. - Political discourse being used as a drive for product development. - Development cycles being mishandled and managed by far too many inadequate development managers. - Marketing teams being given too much of the budget and allowed to have a say in the direct of the product. - Marketing department marketing the product based on items that will not be in the games that are advertised forcing developers to course correct mid project. - HR not focusing on merit based hiring and instead politically charged hiring. - Live service programs being introduced at the expense of a quality product. - Games no longer being treated as a singular piece of work, instead treated as a long term project that should be a cash cow. - Releasing games far before they are ready and even when they are, they are not at the quality promised. These are just "some" of the problems the industry has had. It will get worse before it gets better but all of the listed problems need to be fixed if the industry is not to keel over and pass. P.s CEOs need to grow some stones and be willing to tell investors "No" because the integrity of the product and company must come first.
Writing software has a long history of crunch time. The real problem, whether it is games or something else, is the expectation that coders put in long hours without proper remuneration. The firing of workers to make profits look higher would not necessarily result in hiring amateurs. Those with experience have to go somewhere. Political discourse being used as a drive for product development has both a long history and is not inherently a problem. Not seeing games, films, books and so on as a singular piece of work is directly connected to excessively long copyrights. If it was suitably short no-one could milk work or characters they came up with in the past. This would be easily fixed if politicians weren't in the pay of wealthy vested interests. I doubt so-called politically charged hiring is an actual problem. Undue influence of "investors" is a widespread problem, not restricted to software companies. It coincides with the myth that companies have a duty to provide shareholders with short-term gains. A myth created and maintained by wealthy vested interests.
This is the reason i never take these studios seriously when they brag or lecture you about "being a decent human being" when they themselves will gladly turn around and hire the cheapest labor possible to finish the slop even they dont want to work on
Nothing will change, games journalists should call this stuff out, but they're definitely in the pockets of big publishers and have been for a long time.
Packaged goods are not, and never have been, video games. And yet, as far back as the early 2010s, that is where video game execs came from. What a surprise: the industry went the way of Minimum Viable Product. Make it as cheaply as you can and sell it for as much as you can. Staff are resources. Use them up and throw them out. Art is an asset. Quality is secondary to quantity. Reputation is all. Make everything suspicious or tawdry with a layer of plausible deniability and never, ever, admit ownership or guilt. Ubisoft. Naughty Dog. And all manner of publishers and developers are monsters. Yet, nobody cares. Nobody cared back then either. Let the staff suffer so a pretty game can be bought.
im from indonesia, i know that game dev or IT enginer in general doesnt get regarded as high skill worker like doctor or architect (i only see it in the salary which is bare minimum in some cases, like only 400$ a month, mind you its only in jakarta which highest minimum wage than other cities, imagine if you work at other small cities, it can get as low as 100$ a month) But man i dont expect the work condition worse than i imagine (im IT enginer too but works for other country companies, so work enviroment and salary way better than indonesia)
This has been an issue for decades and despite entering the zeitgeist every couple of years gamers continue supporting these companies. Not that this is unique to big developers. I have friends in the industry and I can assure you that these problems also exists at the smallest of studios.
Unfortunately, companies like Ubisoft and Naughty Dog are not the only companies that does greedy, and other things like this, the downfall of companies like Ubisoft and Naughty Dog will most likely not change anything for the gaming industry and other companies will probably become just as bad as those kinds of companies in the future. We all know that the gaming industry is broken but it is far more worse than most people think, and it would take years maybe even decades before it would fix itself
Naughty Dog isn't going through any downfall, tho. I need to watch the original video, tho, because didn't Sony have other studios working on Part 1 before giving it to new ND devs? I also wonder if this was after the Naughty Dog production changes.
@blackmanwithcomputer I know that Naughty Dog is not in the same problem as companies like Ubisoft and EA but if Naughty Dog ever has a concord level failure or something like that then nothing would change for the gaming industry, in fact Sony would probably double down on the horrible decisions than they have made
@Shadow-Joop-157 You say that, while it's constantly being reported that Sony is rolling back many of Jim Ryan's stupidity. Ultimately, all we can do is watch how things go for the rest of the decade. Pay for what looks good and don't pay for bad shit or potentially really unethical stuff.
When game companies started making games for excessive profit is when everything started being shit, i remember a time when a company would make a hit game that made them more money than they spent on making the game, and what they did was they reinvested that money into new titles or a second game for fans of the first game to enjoy. These days 99% of the money made from a hit AAA game, just goes straight out of the game development sphere and into some dickbags pockets, its really sad.
You think this is a video game thing? We (the rich countries) have been abusing of the workforce of poorer countries for generations. Ridiculous pay, children work, basic human rights neglected if not entirely discarded, and even downright slavery sometimes. This is nothing new. These practices reached the videogame industry as they did with many others before. Each time you hear "outsourcing", you should know to expect all of this.
The end result of globalisation is slave labour in poorer countries. It was known decades ago when manufacturers began outsourcing production. The whole reason China's industry is so huge is because they were willing to allow western countries to treat Chinese citizens badly with regards to health and saftey and wages, in order to gain a hold on production. Now we're doing it with computer software. Companies want unrealistic profits and they engage in human suffering to an extent that is basically slavery to get them. We don't really get a choice because most if not all of the companies are doing it and no one is holding them to account.
Exactly, it's an issue of current world economic systems. It's FAR bigger than the video game industry. It is EVERY industry everywhere in the world. There really isn't a solution.
I mean... Ubisoft was promoting a culture of sexual assault years ago and months later the gaming media forgot about it and was promoting their games again. I feel like you don't get to be suddenly incredulous about the abuse now.
This is all gonna be forgotten in the upcoming weeks. 100% guarantee it. An employee at Activision Blizzard went with suicide because of workplace harassment and I believe sexual harassment as well (been a while, but wasn't anything good) and there was an uproar, nothing was done I believe and then weeks gone by and everyone has forgotten about it and moved on as if she was a nobody and wasn't abused and never existed.
I do only care about the end product: a good game. But since the majority of the gaming industry is incapable of delivering that, I don't care about the industry either. Gaming stagnated 15 years ago. I haven't see any evolution in NPC scripting, or AI for almost 2 decades now. All the ray-tracing / lumen in the world, won't make a game fun to play. There is a reason why NPC's in GTA 4 were more believable than open-world games made over 15 years later, stagnation. Games are produced like sliced bread, or Cola's in a bottling factory, there are no real developers outside of indie games.
Have you seen the photo of the 2024 Ubisoft Dev employee team with them all crammed together and gathered in the hall for the photo? It explains a lot.
The funny thing about all this... is that it mirrors how the Soviet Union operated (nothing like an omnipotent government consolidating all economic output into itself, running it through government bureaucrats with zero knowledge of a given industry and using flawed metrics to measure productivity and success [Soviet bureaucrats for example enforced quota requirements for quantity of leather to use in shoes, the result being the shoe factories making shoes with the world's thickest soles, quite wasteful], and of course pretty nasty abuse of workers ala the KGB keeping guns to the backs of heads of workers to make them work [or showing up in the dead of night to drag you away to the gulag because a co-worker whispered to the local KGB informant that he saw you nod-off at your factory station]). In before all the "this is the evils of Capitalism and belief in private property at work!" Nice Compositional Fallacy there. Seeking the easiest way to make money and take advantage of other people is a universal human flaw. It is not unique to a given economic system. Of the economic systems that exist in the world, communism just let those flaws flourish the worst.
