The Gamespot one is really poorly written. Not sure if it's AI bad or human bad. An example:
> Laid-off union members will also get an additional four weeks of pay–regardless of how long they worked at the company–hybrid schedules that allow them to work from home, and formal systems to settle disputes within the workplace.
They can choose to work their allotted 0 hours any time of the day they choose. Has to be at home though, mandatory "do not work" from home orders apply.
This is probably the beginning of the end for Blizzard as an identifiable company. MSFT will just absorb WoW, Overwatch, and Diablo and spin up new internal studios to support them rather than have their feet held to the fire by a union. They did it with Halo. Of course, it produced garbage, but that never stopped Microsoft.
In creative fields, unions can produce great things but only when the people move freely and independently (see SAG, SWG) of the companies. It becomes more project based.
I’d prefer to see a “Video Game Artists Guild” than a Blizzard wide union.
would love to see some sources for this particularly in tech/video-game land that are much less laden with decades-old, corporate-collusive union bosses like there are in auto-manufacturing (the regular anti-union punching bags) :)
It is the central thesis of unions; unions represent workers, not the product. When you do more for workers (ie making it harder to let them go, striking, increasing benefits, etc) this comes at the cost of the product.
But that's just a thought experiment. There's also a mountain of evidence showing unions hurt the product (here's a study on increased recalls with higher union participation: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1287/mnsc.2021.4082) and that they hurt innovation (here's a study on innovation, showing a reduction in patent quality https://scholarworks.utrgv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...). Unions care about workers at the expense of product, management cares about product at the expense of workers. They are at opposite ends.
in your first cited study, product recalls are an incredibly bad indicator of unions decreasing product quality. if you're trying to minimize labor getting more of the share while preserving existing profit, you reduce overhead elsewhere - ie the quality of material you source, the machinery you purchase, etc. that's a management decision. you could just as easily seek marginally less profit and continue as you were, with your existing vendors, but that's not how management ever works
in your second cited study, the only measurement for 'innovation' is 'quantity of patents.' it has nothing to do with quality and if you know anything about how banal patents tend to be, there's an inverse correlation between quantity of patents and true innovation
a couple easily Googled one-off, low-quality studies doesn't prove a point and neither does a thought experiment. I could just as easily point to the numerous examples of union shops making very specific, artisanal products of stellar quality like union-made Red Wings
> if you're trying to minimize labor getting more of the share while preserving existing profit, you reduce overhead elsewhere
This is my point, rephrased. Unions argue for workers, thus hurt the overall product. If a union holds a strike, the money has to come from somewhere, so it comes from either innovation/research or from the existing product.
I gave you two good studies and the overarching logic, I'm not sure what other evidence I can provide. I implore you though to consider the fact unions, and in particular private unions, simply don't work. This isn't a matter of management vs non-management, it's a question of whether they do or don't work, and the evidence suggests they don't work. The exception to this is sufficiently short-term studies, which hide the fact people lose their livelihoods to unions all the time.
you're just moving the goalposts. I asked for evidence that unions are responsible to quality decreasing and then you provided two very limited, inherently flawed studies (one of which doesn't address quality at all). meanwhile, there are countless examples of union-made goods that are of very high-quality and better than industry-average
also, it is about management (ie shareholder short-turn returns thinking) vs labor. better trained, higher paid workers are shown to be better, more productive workers - the research on this is broad, expansive, and unequivocal:
>We assess the effect of the minimum wage on worker productivity among more than 40,000 salespeople whose pay is partly based on performance and who are employed by a large US retailer that operates more than 2,000 stores. Using a border-discontinuity research design, we document that workers become more productive after a minimum wage increase, and this effect is stronger among workers whose pay is more often supported by the minimum wage
unions are a system by which better pay, benefits, training, and safety protocols are enforced. I'm sure you yourself hold the deeply embedded logic that goods made in developed nation states where QoL is high and so is pay are inherently better than goods made in sweat shops and places with rampant worker abuse
it's not a difficult calculus that drives that. if you treat people better, they'll do a better job. if you treat them like shit, they'll do a worse job, intentionally and just from accumulated stress
that said, if you're the one making the decision to fuck up your product quality because you want to squeeze out another million in margins for your board/shareholders/etc, the fault and blame lies with the decision-maker, not the enforcement vehicle for basic labor rights. that's what happened with the auto-industry - they were handily outcompeted by unionized Japanese manufacturing that focused on reliability and gas mileage while GM and Ford MBA-brained big wigs kept wanting bigger, shittier cars, pursuing the same tactic that we see with all of our large appliances these days with artificially reduced operating lives meant to increase consumer spending on new cars
blaming the failures on unions is an escape hatch for corporate responsibility. buying into that narrative is keenly anti-populist, too
it's not like the logic of economics needs to be a dismal race to the bottom - you have everything from Costco to even Quik Trip that prove the counterpoint
Yet UPS still delivers packages better than FedEx.
The most reliable cars are made by Toyota, Subaru, and Honda in that order. Subaru is unionized. Toyota and Honda are not in the US, but have some union membership among employees in Japan. The two also acknowledge every UAW contract and adjust their pay and benefits at US plants after pretty much every new one is ratified.
Do you own a watch that's higher quality than Rolex? Guess who's unionized.
Would you say Walmart is high quality than Costco? Costco's the one that's unionized.