Dude it's imperialism, you are describing an imperialist system. Stuff like this is always imperialism. Exploiting far away lands for the benefit of the homeland exclusively.
Interesting parallels. Belgian chocolate gots it's reputation because Britain abolished Atlantic slavery first, overpricing Cadbury's etc relative to Belgian and Swiss competitors. Off- topic, but the people who cashed in on the Soviet collapse,took the money to London and invented modern off-shoring. The same people running USSR are now shareholders in multinationals.
That isn't an evil of capitalism. Its an evil of neo-liberalism. It's not just not doing anything about it, but outright ENCOURAGING IT. Why do you think "Deregulation" is just "Lets allow provably dangerous things just because it will allow companies to do things cheaper"? Its not just a fault of the system. It IS the system.
But this is capitalism and exactly a predictable outcome thereof. Of course the Soviet Union wasn't practicing communism either. The state owning everything and having absolute power makes that very clear.
We (or many of us) used to play games to get a break from their corporate jobs. Games made by creatives with visions and values. Now AAA game studios are basically the same as any other capitalistic coorporation that we wanted a break from to begin with. It all comes full circle, there's no end to the greed.
Outsourced crunch just gets worse and worse outsourcing studios are expected to deliver increasingly better work but yet have lower and lower prices because if not, the big studios will just look for whoever can do it for cheaper it's a race to the bottom and it's horrible
Eluding to it being the "West" as opposed to an industry issue is pathetic and smacks of a serious lack of logic. Unless of course, you're either delusional or one of the sort that think the "West" is evil and whatever backwater you hail from is some meca of virtue. Kindly point out the plethora of "Eastern" game studios above an indy level doing any different. It's well documented that poor conditions are rife in the industry world wide.
they've used the rainbow shield to deflect and distract the wider audience from stuff like this.. and the useful idiots defended these large studios.. for what?
I am thankful we have channels like this. There is so much fluff and nonsense in media that it's difficult to see what's actually happening. It feels bad to learn the truth sometimes, but it will help us improve.
I had a friend that was the producer for Scribblenauts. The art was outsourced because of the size of the team was to small to do it. He said it was really difficult because the quality was bad, wrong, or plagiarized. Not helped by language barriers for a game like that. It definitely would have been easier to have done it in house or at least not out of country.
I always love the analogy that Managers (in any company) think changing something in the real world is like moving a bus depot in cities skylines. Click, Delete, Click build.
i worked for years for a company that did the QA for electronic arts games, we were based in south america. our pay was less than what a mcdonalds cashier makes, the contract was written in a way to skirt local laws, so technically it was 7.5 hours + 1 mandatory unpaid lunch hour in the middle, knowing most people would just work most of that unpaid hour, it was worded that way to classify us as "part time workers", since if we had an 8hour contract we would be protected by full time employee laws and earn significantly more. most of us were on chained temp contracts for 3 months, some times for years, this was to keep people in line, if you complain they would just not renew your contract, which is technically not "firing" you so no extra payment would need to be dished out and you were also not protected by unlawful firing law protection so you couldnt sue them. it was a meat grinder. that shit company is now the biggest tech company in my country and even has government contracts. so treating employees like fodder actually works. that's what people learn from this. and the games we made while being abused? mass effect 2, sims 3, dragon age games, dead space, alice madness returns, we did our work and did it right despite never earning a single cent of a bonus for our success. abusing workers in third world countries works. that's the the reality of the games industry.
wait, you mean there isn't unlimited profit potential available in a non-infinite market? but oh woe is me, how will the investment firms make more profits this quarter!? THE HUMANITY!
Worker exploitation is unfortunately a common part of the supply chains for developed countries. Just look at the horrors that come from shipping something as simple as bananas to the US. However, I didn't expect it was happening to this degree with video games published by Western companies. Deplorable.
This is hilarious. Conflating independent artists with commercial artists. Commercial artists are not artists in the lay sense. They are laborers that make what is requested of them. Key word: laborers. Are you really hand wringing over the types of people that design pizza boxes?
I actually worked for some of the studios you mentioned from Manila and yeah everything here is spot on. We basically have no choice if we move to the other contending studios because the low rates are all the same across the board yet the work load is as heavy as the western counterparts. And then if we go freelance, we avoid picking Philippines as our location of residency because if a client sees you are based in PH, they will low ball you or not give you the actual running rate for outsourcing in Asia regardless how good your portfolio is.
RUclips censors almost anything for whatever reason. My comments get constantly censored for the most inane and incomprehensible things in completely innocuous context. This word for example 💀
outsourcing art to other cultures is tricky, I find no matter how skilled an american artist is, if they try anime, it looks off usually. culture matters
If you all let me be a bit pessimistic for a moment, sadly stories like this being told to people like me, those interested in the "actual" Games Industry, are all the same story with different words. We all know how and why the Industry sucks so much right now, which it does. I wish the was a way to get the, what I call, Main Stream Gamers, those who don't often look at the Games Industry past what game is coming next. Sadly, without that, nothing will change. We, who watch videos like this, are in the vast minority of people who play games. And so are most of the people/places we'd share these videos with.
Orwell: "If there is hope, it lies in the proles." O'Brien points out the utter absurdity of that particular line of thinking to Winston later in the book by way of explaining why the Party doesn't fear the proletariat rising up. As long as they're pacified, they're able to be exploited. Sound familiar?
As a kid, I used to have dreams of working in the AAA games industry. I'm glad I abandoned those dreams long ago.
I just wanna be the idea guy for the studio
@@CyberSquatch773 There's a lot of different idea guys, writers, designers, producers, developers and on and on. Find a niche and get good at it, for me it's writing.
It's certainly changed. The AA studios and indie devs are much more akin to how AAA devs were back when I was a kid in every aspect.
You can just make your own games with Epic these days! It's totally free until you make literal millions of dollars.
@@CyberSquatch773 start by publishing games yourself. good games, that is. show you can be a good project lead.
imagine my unfathomable shock when the AAA studio that grandstands on morality and empathy actually treats people like shit
Reset the clock 😂
You mean Naughty Dog, the people who made a game where you play as an IDF stand in murdering Palestinians stand ins? The studio where the lead director directly participated in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinans during his military service? Color me shocked
@@ArcAngle1117 Yeah but he likes the rainbows so it's fine dude.
@@ArcAngle1117 dude that has nothing to do with this at all; y'all really like to take topics and steer them in totally unrelated directions
@@ArcAngle1117 least lying and most sane arab
As the larian head of publishing puts it "On a pirate ship, they'd toss the captain overboard"
If only we still could 😔
@@Duutch Captain's on pirate vessels are elected and are wholly held accountable by their crew.
On pirate ships bad captains get Mutinied by the crew too.😂
@@bengalbrown2834 That's the point. Current captains do not have that type of cautionary incentive anymore. They can fuck up without consequence.
@@Konradius001 and the person you are responding to is pointing out that a CEO or director is not elected nor held accountable by their "crew".
I'm Indian and a 3d animator. Trust me i have seen how bad the work conditions are at the "outsourcing studios".