There's a (in my opinion) very weird tendency to think that workers are a hindrance to the product, that anything that gets made is made in spite of the people making it, rather than thanks to them. I think it's very destructive.
Are there any unionized game studios that continue to produce highly acclaimed games?
Bethesda used to make great games, but the last great game they made was Skyrim in 2011, they unionized in 2022, and just recently they had some big layoffs.
CD Projekt made the highly acclaimed Witcher 3 in 2015, Cyberpunk disappointed on it's release in 2020, although it's reviews are mixed. CD Projekt unionized in 2023.
Blizzard have been in decline for a long time, they mostly focus on maintaining the cash cows games WoW and hearthstone. Although Diablo has is mostly well regarded(ignoring immortal). They haven't made any new ambitious game for a while. Their last attempt at making something ambitious was Titan, a cancelled MMO that they worked on for 6 years and supposedly spent $80 million on, cancelled in 2013.
The decline seems to begin well before the unionization, so I wouldn't say it's causal, it's more of a symptom of the company no longer being a place that can foster high functioning teams, where people feel like they are valued and working on something important.
> Are there any unionized game studios that continue to produce highly acclaimed games?
In order for that to happen, a game studio that is currently producing highly acclaimed games would have to unionize. All of your examples seem to be of studios that are past their peak... Does unionizing turn that around? Seems like no, but what does?
Anyway, Acclaim Games shut down in 2004, and again in 2010. There's a new Acclaim as of 2025, so maybe there's a chance highly Acclaimed games will come out, but I don't think they're unionized, and it might just all be vapor and puffery.
Aguably those things would have happened with or without a union. E.g. it's extremely rare that any studio could repeat a masterpiece like Witcher 3, and CDPR's earlier Witcher titles also are far away from that quality. This game really was a unique 'perfect storm'.
From what I've seen, success and following decline are directly related. Once a studio becomes successful, they start to attract the sort of people (especially in leading positions) who are great at selling themselves but not much else, and the studio founders haven't learned yet to separate the chaff from the wheat. And then after a while suddenly the company is full of 'mercenaries' which only care about their own carreer advancement but not about the games they create.
I live in Sweden, but my company is not unionized (somewhat unusual). Non-unionized companies at least in tech tend to be _overtly_ better places to work than unionized ones simply because people have the _option_ to go to a unionized company. So the non-unionized companies have to make up for it with better work conditions, benefits and pay.
Even if you are not unionized you benefit from other people being unionized in your profession/area.
My uneducated take here is based my my friend's experience, who is an electrician. He's happy to be more flexible than the law allows him to. Work more hours, longer shifts, worse times of the day. Whatever gets the job done as good as possible. But there's an expectation of mutual respect here. If the boss starts not compensating him sufficiently for the work he is asked to do, not giving him time off and periods of calm, and listening to him when he thinks he's nearing his limits, the system doesn't work.
Just like laws in reality are the to protect the average Joe from an abusive employer, unions are similarly a strength in numbers approach to being treated better.
It seems unionisation is one way people slam the breaks on companies that don't treat them fairly for the effort they are expected to put in. Your evidence seems to indicate the companies had plenty of chances to ask "why are people unhappy" before their employees unionised
I'm not sure I follow the correlation or causation logic here. By the evidence presented the conclusion I would draw is it's very difficult to have repeated success. All your stated failures predated any unionisation.
If anything to unionization seems correlated simply to how long a company has been around.
There aren't many studios that have managed long term repeated success.
The best contenders would be:
Nintendo EPD, Nintendo's internal studio.
~40 years of sustained high quality games.
FromSoftware is also about 40 years old, although didn't really see breakout success until Demon's Souls in 2009.
Naughty Dog, founded in 1989, released Crash Bandicoot in 1996, and have continuously maintained a high bar.
Rockstar is 27 years old and makes great games, though it's been about 6 years since they released a game. Also I believe they have recently begun to unionize.
Valve is also worth a mention, they never really dropped the bar in terms of quality, they just lost interest in making games because they make so much money from Steam.
I guess we will find out when GTA 6 comes out as Rockstar has become unionized.
Although actually…Rockstar didn’t become unionized until most of GTA 6 had already been completed. So I guess we’ll find out when their next game comes out.
Fair point on WoW and I totally forgot Starcraft 2.
Diablo 3 I played extensively, yet I felt somewhat disgusted by the end of it.
But it's a product of that time. If I think about the games I played recently, nothing holds except Warcraft 3 with the custom maps.
I have little time so I play only what I consider "top" for my taste and drop everything else, even in the "good" category.
Due to that my last few years have been games that last me hundreds and hundreds of hours with high satisfaction, or shorter games with high satisfaction.
Either way, I would never play diablo 3 the same amount of time I did back in the day, the only reason I played was because of the friends I had
I don't see how this is a meaningful statement, as it implies there are games that cross this threshold. GTA V and Cyberpunk are some of the most critically aclaimed and beloved games ever made?
I don't think "raw, unfettered capitalism" and unions are orthogonal.
Actually, quite the opposite - in a free market, labor is free to organize in any way they want. If they have enough leverage over the employer, they'll succeed.
The anti-free market part is the regulatory quagmire that the US has in place for organized labor.
I think that's the thing that most people take umbrage with.
I don't know for sure, but I've heard from knowledgeable folks that it is more effective in Europe.
They are a little bit, because collective action is very hard. If everyone chooses to participate and pay the cost of organizing it is worth the cost and a union will happen. But if a number of people choose not to then everything falls apart, as it is no longer worth it for anyone to pay the cost and the union can't function. Often the benefits of a union are also a public good, meaning everyone gets the benefits of a union fighting for better working conditions whether they pay the cost or not. If so, then there's little incentive to pay and the union will have trouble keeping itself alive.
Unions need some external extra incentive, like the state forcing them to exist or subsidizing the cost of organizing, to exist long term.
> I don't think "raw, unfettered capitalism" and unions are orthogonal.
In a vacuum, no. If the most profitable approach means involves maintaining an "all star" cast to keep the best team happy, then everything works out. That's the athlete/celebrity model.
But current dynamics has games divorced from quality to generate the most profit, and companies work to minimize expenses instead, via the assembly line approach. Devaluing labor to maximize money makes unions inevitable.
One theory is that building/maintaining games is knowledge work, and each worker you retain helps with that. But as always, human social groups can deviate against the common good, but they can also boost it, and in this case even protect against abuses of the masses workers by management.
the expectation combined with more studios doing stuff, the fact that video-games don't have 100 years (so it's a maturing art form, somehow) and also investment money... i believe there's much more chances of quality declining on companies by the hook of investors or at least less innovation (which seems to drive a bunch of 'unicorns' on this field)? graphics kinda topped by now, there's no more magic on realism/fancy graphics! maybe at some point role-play/storytelling will get more complex/infinite with AI but it's not clear how or if it'll, as we have player driven multi-player video-games for quite a while, like Albion or some much older: https://www.havenandhearth.com/portal/ ... maybe man vs. the machine in a sensible way and not those engines stomping pro-players on Dota
I think Valve sets a good example for an alternative, while not union they operate with a flat structure and is not publicly traded which sets them apart. They're kinda like an elite guild of game developers.
I'm not really sure how you could know this? For all we know all the employees are unionized and haven't felt like they need to push management for official recognition.
Let's not get too excited until the game is actually released. Cyberpunk was also irrationally hyped and then was released as a turd which then took 5 more years to become a merely 'good' but not great game.
Unionization seems to be a secondary effect of strategic failure. If there is a causal relationship, I think it happens in reverse.
Walking the game theory backward, if the team was executing successfully and productively and everyone is getting paid fat bonuses then I don't think there is much motivation to get political in the workplace.
Only after the soul has been completely extracted from a company/team does this process seem to occur.
I wonder how many examples there actually are of the people in the trenches doing the actual work getting a 'fat bonus'.
E.g. the idea that unionization might not be a bad idea usually starts with teams not getting any bonuses after they created a highly successful game, and instead the company preventing such 'problems' by firing most of the team right before a game ships.
Linear Technology gave the same bonus multiplier based on overall company profit, paid out every 6 months. Most years this came out as an extra 30% on top of base comp for literally everyone at the company. Then the founders retired, Linear got Acquired by Analog Devices, and the program was scrapped the next year.
There's also RenTech, which allows employees to invest in their private fund that pays out 40% annually.
So to answer your question: not many, especially not in games.
Would be crazy to work for a company where you had confidence that like half your colleagues would be "laid off" after successfully delivering a project.
Use to be a huge Blizzard fan back in the day. Can't get behind basically anything they are doing today. Time will tell if something like this just reinforces whatever is broken or results in real improvement. I'm cynical on the matter.
I remember when Warcraft 3 came out and a news outlet mentioned something on the lines of "gamers' trust in Blizzard borders on religious faith" and it sounded true.
It's unbelievable how far from that trust and love they have fallen.
Big corporate gaming studios get my full support for unionizing, those people need collective bargaining. I am a skeptic of many unionizing efforts, but not this one.
in australia workers seem to have more rights. they have industry awards that specify minimum wage and safety conditions etc, they have the legal right to strike and the legal right for union/collective bargaining if they choose it, aka freedom of association. when i look at employment conditions in the US, it boggles my mind how workers there basically have zero safety net. its an extreme example of giving all the power to the employer.
Maybe Americans get higher incomes because US companies structurally sell to larger markets than Australian companies, so - at least for those roles with scale / leverage - the role is more productive & the absolute value that the employee can extract is high, even if the proportion of the overall value extracted by the worker is similar to or lower than the proportion extracted by an Australian worker.
Maybe if Americans had stronger unions, perhaps American workers could benefit from both higher incomes - due to the increased scale & opportunities of the US market - & increased protections relative to Australian workers.
Another thing that is quite different between the US & Australia is that in the US, the public is generally a lot more trusting of business over government. US business interests have a long history of influencing US public opinion- there's examples of stuff like business interest groups creating educational materials & getting them into schools, so kids learn early about the wonders of capitalism & free markets. It's unsurprising that you might not find unions so popular in such an environment. A book that details quite a lot of that history is Kerryn Higgs' book Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet [1].
One of the reasons that unions in the US are unpopular because they function as the funding arm of one of the political parties. In some states you have to join these unions to get a job at a state agency or at a government funded school. This is obviously incredibly corrupting, where the unions donate huge amounts of money to politicians who then feed back more money to the union members, and it's all paid for by taxpayers.