Which is why its so funny to me how the western games media that does so much virtue signaling and activism ignores stories like these where actual real harm is being on a large scale by corporations. Most of these "journalists" in the west are anti capitalists who say they hate big corporations and yet they refused to talk about stories like these.
I take it back, its not funny. Its sad, pathetic and hypocritical. I am glad you guys covered it and for the original reporting by people make games.
They say they are anti capitalists while being the biggest corporate bootlickers around. You'd be right about it being pathetic, but this kind of behavior does not deserve even pity, only condemnation
The west's virtue signaling is only to make themselves feel better, never forget that.
I do hope the working conditions for you and every other person in these outsourcing studios gets better.
If it's any consolation anyone informed knows these companies are all liars, it's only normies and leftists that fall for the virtue signalling. The good thing is though even the normies are clicking onto everything and they pay attention to what informed gamers are saying about these studios and the staff in particular. This goes back to rants I regularly have about their workflow and I am very eager to get any details I can on these companies if only to point and laugh at them and have my prejudices confirmed. It's not that these studios won't fix them, it's they can't.
It's looking like that they hire the blue hair leftists in order to do all their marketing work and pay them very well to keep them happy and shilling for the brand while they attack the real fanbase and then outsource to third world labour who do the real dev work in the background. This also explains a good deal about why there are so few patches after release and nothing ever gets fixed or changed.
I am somebody who does programming and 3D art and I am salivating at the idea of all these studios going bankrupt and I hope there are plenty of disgruntled employees making recordings and notes of the kind of workflow they've got going.
The Western gaming industry is full of hypocrisy. Outsourced studios have terrible conditions while the Western studios pat themselves on the back for being progressive and having "diversity". As a non white, they don't bother putting males like in their games. It's a grotesque industry.
I wish I could tag unifadewalker in this.
Triple A gaming can't collapse fast enough
It can
@@True-Sea-Turtle it already has these past few years. If you're expecting it to be worse, it's not.
@@heavyartillery-qm5hu It is just the western that needs to colapse, Japan is doing fine with Fromsoft, Capcom and nintendo. Recently even Korea with Stellar Blade and then China with Black Myth
@@alsozoso i think he meant that ppl for some reason keep buying these games, keeping their companies alive a little longer
How are you in every comments section? 😂
Forget outsourcing, that's way too expensive. Just think of how much cheaper games would be if we had slavery.
The race to the bottom takes place in a septic tank.
“We can’t get rid of labor exploitation. It would crash the economy!” ~Journalists, probably
Executives always need more money for some reason. Can't make good games without a private jet it seems.
@@Spectacular_Insanity I believe that’s one of the “arguments” for keeping illegal immigrants in USA
@@Spectacular_Insanity thats literally what the democrats argued back in the day when republicans tried to end slavery around the time of hte civil war.
But who would pick the cotton!
slaves arent skill labor. they dig ditches, not build houses
It's worth noting that outsourcing to Indonesians who are then abused is a massive issue for Tech as a whole. It needs to be addresseed at a much wider level than just videogames
Years back when I worked at call centers and ended up helping to train the people overseas who would end up replacing me and my coworkers, I watched one of the Philippines agents get actually slapped for speaking their native language while on break by a manager. I can only imagine how badly others get treated that they get away with that would get lawsuits stateside.
@@Eltener123 It's a global thing and not limited to Indonesia. The good news is that it won't be long before AI will take over those jobs. The bad news is we won't know what humans will do to earn money, yet.
@@MyAnalyser Why would we even need money at that point? If AI is able to automate everything, money becomes nothing more than a means to power. As if it isn't basically that already lol
@@krytenfivetwothreep2485 yeah in a perfect world profits from ai will be used to sustain people thru universal basic income. In our world tho some billionaire will buy his 9th yacht and fired employees will starve
yep its a massive issue for American industry overall, especially tech though.
This kind of decline seems inevitable for all publicly traded companies these days. Everyone has a short-term mentality of stock price must go up.
It guarantees your studio is on life support, but muh infinite growth
A random investor doesn't care about long term sustainability when a new get rich quick scheme happens on practically a monthly basis. They will pull out on a moment's notice and leave the company scrambling to stay afloat.
Hello, I'm kind of Indonesian myself. The CEO had worked as EA employee before he made Brandoville. It's everything that you need to know
My dear sibling, please explain to me how you can be "kind of" Indonesian. I beg you. 😂
@@kombatwombat6579 he’s 0.25 percent Indonesian so he gets the struggle trust
@@kombatwombat6579 He’s hiding the fact he’s Malaysian /j
@YOOT_JJ LOL. I didn't know there was beef there. Is it?
@@kombatwombat6579 why did you ask if there is a beef here? don't you know how to use search engine? You should work at EA. Almost all of EA game developer don't know how to use google search image nor google earth
I worked for Ubisoft in Serbia (around 2014/2015), worst job I ever worked.
I guess Serbia have some worker protection, but still their policies were still terrible.
Like promissing full salary (plus pension) payments as soon they open full studio. But when they openned studio they said, now you need to wait 3 years to get full pension payments.
Wow
My friend worked at Ubisoft Bulgaria at the same time. And it was also the worst experience in her life.
what hell.... :/
I know there a Ubisoft in Viet Nam . Wonder what happened over there ?
Ubisoft isn't all that good to work at, although in the recent years they got better (after the Black Flag fiasco, at least in Bulgaria). In Bulgaria officially and legally people are not allowed to crunch. We have laws regarding maximum overtime people could work, as well as the pay for it. People who worked on Black Flag and did overtime were paid adequately, but their overtime pay was subtracted from the bonus they got for shipping the game. As far as I know, that only happened with Black Flag and none of the games the studio worked on after that, and apparently it got a lot better. Not sure how it is now - my friends that work there aren't complaining, apparently salaries have gotten better, but with their financial situation I'm not sure the studio here will last.
So THIS is why the credits to a Naughty Dog game is an hour and a half long!
But seriously, this is terrible.
Same with Cyberpunk...
Two hours long but Alanah Pearce is not there 😂 o no wait, she is there, as an accessibility consultant.
@@christianlacroix4 focus up on the real issues here.
Oof. Hahahaha.
Now how many people didn't make it into the credits?
How many of us are really surprised?
Someone always takes the hit when it comes to large corporations.
And its not the big guys.
Indie games made in countries not traditionally associated with game development like Czechia, Poland, China, and others: Wonderful, a sign that games have gone truly global.
AAA games made with cheap labor like just another exploitation-powered cheap, shoddy consumer product: Far less so.
@@SimuLord remember how both miside and atomic heart are made in russia?
I am still murderously angry that i cant just bring tiny mita with me, god damnit
I might be misunderstanding, but are you claiming Poland isn't associated with video game making?
He's saying that it's good that games are coming from other nations such as Poland and China (though I have plenty of misgivings about China!)
@@premc8071 Not traditionally in the classic "US and Japan make everything" sense. Other than CDPR, you never really heard about games from Poland until very recently.
@@SimuLord depends on meaning of your words " you never really heard about games from Poland until very recently" bc there are some games that could be popular and not recent like Frostpunk from 11 bit studios or dying light from techland and sure there are some less known games like This war of mine ( but it sure was heated about war and those situations when it was published) or green hell. Those games arent strictly associated with poland but they sure are from there
honestly at this point im boycotting modern games. I've installed over 3TB of half life and half life 2 related content. I dont need modern games
Radical idea, make your own game, you can't possibly do worse than AAA devs, a big part of why they're so bad is these people hate their jobs.