There's also ridiculous rules that many of them have adopted. My favorite example is that in my state a teacher was awarded the "Teacher of the Year" award, which is a pretty prestigious award, and requires you to be nominated by your students. Before the next school year she was fired because they had to make some cuts and the union had set it up so it was a Last In-First Out arrangement. So the teacher of the year was let go as that was her first or second year teaching. The teachers union prioritized its older members at the cost of that school losing their best teacher.
American unions are very different, in my experience, from what I saw from the European companies I've worked for. Those employee unions seemed solely focused on the people working at the company and did a good job representing their interests and solely their interests. If that's how unions in the US functioned, many people would have a much different opinion of them.
There are plenty of legal "safety nets" for American employees, regardless of if you're in a union or not. Could they be better? Sure, anything can be improved, just like every other country on Earth.
What kind of boggles my mind is that people online think they have an understanding of almost every part of American society because of what they read online or saw in the news. I wouldn't for the slightest second think I would have a clue about the working conditions in Australia, nor would I think I have the ability to read stuff online and get an actual understanding of it.
The most glaring example of this were all the people who came here for the world cup, afraid of all the crime and all that nonsense, and realized that living in America is actually pretty fucking great.
> its an extreme example of giving all the power to the employer
And yet, we make the most money, which seems to kind of go against that idea. If all the power was with the employer, you'd expect low wages, not high ones.
Apologies if that was a harsh response, it's just tiresome reading all of these foreign online "experts" on American society.
Comparing US safety nets to those of “any other country on Earth” is just patently absurd and disingenuous. EU has mandated - mandated - 4 week paid leave. In the US you are obligated to exactly 0 days of paid leave.
I get that this is HN and most people here haven’t worked the bottom-of-the-barrel retail jobs that this applies to, but there is very little difference in take home pay for this income regime after accounting for necessary expenses such as housing, transportation, and food; in some cases EU take home is even higher. https://boundlesshq.com/blog/us-vs-europe-employment-costs-s...
Like, sure, if you want to larp as a low income oligarch the US is the best place to do that. Otherwise, you’re going to be regularly crying after 10 hour shifts because you’re in the red each month after necessary expenses. Most people would like tech talent fall into the latter category out of schadenfreude or profit motive.
What's disingenuous is comparing government mandated minimums and acting like that has any reflection on what the situation is for the vast majority of people. In addition, plenty of states and localities have their own requirements for PTO, sick pay, etc. You act as if the US is some homogenous place.
> I get that this is HN and most people here haven’t worked the bottom-of-the-barrel retail jobs
I worked 50+ hours a week while pursuing my CompSci degree. The place I worked was officially commission based (Circuit City) so it didn't matter how many hours they put me on the schedule. I was frequently working 9am - 9pm retail shifts. My easy shifts were 10am-9pm or 12-9:30. Life is hard, but somehow I managed to get my degree while working that schedule for years. My favorite thing was when we did entire store inventories. It was required to be there, but we didn't get paid. Was it legal? Who knows!
I wish I had the pay and benefits that every single major big box store provides now. It would have been glorious. $15-$20 an hour to start, plus full benefits, PTO, sick days, paid breaks(!), etc etc? Heck, quite a few would have helped pay for my tuition too!
> Tech needs to unionize.
There is no job sector in the US that needs unions less than tech. I'm not sure how you can go from talking about "hard" retail jobs to the absolute cushy profession we enjoy. Sitting around in a comfortable office or working from home, poking at a keyboard, attending meetings, stock awards, ridiculously high pay for the amount of effort it requires - the list goes on and on.
This is really needed right now. I suspect with studios adopting AI en masse for software development and the creative side of things the studios that unionise and/or treat their real workers well will come out on top. We need studios filled with talented and passionate people who aren't worried about getting laid off next week and not making rent.
It's interesting to observe that there seemingly is a very high relationship with groups of people producing garbage and seeking extra protection through other means to "level the playing field" aka force everyone to be on their level.
This is my immediate thought too; feels like the final nail on the coffin for Blizzard. Unions exist to benefit workers at the expense of product, and if they're already not producing leading class games then not being able to fire low performers isn't going to help
No need, Jason Hall said that a single World of Warcraft cosmetic mount generated more profit for Blizzard than the entire release of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty
The Starcraft site is clearly doing some sort of intentional glitch out ARG, and the rumour going around is that they are doing some sort of singleplayer shooter set in that universe.
Well 40k sell branding to just about anyone who is willing to pay. On other hand I have heard that they are increasing prices on everything physical...
Overwatch (as a game and as a franchise) was just straight up killed by Bobby Kotick (intentionally, and slightly unintentionally by Jeff Kaplan wanting to still build Project Titan). Since OW2 under MS its been back to being a fine game.
Spectacular. Many people have been disappointed with moves by Blizz in the last 5-10 years and anything that improves livability for those that make what used to be great games is a huge win
I don’t necessarily think meta complaints about the HN crowd are productive, but…
Worker proportion of total company profits is at a historic low, but “unions bad” is often the most that the HN contingent can come up with. A lot of it is “I once knew a union guy who was lazy” kind of discourse. The consistency of the anti-union takes reads to me like a lot of well-internalized propaganda. Many people have bought the SV exceptionalism lie hook, line, and sinker.
Just because you’re a few more months away from homelessness than somebody working a different job doesn’t make you part of the capital class.
I've always heard "millionaires" (the quote was always apocryphal, anyways), and that belief is much less delusional than the belief that we're part of the proletariat, that class of workers who have nothing to lose but their chains. The vast majority of people here have lots to lose. These Blizzard workers, however miserable they are, have always had a staggering lot to lose, more than the proletariat could ever dream of possessing.
> I've always heard "millionaires" (the quote was always apocryphal, anyways)
Gotta update it for 2026 because millionaires are broke bitches. Basically part of the permanent underclass that will never escape the singularity at this point.
But more seriously, your view of what constitutes the proletariat is skewed off of its contemporary meaning.
If you can't retire today and never work again without having to worry about money, you're part of the proletariat. You don't have to be poor, you just have to be a laborer. That's... almost all of us.
Also, attribution of the quote to Steinbeck would be apocryphal, but the core idea behind the oft-misattributed phrase has never been more true than it is today on social media and internet forums, so I wouldn't say the quote itself is apocryphal.
This was the essence of the actual Steinbeck quote, for the record: "Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams." Steinbeck is no Marxist, but at least he was right about the "game of dreams", which indeed is more true today than ever before.
> Gotta update it for 2026 because millionaires are broke bitches.
> If you can't retire today and never work again without having to worry about money, you're part of the proletariat.
Uh, do you think that the labor class is defined by utter poverty or something? The labor class is defined by having to work for their livelihood, which most of us still do, even if we have a mortgage or a nice 401(k) or whatever.
I'm going to guess that you want this to include SV/SF people as part of the labor class. This is a joke to the labor class and they are making fun of you
My parent did not say "labor class" (a mishmash of words), they said proletariat, which is an abstraction that has a real history. Most of us here are petty bourgeois, labor aristocrats, or settlers. A house or a 401(k) are literally capital. So, the proletariat is defined by utter poverty more than being wage laborers, yes. That's my point. Those conditions of utter poverty define the majority of the world's population, but exceedingly few in the imperialist sphere.
The proletariat’s primary economic value is their labor. They do not own the means of production. Having capital is not the same as being able to live entirely off your capital and the hired labor of others.
In Marxist terms, we are possibly the petite bourgeoisie, although I personally always viewed that as being only the small-business-owning or freelance-style non-capital class: i.e. people who don’t live off their money/property exclusively, but who own a business that they themselves must work to maintain. People who “are their own boss” but who still have to work, essentially.
A key point is that the petite bourgeoisie always wants to act like and identify with the capital class, despite not belonging to it. In an era of continuously deepening equality, the petite bourgeoisie would likely be better off identifying more with the proletariat, since the capital class is not itching to let them in.
> "The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labour power and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labour...
Almost every comment I can see from this account is a brief, snarky swipe, lacking any substance nor even a period at the end of the sentence, which is a hallmark of low-effort participation. It's honestly hard to know if these comments are human written or bot generated, so, in the absence of any redeeming qualities, the account is now banned.
If only there were some sort of moderation on this site. Surely there's nothing that non-moderators can do. So it feels weird when a mod complains about shit like this which appears everywhere. If only you were willing and able do something about it. Meanwhile people like me are rate limited for daring to question the lack of and uneven "moderation" on this site.
This is in response to a literal moderator on the site complaining about comments on the site. Why would I need to email anyone? The moderator is already involved and just wringing their hands.
Might be a better article on this: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/20...
The Gamespot one is really poorly written. Not sure if it's AI bad or human bad. An example:
> Laid-off union members will also get an additional four weeks of pay–regardless of how long they worked at the company–hybrid schedules that allow them to work from home, and formal systems to settle disputes within the workplace.
Laid off workers get to utilize hybrid schedules?
They can choose to work their allotted 0 hours any time of the day they choose. Has to be at home though, mandatory "do not work" from home orders apply.
This is probably the beginning of the end for Blizzard as an identifiable company. MSFT will just absorb WoW, Overwatch, and Diablo and spin up new internal studios to support them rather than have their feet held to the fire by a union. They did it with Halo. Of course, it produced garbage, but that never stopped Microsoft.
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In creative fields, unions can produce great things but only when the people move freely and independently (see SAG, SWG) of the companies. It becomes more project based.
I’d prefer to see a “Video Game Artists Guild” than a Blizzard wide union.
> To be fair unions also produce garbage;
would love to see some sources for this particularly in tech/video-game land that are much less laden with decades-old, corporate-collusive union bosses like there are in auto-manufacturing (the regular anti-union punching bags) :)
It is the central thesis of unions; unions represent workers, not the product. When you do more for workers (ie making it harder to let them go, striking, increasing benefits, etc) this comes at the cost of the product.
But that's just a thought experiment. There's also a mountain of evidence showing unions hurt the product (here's a study on increased recalls with higher union participation: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1287/mnsc.2021.4082) and that they hurt innovation (here's a study on innovation, showing a reduction in patent quality https://scholarworks.utrgv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...). Unions care about workers at the expense of product, management cares about product at the expense of workers. They are at opposite ends.
in your first cited study, product recalls are an incredibly bad indicator of unions decreasing product quality. if you're trying to minimize labor getting more of the share while preserving existing profit, you reduce overhead elsewhere - ie the quality of material you source, the machinery you purchase, etc. that's a management decision. you could just as easily seek marginally less profit and continue as you were, with your existing vendors, but that's not how management ever works
in your second cited study, the only measurement for 'innovation' is 'quantity of patents.' it has nothing to do with quality and if you know anything about how banal patents tend to be, there's an inverse correlation between quantity of patents and true innovation
a couple easily Googled one-off, low-quality studies doesn't prove a point and neither does a thought experiment. I could just as easily point to the numerous examples of union shops making very specific, artisanal products of stellar quality like union-made Red Wings
> if you're trying to minimize labor getting more of the share while preserving existing profit, you reduce overhead elsewhere
This is my point, rephrased. Unions argue for workers, thus hurt the overall product. If a union holds a strike, the money has to come from somewhere, so it comes from either innovation/research or from the existing product.