@@lethn2929 it's alot of work but i've been trying to do it. Making your own game is unsurprisingly really hard, and will likely take me years until i get something working lol. But at this rate, anything is better than what these companies churn out.
I just boycott most AAAs they make creatively bankrupt garbage anyway. Most indies are far better.
MiSide. Built by 2 dudes, quality on par with DDLC
@@Crablover132 I disagree, games developers and their journalist hacks have fooled you and everyone else into thinking it's hard, depending on the genre it's not difficult at all with modern software, don't get me wrong, it's not the 'easiest' thing in the world, but it's entirely possible. I wouldn't advise for example doing a simulation game or RTS for your first game because that takes a lot of code lol.
Never forget, Notch made Minecraft while he was working part time in an office.
In the 1990's Nike was making Jordan's with less than 7 cents in labor where workers were literally beaten with sticks. People still bought Jordans.
'I wanna be like Mike' is what people remember.
Yep and it's still true
Brandoville case actually blew up pretty spectacularly here in Indonesia, everybody was talking about it for weeks. I have a few friends who are quite close with Christa (one of the victims) and the level of abuse she received were absolutely horrifying. Worst part is, the mf who abused her (Cherry Lai, the owner) isn't actually Indonesian herself but came from Hong Kong and she managed to fled the country. What a POS.
@@echadit hold on, I've just heard about these. What should I search to get these information.
@@5violin533 start with Google. Try various key words & phrases in the search box. this basic, I know, but it is a start. Good luck
I’m more than confident that you could tell your yearly Cod/2K/Madden consumer that they can only get to have their games if we regularly sacrificed children, kittens and puppies to a giant blender and they’d just shrug and say it’s not their problem unless their favorite streamer or sports player tells them it’s a o problem.
They'd buy the deluxe edition if it included NFT portraits of the victims.
They have got to be the most dim-witted gamers in the history of video games. Annually the same game with minor iterations and tons of exploitive microtransactions.
Just like in warhammer 40k. I little sacrifice for the emperor
Make no mistake though, you see this kind of willfully-blind consumerism in many spaces and it didn't happen by accident. People have been deliberately made to feel so bad about their own, immediate circumstances that they haven't the mental capacity to truly care about anything else, and they retreat into escapism and consumerism to cope. Everyone knows we're screwed and no one has the energy to do anything about it.
The industry really is killing itself
Industry is fine thenrot is just AAA.
@@vonfaustien3957Space Marine 2, Elden Ring, Astrobot, Baldur's Gate, Yakuza 8 are all triple A. Stop thinking the "industry" is just one building
Yeah, Indie devs will keep video games from dying
Greedy corpos and facilitating governments. Tying subsidiary companies to their parent/employer companies and mandating the work conditions and pay must be on par with American labor laws would eliminate this cheap labor market.
Yup, it's time to normalise AAAA solo action adventure games for all developers
Ubisoft, Naughty Dog, Activison, EA... All the same
It's not just the big guys...
Naughty dog changed though, around 2020 they had a huge studio change to combat crunch.
💀
Not the same. Ubisoft is worse.
They are french
You're supposed to type different names
We didn't address the crunch culture. We just moved it somewhere else. Yet another reason why indie is the better alternative.
I mean indianna jones can be a pretty good alternative to other things, but i'd say it's a little niche at this point.
You think crunching doesn't exist in indie development?
This has been permeating every industry and every market for decades. i feel like every service i use or interact with has gotten qualitatively worse since i was younger. sure they have fancy new tools, and optimizations, but everything is more expensive the people often get paid less, and do more work, and have less downtime. everything just seems miserable. we are l living in cyberpunk dystopia already. they just didnt bother to give us the cool metal arms and head computers. why waste the money on us cattle?
Unpoppular oppinion. Crunch culture was what made games good. To make good games, you need the kind of passionate enough people who would push past the crunch and enjoy doing it. People without that passion won't be able to make good enough games, and while the passionate people doesn't need the crunch to be passionate, the crunch is the perfect filter to make sure the unsuited people doesn't go into game dev.
@@Niyucuatro agreed, people are treating art as an office job because you use a pc to do it. A game developer has vast knowledge on maths, programming, 3d spaces etc. a different job in IT isn't incompatible, if you don't want crunch.
Just proves the point AAA got too big, has far too many career CEOs that know nothing of creativity who have pushed out truly creative minds. To be honest it's reminding me of how Atari almost killed off gaming in the US with the same bs mentality back in the 80s! Funnily enough just like in the 80s it's the Eastern devs that are pushing the medium forwards again and tbh I think they're going to save the industry and probably rule it again until the western AAA publishers get their acts together... or collapse!
All that is old is new again. Investors will decide that the returns don't justify the huge risks in gaming, they'll pull their money out, the industry will collapse, and then Nintendo will release a Mario game and save video games.
We just ignoring Square and Capcom doing the same crap as western studios and also failing them so we can pretend Japan isn't as bad off? Alright than
We'll see if they do save it again. They're already censoring old animes and credit card companies dont want you buying manga so to me it seems like the western bs is infecting them too.
@@SimuLord Nintendo saving video games. You mean the Nintendo who sued palworld for petty reasons? Nintendo who hasn't innovated in decades and has basically pumped out the same game since their existence? The same Nintendo who fights fan events aggressively? Nintendo who goes after fan projects with their mob of lawyers?
@@grendelbiter303 Could you please explain to me how Nintendo has just been releasing "the same game" to me?
This is the exact thing that happened to Hollywood. I have a lot of friends that used to work at Disney, Pixar in animation Etc and it's all gone, they work for foreign studios making pennies now.
The same for the QA departments too. I work at a UK based games QA company. It's slowly doing each year less projects, always being told we charge too much. Were paid minimum wage as testers they just can't complete with the companies in poorer countries
Get out while you can put your qa experience to use in a real it company and get paid what you’re worth
Yeah... who needs testing anyway. Isn't that why they're suckering all of us to buy early release games (at full price!) so they can get buy with large sections of product testing ? Just have your user's test em!
I wish UK companies would learn to compete on service instead of price. They'll never win a price war with poor countries with no employee protections, so why even try? Every services company I deal with now wants a premium to deliver a substantially worse service than they used to and it's always because there's a new corporate overlord managing the purse strings. I can only guess what QA is like, but if it's anything like vulnerability scanning actually having a knowledgable employee to triage bugs for me would be a godsend instead of me having to manually deal with hundreds of low quality reports and arguing with worse-than-chatgpt "support" personnel who need to get rid of me so I stop messing up their metrics.
I’m also in QA. The McDs across the street now pays more per hour than what our company offers :/
@@youngwt1 oh I'm actively applying haha
It gets even crazier when you start looking into ghost developers.
I agree, the living dead are a substantial problem in the gaming industry.
What is this? I couldn’t find any videos on it
the real ghost developers are the studios having to call their sernior White developers back to finish the mess of a game the diversity hires cannot put together.