I gave you two good studies and the overarching logic, I'm not sure what other evidence I can provide. I implore you though to consider the fact unions, and in particular private unions, simply don't work. This isn't a matter of management vs non-management, it's a question of whether they do or don't work, and the evidence suggests they don't work. The exception to this is sufficiently short-term studies, which hide the fact people lose their livelihoods to unions all the time.
you're just moving the goalposts. I asked for evidence that unions are responsible to quality decreasing and then you provided two very limited, inherently flawed studies (one of which doesn't address quality at all). meanwhile, there are countless examples of union-made goods that are of very high-quality and better than industry-average
also, it is about management (ie shareholder short-turn returns thinking) vs labor. better trained, higher paid workers are shown to be better, more productive workers - the research on this is broad, expansive, and unequivocal:
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/11/09/pay-productivity-...
>In particular, a 10% increase in productivity is associated with a 0.7% increase in mean pay.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/720397
>We assess the effect of the minimum wage on worker productivity among more than 40,000 salespeople whose pay is partly based on performance and who are employed by a large US retailer that operates more than 2,000 stores. Using a border-discontinuity research design, we document that workers become more productive after a minimum wage increase, and this effect is stronger among workers whose pay is more often supported by the minimum wage
unions are a system by which better pay, benefits, training, and safety protocols are enforced. I'm sure you yourself hold the deeply embedded logic that goods made in developed nation states where QoL is high and so is pay are inherently better than goods made in sweat shops and places with rampant worker abuse
it's not a difficult calculus that drives that. if you treat people better, they'll do a better job. if you treat them like shit, they'll do a worse job, intentionally and just from accumulated stress
that said, if you're the one making the decision to fuck up your product quality because you want to squeeze out another million in margins for your board/shareholders/etc, the fault and blame lies with the decision-maker, not the enforcement vehicle for basic labor rights. that's what happened with the auto-industry - they were handily outcompeted by unionized Japanese manufacturing that focused on reliability and gas mileage while GM and Ford MBA-brained big wigs kept wanting bigger, shittier cars, pursuing the same tactic that we see with all of our large appliances these days with artificially reduced operating lives meant to increase consumer spending on new cars
blaming the failures on unions is an escape hatch for corporate responsibility. buying into that narrative is keenly anti-populist, too
it's not like the logic of economics needs to be a dismal race to the bottom - you have everything from Costco to even Quik Trip that prove the counterpoint
Yet UPS still delivers packages better than FedEx.
The most reliable cars are made by Toyota, Subaru, and Honda in that order. Subaru is unionized. Toyota and Honda are not in the US, but have some union membership among employees in Japan. The two also acknowledge every UAW contract and adjust their pay and benefits at US plants after pretty much every new one is ratified.
Do you own a watch that's higher quality than Rolex? Guess who's unionized.
Would you say Walmart is high quality than Costco? Costco's the one that's unionized.
There's a (in my opinion) very weird tendency to think that workers are a hindrance to the product, that anything that gets made is made in spite of the people making it, rather than thanks to them. I think it's very destructive.
Are there any unionized game studios that continue to produce highly acclaimed games?
Bethesda used to make great games, but the last great game they made was Skyrim in 2011, they unionized in 2022, and just recently they had some big layoffs.
CD Projekt made the highly acclaimed Witcher 3 in 2015, Cyberpunk disappointed on it's release in 2020, although it's reviews are mixed. CD Projekt unionized in 2023.
Blizzard have been in decline for a long time, they mostly focus on maintaining the cash cows games WoW and hearthstone. Although Diablo has is mostly well regarded(ignoring immortal). They haven't made any new ambitious game for a while. Their last attempt at making something ambitious was Titan, a cancelled MMO that they worked on for 6 years and supposedly spent $80 million on, cancelled in 2013.
The decline seems to begin well before the unionization, so I wouldn't say it's causal, it's more of a symptom of the company no longer being a place that can foster high functioning teams, where people feel like they are valued and working on something important.
> Are there any unionized game studios that continue to produce highly acclaimed games?
In order for that to happen, a game studio that is currently producing highly acclaimed games would have to unionize. All of your examples seem to be of studios that are past their peak... Does unionizing turn that around? Seems like no, but what does?
Anyway, Acclaim Games shut down in 2004, and again in 2010. There's a new Acclaim as of 2025, so maybe there's a chance highly Acclaimed games will come out, but I don't think they're unionized, and it might just all be vapor and puffery.
Aguably those things would have happened with or without a union. E.g. it's extremely rare that any studio could repeat a masterpiece like Witcher 3, and CDPR's earlier Witcher titles also are far away from that quality. This game really was a unique 'perfect storm'.
From what I've seen, success and following decline are directly related. Once a studio becomes successful, they start to attract the sort of people (especially in leading positions) who are great at selling themselves but not much else, and the studio founders haven't learned yet to separate the chaff from the wheat. And then after a while suddenly the company is full of 'mercenaries' which only care about their own carreer advancement but not about the games they create.
I live in Sweden, but my company is not unionized (somewhat unusual). Non-unionized companies at least in tech tend to be _overtly_ better places to work than unionized ones simply because people have the _option_ to go to a unionized company. So the non-unionized companies have to make up for it with better work conditions, benefits and pay.
Even if you are not unionized you benefit from other people being unionized in your profession/area.
My uneducated take here is based my my friend's experience, who is an electrician. He's happy to be more flexible than the law allows him to. Work more hours, longer shifts, worse times of the day. Whatever gets the job done as good as possible. But there's an expectation of mutual respect here. If the boss starts not compensating him sufficiently for the work he is asked to do, not giving him time off and periods of calm, and listening to him when he thinks he's nearing his limits, the system doesn't work.
Just like laws in reality are the to protect the average Joe from an abusive employer, unions are similarly a strength in numbers approach to being treated better.
It seems unionisation is one way people slam the breaks on companies that don't treat them fairly for the effort they are expected to put in. Your evidence seems to indicate the companies had plenty of chances to ask "why are people unhappy" before their employees unionised
I'm not sure I follow the correlation or causation logic here. By the evidence presented the conclusion I would draw is it's very difficult to have repeated success. All your stated failures predated any unionisation.
If anything to unionization seems correlated simply to how long a company has been around.
That's a fair criticism.
There aren't many studios that have managed long term repeated success.
The best contenders would be:
Nintendo EPD, Nintendo's internal studio. ~40 years of sustained high quality games.
FromSoftware is also about 40 years old, although didn't really see breakout success until Demon's Souls in 2009.
Naughty Dog, founded in 1989, released Crash Bandicoot in 1996, and have continuously maintained a high bar.
Rockstar is 27 years old and makes great games, though it's been about 6 years since they released a game. Also I believe they have recently begun to unionize.
Valve is also worth a mention, they never really dropped the bar in terms of quality, they just lost interest in making games because they make so much money from Steam.
I guess we will find out when GTA 6 comes out as Rockstar has become unionized.
Although actually…Rockstar didn’t become unionized until most of GTA 6 had already been completed. So I guess we’ll find out when their next game comes out.
> So I guess we’ll find out when their next game comes out.
I doubt that any of us will still be alive at the time when GTA 7 releases - at least when looking at the trajectory of GTA release dates ;)
Remember that correlation != causation.
They might also have unionized due to the bad conditions while developing GTA 6, which could also lead to it being a bad game. Who knows though.
Isn't Activision Blizzard, which implies they make call of duty which is one of the games that makes the most money out there?
I don't like any of that, but they do make money.
As for good games, the last one was warcraft 3 maybe
Yeah they still make good money.
I think calling WC3 the last good game is immoderately scornful though.
I regret the time I spent playing WoW, but it was category defining and a cultural phenomenon.
StarCraft 2 was excellent, perhaps to this day the best RTS ever made.
Diablo 3 was highly regarded.
> Diablo 3 was highly regarded.
Lol, Diablo 2 was the last good Diablo (it has a great remaster now btw).
Fair point on WoW and I totally forgot Starcraft 2.
Diablo 3 I played extensively, yet I felt somewhat disgusted by the end of it.
But it's a product of that time. If I think about the games I played recently, nothing holds except Warcraft 3 with the custom maps.
I have little time so I play only what I consider "top" for my taste and drop everything else, even in the "good" category. Due to that my last few years have been games that last me hundreds and hundreds of hours with high satisfaction, or shorter games with high satisfaction.
Either way, I would never play diablo 3 the same amount of time I did back in the day, the only reason I played was because of the friends I had
Diablo 3 got such a harsh reaction that one of the lead game developers quit the industry after
Diablo 3, no, it was horrible
The rest you've mentioned were bangers in their own ways however.
Patched Cyberpunk is the best game after Elden Ring of the last 10 years
Cyberpunk created a beautiful city and world but it feels so empty with no real interactions possible with the NPCs. Not unlike the GTA games.
I don't see how this is a meaningful statement, as it implies there are games that cross this threshold. GTA V and Cyberpunk are some of the most critically aclaimed and beloved games ever made?
Baldur's Gate 3 is much better on this front.
What's "real interactions"?
Care to provide counterexamples?
Workers unionize when they're being treated poorly by management. Workers in such situation tend to not produce their best work.
You have cause and effect ass-backwards
I don't really know what unionization has to do with making good games. We've seen plenty of studios fall from grace with raw, unfettered capitalism.
It ultimately will come down to if it can retain talent and don't do a soft reset every project.
I don't think "raw, unfettered capitalism" and unions are orthogonal.
Actually, quite the opposite - in a free market, labor is free to organize in any way they want. If they have enough leverage over the employer, they'll succeed.
The anti-free market part is the regulatory quagmire that the US has in place for organized labor.
I think that's the thing that most people take umbrage with.
I don't know for sure, but I've heard from knowledgeable folks that it is more effective in Europe.
They are a little bit, because collective action is very hard. If everyone chooses to participate and pay the cost of organizing it is worth the cost and a union will happen. But if a number of people choose not to then everything falls apart, as it is no longer worth it for anyone to pay the cost and the union can't function. Often the benefits of a union are also a public good, meaning everyone gets the benefits of a union fighting for better working conditions whether they pay the cost or not. If so, then there's little incentive to pay and the union will have trouble keeping itself alive.