Guessing it's something like ghost writers. I'd give them the benefit of the doubt given how terrible the industry seems now, but vague doomposting is kind of an annoying trend on social media lol
@@OhsoLosooit's similar to ghost writer basically, they agree to remain anon so that the publisher take all the credits basically
The reason they didn't talk or say anything is that people do not care, just as they don't care about how well janitors or other low paying jobs are treated, people don't even care about the devs of the main studio we see daily people supporting crunch in studios like rockstar because if crunch is needed to have games like GTA V and RDR2 than people will even support that, support and outsourcing studios are invisible
Whenever game developers become publicly traded, the curse begins. As a public company, they are expected to grow profit. To do so, they either have to grow revenue or cut cost. Doing both at the same time is extremely hard and not realistic for the games industry.
So these companies often resorted to cutting cost, since it’s an easy way to please the stock market. After they’ve cut costs for a while, they lost the infrastructure and talents to make good games. Ubisoft and EA have been good examples of this.
When you sell public shares, you sell your soul.
Also, the market is heavily saturated/there are not many new users to go after.
Thus, there’s a need to further monetise their existing user base to continue meeting shareholder and market expectations.
Like every maturing industry, gaming is seeing a shift in priorities.
From Product > Workers' profit > Company's profit > Shareholders' profit > Personal profit
to Personal profit > Shareholders' profit > Company's profit > Product > Workers' Profit
Making money is no longer a mean to make more games, making games is now a means to make money, it could be anything else really.
"We are deeply disturbed by the continued backlash we're receiving as we are unable to understand why we are receiving it." ~ Ubisoft whenever they fuck up
This is what happens when you keep hiring CEOs that don’t know what they’re selling
The problem isn't that game company CEOs don't know what they are selling, it is that they are selling increasing stock prices and dividends to investors, not games. The Games are just the means, not the ends.
@@fleetadmiraljThis is true for every single company. The objective of a corporation is to maximize shareholder value. This is the first lesson of business school.
They’re doing an exceptionally poor job of it though. The elasticity of game demand is wildly variable. A game like Skull and Bones failed because there was no established audience.
Whereas CoD can make 3 trash games in a row because there is an established base that always buys. This isn’t infinity exploitative, we’ve seen big franchises die too.
@@fleetadmiralj this is true, but I think its failing now for the games industry because they forgot that theyre supposed to make state of the art high quality experiences
It is funny to see Neil has so many opinions on other things but has no opinions on this.
Neil Hackman
@@mlgesus8362 Thanks for the correction.
@@mlgesus8362 Neil MyWife'sBoyfriendSaysMan is his real name
Wow, this was mature and sane. Congrats!
Lets be real, the only reason Ubisoft came out with a limp empty apology and Naughty Dog didn't is because one studio is coming out with a major game very soon and the other isn't
@@FredericoASousa I think it's more Ubisoft currently being the most popular joke in the industry so they have to talk about it for their PR while nobody cares about naughty dogs because people like their shallow movie games
I'll repeat this until I die: ART CAN'T BE MADE FOR PROFIT. Video Games are every single human endeavor rolled up into an interactive story. It's every Art. It's the culmination of Human creativity. It deserves more respect than this, and the people making it deserve to be treated WAY WAY better than this.
What’s even more frustrating is that the core team devs always refused and tried to push back against working with outsourcing teams based in low cost countries. But in the end, the executives won (as always).
gaming really went down the toilet when grubby ceos realized they could make loadsa money from it.
So it always sucked lol?
Nah, you can still make lots of money with games without absolutely screwing things up. All you gotta do is trust your dev team knows their audience and give them enough time to finish the damn games.
Sacrificing quality for short term gain always leads to this result.
So after the first game was made?
@@SwagAddict88 guess you didn't play games in the 90' and 00'
@@sparking023 CEO types will ruin everything. Every product imaginable has been taken over and ruined by big corpos and money men. Even most governments simp for and are almost entirely controlled by big business.
Naughty Dog being a bunch of shits?
Let me schedule 30 seconds a week from Friday to spend clutching my pearls and lightly gasping in shock.
facts
This is just the end result of studios being owned by corporations, because in the end the 1 incontrovertible law of corporations is:
" *LINE MUST GO UP* "
The only studio you can trust is one privately owned.
The exploitation of marginalized countries has long been a fundamental aspect of global capitalism, and the United States is no exception. Industries such as manufacturing and the cruise sector thrive on low wages and poor working conditions in developing nations, all to meet the American demand for affordability, convenience, and quality.
Consumer expectations play a significant role in sustaining this cycle. In the gaming industry, for example, people demand quick releases while simultaneously criticizing the final product. This pressure leads to exploitative labor conditions, particularly in countries where regulations are weak, and workers have little bargaining power.
Exploitation has been a persistent part of human history, but meaningful change requires a shift in consumption habits. When aesthetic concerns-such as the design of a digital character-take precedence over the well-being of the people creating them, ethical issues are overlooked. Until consumers prioritize fair labor practices over convenience and cost, the cycle of exploitation will persist.
If you deliver subpar quality you get subpar sales.
You are correct in saying that there is no benefit to lessening competition, but with games there's always the option of not buying them. Something AAA has been discovering recently as well.
Triple-a can self destruct. Support small studios and individuals who have a passion for their work.
This is what happens when Profits takes priority over Morals and Empathy.
This sounds more like neither maybe look up some definitions?
@Anonihmus2567 sweatshops = more Profit then Ethical factory standards.
@@Anonihmus2567 I think it's best worded in terms of "This is what happens when profits and cost cutting leads to questionable moral and empathetic decisionmaking by the higher ups". In this case, their greed in chasing profits for as little cost as possible led to them resorting to basically modern day slavery, which itself is immoral.
A moral person doesn't treat a person like a slave... The problem is these soulless AAA mega corps doing business with companies operating in 3rd world sh-t hole countries who basically have slave labour. Would be nice for western governments to legislate against this sort of thing, but gamers can also do something. Don't buy AAA garbage products, they will eventually go bankrupt.
Also the cost of wanting to keep game prices at under $60. You HAVE to go where cheap labor is to keep the games remotely profitable. There is bloat, and could cut team sizes down. But lets not pretend that cost of creating something in the US is the same cost as creating something in Indonesia.
Honestly my backlog is so large that I really don’t need to keep up with the new releases.
Michael this was one of your best videos yet. It managed to draw up the big picture, show us where so much of it goes wrong and why all of us should care, even it is for different reasons. I also liked your way with words (varied and descriptive, very few repetitions) in this one, nicely done.
Screw AAA, seriously. And these rotten companies that truly reached the 'mainstream' levels of awfulness.
I have IDK 1500 steam games and I am not sure I buy one AAA title a year, probably less.
You don’t have to buy this slop. Plenty of interesting people and projects to support.
We already knew Naught Dog was toxic from the way they handled TLoU2.
@@sardonicspartan9343 last of us two is probably one of the best games ever.
@PavelKrupets In technical execution it is one of the best games ever. However, they created a product that did not align with their fanbase and customer base. That's just terrible business and implies management incompetence. Their response to backlash was also not very good. They need to shape up for the next product or its going nowhere fast.
@PavelKrupets if you have bad taste, that is
@PavelKrupets you wouldn’t know taste if it hit you on the tongue
@@Leeeeegionnot to mention Neil Duckman booted the writer off of the franchise who happens to be a woman and claims he supports women rights and DEI 😂
Remember guys these are the exact same people who try to preach to us day in and out.
Hypocrisy has become a business model in modern day corporations.
Their politics are of the opposite spectrum, but no one wants to talk about that...
I stopped expecting game companies to run sustainable business that delivered quality products made by adequately compensated developers when live services got popular, I knew it would burn out eventually as it has, but there was no way to convince people it would happen until it did. Now that reality is setting in and the ceaseless toxic positivity is quieting down, it’ll be more popular to complain about the things I’ve always known to be problems that the industry is only now finally conceding.
That line about looking for creative flourishes in a piece of art made by a human really sticks with me. Almost never do I look at or play a AAA game and think "this has charm", and in the rare times I do, I can't help but think about the 9-figure budget and insane crunch that went into it. Without those human flourishes we don't have interactive art, we have an expensive distraction.
PSA: Though it may seem like Bellular is spinning this story to make it seem like Naughty Dog and Ubisoft were knowledgeable or at the forefront of what happened at Brandoville, these reports weren't known until the studio shut down and really didn't pick up steam in the west due to it being one of many outsource studios these larger developers work with. Really at the end of the day Bellular is just guilt tripping these studios into making a public announcement addressing the situation but talking in a way in which he makes it seems like they caused the abuse. He was even consistent in this video as to calling The Last of Us Part 1 a remaster over and over again when it a remake and the remaster came out over ten years ago. Maybe it was cause some mental ease for the small amount of people who know of the situation (even more now do to his click baiting title).
This is a story that spans decades, starting in the VFX industry. Like mentioned in the video, studios (now game studios as well) simply started outsourcing that work to foreign countries instead of paying people what they're worth. They keep moderate teams in the US and Canada, where they can control their press releases and "take action" on issues that are easily seen by others, while at the same time, sticking their hand in the "black box" as is mentioned in the video to continue saving money through overseas labor. I'm not really sure what the solution here is, other than simply not buying their games and perhaps sending a letter/email to corporate headquarters stating such. The folks at the top HAVE to make more money. It's never enough money. It always has to be MORE. So they likely won't listen to anything unless it dramatically hurts their bottom-line. Perhaps what needs to be introduced is not-for-profit 3rd party body that ensures these businesses are treating all outsourced companies with respect and fair-wages? That however is a whole new can of worms in and of itself, though. This is a tough one.
That 'story' started way earlier in other industries. It started the moment the first business could outsource something to a country with cheaper labor cost etc. The textile industry, car, etc ... This is nothing new and the sad thing is nobody cares.
This isn't limited to South East Asia nor to the gaming industry. It's a global phenomenon that applies to all industries and is caused by Wall Street. Publicly traded companies need to keep improving their stocks to please their investors. It's their fiduciary duty to do so in fact. How they fulfil their fiduciary responsibilities isn't indicated anywhere, nor do any western courts care, all they care about is that said fiduciary duties are fulfilled. Therefore outsourcing anything and everything to countries without worker protections, worst living conditions, etc, is the natural course of action. It's modern slavery, plain and simple, and we(each and every one of us living in a western country) benefit from it on a daily basis. The goods we consume, from groceries to video games, are priced the way they are because somewhere along the chain there are people working in slavery like conditions to enable these prices. Goods that can't be outsourced(at least easily), like say produce(well they can but that's a whole other can of worms and thankfully has a lot of regulation and enforcement on it) are significantly more expensive than goods that can be, like say your shampoo.
As long as money talks, which it always will in the foreseeable future, these sort of practices are only continue to grow. Even videos like this or various articles on the subject won't change anything. It will just kick the can further down the road so to speak. If it's not going to be Brandoville studios than it's going to be someone else. If it's not going to be in Indonesia than it's going to be somewhere else. As long as our own western cultures and governments value money over everything else, including human life mind you, than this isn't going to change. All that will change is the actors and locations involved, not the practices themselves.
"Triple A's that we have purchased and played" yeah that wasn't me chief
I've seen this first hand with Keywords studios. I use to work in the Riot Games Player Support NA office for several years, and after our contract switched hands multiple times, it ended up with them. They were incompetent, rude, and had no idea what they were doing with our team. In the end it didn't matter though, as our support team was closed and farmed out to another country (I believe Manila). I'm glad to have left before then, but them and Riot Games will happily ruin lives to save a few dollars.
This is one of those issues we can trace directly back to the 1980s economic policies that have ultimately been maintained. Allowing wealth to concentrate to the very top of income earners to the point they can manipulate the market and squash innovation. It’s only a matter of time before every industry collapses because of these short sighted profiteering schemes
Future historians will study the Information Age Collapse the way historians today study the Bronze Age Collapse or the fall of the Western Roman Empire or even, more recently, the end of the Soviet Union. It is one of those odd inevitabilites of life that systems are cyclical...heck, it might just be baked into the codebase of Earth's programming if we look at things like the Permian extinction event or the asteroid that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs.
outsourcing is terrible. it is never a win for the employee, you can be sure of that
No, outsourcing is not "terrible" itself. That's a Compositional Fallacy. Abuse of employees is a non-sequitur to the question of for whom the work is being done.
The issues listed in the video have more to do with the outsourced studio's internal labor practices (and laws of the nation they reside in).
Also, it is not up to the employee to dictate what the value of the job they do is. That is up to the Free Market. To assume otherwise is the Fallacious Labor Theory of Value (which is flawed because, A. it is the customer purchasing the labor that determines what the value of that labor is to them, a worker who demands $5 million dollars to make mudpies all day isn't going to get anyone to buy their product/service at that rate; and B. laborers can *destroy* value and don't just create value, as observed by Robert A. Heinlein in Starship Troopers when one of his characters pointed out that an inexperienced chef can take the raw ingredients of an apple pie (which start out with some value of their own) and destroy it by burning the pie in the process of trying to create it.
99% of consumers don't care if it costs them less money
@ problem is, it's not costing them less money. all those AAA companies use outsourced staff, and the prices aren't going down. cutting costs for more profit is all we've been hearing about.
@ yeah, just many things in themselves that aren't bad in theory, but in reality, they are. i've worked as an outsourced employee for two companies in the game industry, and now i work directly under a game company. the benefits, respect, and recognition i get for my work is way higher and better than when i was employed by outsourcing companies. worse yet, we are seeing companies that index outsourcing companies, making employees thrice removed from the actual product they're making. it's a nightmare and worse for employees, always.
@@GreyWolfLeaderTWyes, outsourcing IS terrible by itself. The whole reason why work is outsourced is to reduce costs, so, free market and all, now any contractor will bid below what the thing they have to make actually costs, and they compete. It's a race to the bottom and it's guaranteed to be a bad time for everyone involved.
The kicker? quality also drops.
Nobody wins.
Thank you for covering this, I have been talking about this for 5 years at least.
The Issues ive seen over the last 20 years have been the following;
- Outsourced companies, that are much smaller than AAA studios are expected to keep up with AAA work loads despite having smaller teams.
- Crunch times introduced as a result of short term investment games over long term dividends.
- Media circuit protecting poor working conditions from scrutiny.
- products made a result of contempt for the customer rather than reverence (I.e the customer is always right, the majority)
- Firing or allowing the resigning of veteran talent which HR let go too easily, causing the industry to sign up thousands of amateur developers who aren't ready for big projects.
- Political discourse being used as a drive for product development.
- Development cycles being mishandled and managed by far too many inadequate development managers.
- Marketing teams being given too much of the budget and allowed to have a say in the direct of the product.
- Marketing department marketing the product based on items that will not be in the games that are advertised forcing developers to course correct mid project.
- HR not focusing on merit based hiring and instead politically charged hiring.
- Live service programs being introduced at the expense of a quality product.
- Games no longer being treated as a singular piece of work, instead treated as a long term project that should be a cash cow.
- Releasing games far before they are ready and even when they are, they are not at the quality promised.
These are just "some" of the problems the industry has had. It will get worse before it gets better but all of the listed problems need to be fixed if the industry is not to keel over and pass.
P.s CEOs need to grow some stones and be willing to tell investors "No" because the integrity of the product and company must come first.
Writing software has a long history of crunch time. The real problem, whether it is games or something else, is the expectation that coders put in long hours without proper remuneration.
The firing of workers to make profits look higher would not necessarily result in hiring amateurs. Those with experience have to go somewhere.
Political discourse being used as a drive for product development has both a long history and is not inherently a problem.
Not seeing games, films, books and so on as a singular piece of work is directly connected to excessively long copyrights. If it was suitably short no-one could milk work or characters they came up with in the past. This would be easily fixed if politicians weren't in the pay of wealthy vested interests.
I doubt so-called politically charged hiring is an actual problem.
Undue influence of "investors" is a widespread problem, not restricted to software companies. It coincides with the myth that companies have a duty to provide shareholders with short-term gains. A myth created and maintained by wealthy vested interests.
This is the reason i never take these studios seriously when they brag or lecture you about "being a decent human being" when they themselves will gladly turn around and hire the cheapest labor possible to finish the slop even they dont want to work on
Nothing will change, games journalists should call this stuff out, but they're definitely in the pockets of big publishers and have been for a long time.
wtf this the first time i heard abt an indonesian-based company got involved! im surprised cus im an indo meself and didnt hear anything abt this!!!
Packaged goods are not, and never have been, video games. And yet, as far back as the early 2010s, that is where video game execs came from. What a surprise: the industry went the way of Minimum Viable Product. Make it as cheaply as you can and sell it for as much as you can.
Staff are resources. Use them up and throw them out. Art is an asset. Quality is secondary to quantity. Reputation is all. Make everything suspicious or tawdry with a layer of plausible deniability and never, ever, admit ownership or guilt.
Ubisoft. Naughty Dog. And all manner of publishers and developers are monsters. Yet, nobody cares. Nobody cared back then either. Let the staff suffer so a pretty game can be bought.
im from indonesia, i know that game dev or IT enginer in general doesnt get regarded as high skill worker like doctor or architect (i only see it in the salary which is bare minimum in some cases, like only 400$ a month, mind you its only in jakarta which highest minimum wage than other cities, imagine if you work at other small cities, it can get as low as 100$ a month)
But man i dont expect the work condition worse than i imagine (im IT enginer too but works for other country companies, so work enviroment and salary way better than indonesia)
This has been an issue for decades and despite entering the zeitgeist every couple of years gamers continue supporting these companies. Not that this is unique to big developers. I have friends in the industry and I can assure you that these problems also exists at the smallest of studios.
Unfortunately, companies like Ubisoft and Naughty Dog are not the only companies that does greedy, and other things like this, the downfall of companies like Ubisoft and Naughty Dog will most likely not change anything for the gaming industry and other companies will probably become just as bad as those kinds of companies in the future.
We all know that the gaming industry is broken but it is far more worse than most people think, and it would take years maybe even decades before it would fix itself
Naughty Dog isn't going through any downfall, tho. I need to watch the original video, tho, because didn't Sony have other studios working on Part 1 before giving it to new ND devs? I also wonder if this was after the Naughty Dog production changes.
@blackmanwithcomputer I know that Naughty Dog is not in the same problem as companies like Ubisoft and EA but if Naughty Dog ever has a concord level failure or something like that then nothing would change for the gaming industry, in fact Sony would probably double down on the horrible decisions than they have made
@Shadow-Joop-157 You say that, while it's constantly being reported that Sony is rolling back many of Jim Ryan's stupidity. Ultimately, all we can do is watch how things go for the rest of the decade. Pay for what looks good and don't pay for bad shit or potentially really unethical stuff.
When game companies started making games for excessive profit is when everything started being shit, i remember a time when a company would make a hit game that made them more money than they spent on making the game, and what they did was they reinvested that money into new titles or a second game for fans of the first game to enjoy. These days 99% of the money made from a hit AAA game, just goes straight out of the game development sphere and into some dickbags pockets, its really sad.
I've just started Xcom 2 with a bunch of mods and am content to let the pubescent teenager AAA gaming industry "figure itself out."
You think this is a video game thing? We (the rich countries) have been abusing of the workforce of poorer countries for generations. Ridiculous pay, children work, basic human rights neglected if not entirely discarded, and even downright slavery sometimes.
This is nothing new. These practices reached the videogame industry as they did with many others before.
Each time you hear "outsourcing", you should know to expect all of this.
The end result of globalisation is slave labour in poorer countries. It was known decades ago when manufacturers began outsourcing production. The whole reason China's industry is so huge is because they were willing to allow western countries to treat Chinese citizens badly with regards to health and saftey and wages, in order to gain a hold on production. Now we're doing it with computer software. Companies want unrealistic profits and they engage in human suffering to an extent that is basically slavery to get them. We don't really get a choice because most if not all of the companies are doing it and no one is holding them to account.
Exactly, it's an issue of current world economic systems. It's FAR bigger than the video game industry. It is EVERY industry everywhere in the world.
There really isn't a solution.
I mean... Ubisoft was promoting a culture of sexual assault years ago and months later the gaming media forgot about it and was promoting their games again. I feel like you don't get to be suddenly incredulous about the abuse now.
This is all gonna be forgotten in the upcoming weeks. 100% guarantee it. An employee at Activision Blizzard went with suicide because of workplace harassment and I believe sexual harassment as well (been a while, but wasn't anything good) and there was an uproar, nothing was done I believe and then weeks gone by and everyone has forgotten about it and moved on as if she was a nobody and wasn't abused and never existed.
I do only care about the end product: a good game. But since the majority of the gaming industry is incapable of delivering that, I don't care about the industry either. Gaming stagnated 15 years ago. I haven't see any evolution in NPC scripting, or AI for almost 2 decades now. All the ray-tracing / lumen in the world, won't make a game fun to play.
There is a reason why NPC's in GTA 4 were more believable than open-world games made over 15 years later, stagnation. Games are produced like sliced bread, or Cola's in a bottling factory, there are no real developers outside of indie games.
Have you seen the photo of the 2024 Ubisoft Dev employee team with them all crammed together and gathered in the hall for the photo? It explains a lot.
The funny thing about all this... is that it mirrors how the Soviet Union operated (nothing like an omnipotent government consolidating all economic output into itself, running it through government bureaucrats with zero knowledge of a given industry and using flawed metrics to measure productivity and success [Soviet bureaucrats for example enforced quota requirements for quantity of leather to use in shoes, the result being the shoe factories making shoes with the world's thickest soles, quite wasteful], and of course pretty nasty abuse of workers ala the KGB keeping guns to the backs of heads of workers to make them work [or showing up in the dead of night to drag you away to the gulag because a co-worker whispered to the local KGB informant that he saw you nod-off at your factory station]).
In before all the "this is the evils of Capitalism and belief in private property at work!"
Nice Compositional Fallacy there. Seeking the easiest way to make money and take advantage of other people is a universal human flaw. It is not unique to a given economic system. Of the economic systems that exist in the world, communism just let those flaws flourish the worst.
Dude it's imperialism, you are describing an imperialist system. Stuff like this is always imperialism. Exploiting far away lands for the benefit of the homeland exclusively.
Interesting parallels. Belgian chocolate gots it's reputation because Britain abolished Atlantic slavery first, overpricing Cadbury's etc relative to Belgian and Swiss competitors.
Off- topic, but the people who cashed in on the Soviet collapse,took the money to London and invented modern off-shoring. The same people running USSR are now shareholders in multinationals.
That isn't an evil of capitalism.
Its an evil of neo-liberalism. It's not just not doing anything about it, but outright ENCOURAGING IT.
Why do you think "Deregulation" is just "Lets allow provably dangerous things just because it will allow companies to do things cheaper"?
Its not just a fault of the system. It IS the system.
@@steelcry6665 The Soviets didn't have to do it to a far away land. Neither did Mao.
But this is capitalism and exactly a predictable outcome thereof.
Of course the Soviet Union wasn't practicing communism either. The state owning everything and having absolute power makes that very clear.
Im done with these modern AAA games. Full stop boycotting.
Thank you. Not only is the story recognized but this video is recognized because of your killer headline.
We (or many of us) used to play games to get a break from their corporate jobs. Games made by creatives with visions and values. Now AAA game studios are basically the same as any other capitalistic coorporation that we wanted a break from to begin with. It all comes full circle, there's no end to the greed.
Hurray for quality indie games
Outsourced crunch just gets worse and worse
outsourcing studios are expected to deliver increasingly better work but yet have lower and lower prices because if not, the big studios will just look for whoever can do it for cheaper
it's a race to the bottom and it's horrible
We learn from this play more one-three-person indie games. They may not be fully broken yet in terms of "human ressources".
The way you convey the tone of this video from moment one is admirable.
Eluding to it being the "West" as opposed to an industry issue is pathetic and smacks of a serious lack of logic. Unless of course, you're either delusional or one of the sort that think the "West" is evil and whatever backwater you hail from is some meca of virtue. Kindly point out the plethora of "Eastern" game studios above an indy level doing any different. It's well documented that poor conditions are rife in the industry world wide.
Corporations aren't your friend is a statement i have to remind people about more than I'd like.
they've used the rainbow shield to deflect and distract the wider audience from stuff like this..
and the useful idiots defended these large studios.. for what?
Money!
I remember going to school for animation so I can work for a game company but hearing the crunch and overall toxicity decided to focus on stop motion
I am thankful we have channels like this. There is so much fluff and nonsense in media that it's difficult to see what's actually happening. It feels bad to learn the truth sometimes, but it will help us improve.
I had a friend that was the producer for Scribblenauts. The art was outsourced because of the size of the team was to small to do it. He said it was really difficult because the quality was bad, wrong, or plagiarized. Not helped by language barriers for a game like that. It definitely would have been easier to have done it in house or at least not out of country.
wow big business exploiting regular people no way say it isn't so
I always love the analogy that Managers (in any company) think changing something in the real world is like moving a bus depot in cities skylines. Click, Delete, Click build.
Ubisoft sent "thoughts and prayers" typical.
Thank you for covering this - I was completely unaware :( Shocking!!
Indie Games is the Future of the GAMING INDUSTRY!
When gaming becomes a cottage industry, not a corporate industry, everybody wins.
THATS RIGHT
i worked for years for a company that did the QA for electronic arts games, we were based in south america. our pay was less than what a mcdonalds cashier makes, the contract was written in a way to skirt local laws, so technically it was 7.5 hours + 1 mandatory unpaid lunch hour in the middle, knowing most people would just work most of that unpaid hour, it was worded that way to classify us as "part time workers", since if we had an 8hour contract we would be protected by full time employee laws and earn significantly more. most of us were on chained temp contracts for 3 months, some times for years, this was to keep people in line, if you complain they would just not renew your contract, which is technically not "firing" you so no extra payment would need to be dished out and you were also not protected by unlawful firing law protection so you couldnt sue them. it was a meat grinder. that shit company is now the biggest tech company in my country and even has government contracts. so treating employees like fodder actually works. that's what people learn from this. and the games we made while being abused? mass effect 2, sims 3, dragon age games, dead space, alice madness returns, we did our work and did it right despite never earning a single cent of a bonus for our success. abusing workers in third world countries works. that's the the reality of the games industry.
wait, you mean there isn't unlimited profit potential available in a non-infinite market? but oh woe is me, how will the investment firms make more profits this quarter!? THE HUMANITY!
Worker exploitation is unfortunately a common part of the supply chains for developed countries. Just look at the horrors that come from shipping something as simple as bananas to the US.
However, I didn't expect it was happening to this degree with video games published by Western companies. Deplorable.
Can't believe gaming is doing exploitative colonization now.
The race to the bottom is happening in countless industries sadly. These bubbles will all pop and its going to be chaos.
This is hilarious. Conflating independent artists with commercial artists. Commercial artists are not artists in the lay sense. They are laborers that make what is requested of them. Key word: laborers. Are you really hand wringing over the types of people that design pizza boxes?
…they’re still people, and still deserve a good paying job where they’re not abused
I actually worked for some of the studios you mentioned from Manila and yeah everything here is spot on.
We basically have no choice if we move to the other contending studios because the low rates are all the same across the board yet the work load is as heavy as the western counterparts. And then if we go freelance, we avoid picking Philippines as our location of residency because if a client sees you are based in PH, they will low ball you or not give you the actual running rate for outsourcing in Asia regardless how good your portfolio is.
0:36 bruh don't tell me youtube's making you censor the word "falling" like that now 💀
I think you will find the word was jumping. RUclips doesn't like suicidal implications.
RUclips censors almost anything for whatever reason. My comments get constantly censored for the most inane and incomprehensible things in completely innocuous context. This word for example 💀
outsourcing art to other cultures is tricky, I find no matter how skilled an american artist is, if they try anime, it looks off usually. culture matters
If you all let me be a bit pessimistic for a moment, sadly stories like this being told to people like me, those interested in the "actual" Games Industry, are all the same story with different words. We all know how and why the Industry sucks so much right now, which it does. I wish the was a way to get the, what I call, Main Stream Gamers, those who don't often look at the Games Industry past what game is coming next. Sadly, without that, nothing will change. We, who watch videos like this, are in the vast minority of people who play games. And so are most of the people/places we'd share these videos with.
Orwell: "If there is hope, it lies in the proles."
O'Brien points out the utter absurdity of that particular line of thinking to Winston later in the book by way of explaining why the Party doesn't fear the proletariat rising up. As long as they're pacified, they're able to be exploited.
Sound familiar?