Unions need some external extra incentive, like the state forcing them to exist or subsidizing the cost of organizing, to exist long term.
You might be surprised to learn that much of the regulatory quagmire you speak of was devised by supposed proponents of the free market.
> I don't think "raw, unfettered capitalism" and unions are orthogonal.
In a vacuum, no. If the most profitable approach means involves maintaining an "all star" cast to keep the best team happy, then everything works out. That's the athlete/celebrity model.
But current dynamics has games divorced from quality to generate the most profit, and companies work to minimize expenses instead, via the assembly line approach. Devaluing labor to maximize money makes unions inevitable.
One theory is that building/maintaining games is knowledge work, and each worker you retain helps with that. But as always, human social groups can deviate against the common good, but they can also boost it, and in this case even protect against abuses of the masses workers by management.
the expectation combined with more studios doing stuff, the fact that video-games don't have 100 years (so it's a maturing art form, somehow) and also investment money... i believe there's much more chances of quality declining on companies by the hook of investors or at least less innovation (which seems to drive a bunch of 'unicorns' on this field)? graphics kinda topped by now, there's no more magic on realism/fancy graphics! maybe at some point role-play/storytelling will get more complex/infinite with AI but it's not clear how or if it'll, as we have player driven multi-player video-games for quite a while, like Albion or some much older: https://www.havenandhearth.com/portal/ ... maybe man vs. the machine in a sensible way and not those engines stomping pro-players on Dota
I think Valve sets a good example for an alternative, while not union they operate with a flat structure and is not publicly traded which sets them apart. They're kinda like an elite guild of game developers.
I'm not really sure how you could know this? For all we know all the employees are unionized and haven't felt like they need to push management for official recognition.
If a union had managed to organize the most profitable-per-employee company in the video game industry, it would have been front-page news.
That's my point. There is no requirement in the US that you organize explicitly. You could just as easy do it without requesting recognition.
Valve doesn’t release that many games though.
Presumably they subsidise the good conditions, few but high quality releases etc with the Steam store, which does set them apart from most studios.
CPR is about to release The Witcher 4, probably it’s going to be a masterpiece.
Let's not get too excited until the game is actually released. Cyberpunk was also irrationally hyped and then was released as a turd which then took 5 more years to become a merely 'good' but not great game.
All those studios were actually already on a downward trend I'd argue. Unionisation may turn it around
Cyberpunk may have had a bad launch, but in 2026 it is a great game, and worth playing. One of the best games I've played in years.
I remember it being called "Cedarpunk" on account of its rendering issues.
Unionization seems to be a secondary effect of strategic failure. If there is a causal relationship, I think it happens in reverse.
Walking the game theory backward, if the team was executing successfully and productively and everyone is getting paid fat bonuses then I don't think there is much motivation to get political in the workplace.
Only after the soul has been completely extracted from a company/team does this process seem to occur.
> ...and everyone is getting paid fat bonuses...
I wonder how many examples there actually are of the people in the trenches doing the actual work getting a 'fat bonus'.
E.g. the idea that unionization might not be a bad idea usually starts with teams not getting any bonuses after they created a highly successful game, and instead the company preventing such 'problems' by firing most of the team right before a game ships.
Linear Technology gave the same bonus multiplier based on overall company profit, paid out every 6 months. Most years this came out as an extra 30% on top of base comp for literally everyone at the company. Then the founders retired, Linear got Acquired by Analog Devices, and the program was scrapped the next year.
There's also RenTech, which allows employees to invest in their private fund that pays out 40% annually.
So to answer your question: not many, especially not in games.
About time tbh. I don't work in game dev, in part because of the horrorshow of game dev management.
Would be crazy to work for a company where you had confidence that like half your colleagues would be "laid off" after successfully delivering a project.
I'd never ship then, consciously or not.
You'd fit right in then
Duke Nukem Forever sounds like your kind of game?
I am applying work on GTA
Use to be a huge Blizzard fan back in the day. Can't get behind basically anything they are doing today. Time will tell if something like this just reinforces whatever is broken or results in real improvement. I'm cynical on the matter.
I remember when Warcraft 3 came out and a news outlet mentioned something on the lines of "gamers' trust in Blizzard borders on religious faith" and it sounded true.
It's unbelievable how far from that trust and love they have fallen.
Big corporate gaming studios get my full support for unionizing, those people need collective bargaining. I am a skeptic of many unionizing efforts, but not this one.
in australia workers seem to have more rights. they have industry awards that specify minimum wage and safety conditions etc, they have the legal right to strike and the legal right for union/collective bargaining if they choose it, aka freedom of association. when i look at employment conditions in the US, it boggles my mind how workers there basically have zero safety net. its an extreme example of giving all the power to the employer.
Americans trade higher worker income for decreased protections.
Is that actually true though?
Maybe Americans get higher incomes because US companies structurally sell to larger markets than Australian companies, so - at least for those roles with scale / leverage - the role is more productive & the absolute value that the employee can extract is high, even if the proportion of the overall value extracted by the worker is similar to or lower than the proportion extracted by an Australian worker.
Maybe if Americans had stronger unions, perhaps American workers could benefit from both higher incomes - due to the increased scale & opportunities of the US market - & increased protections relative to Australian workers.
Another thing that is quite different between the US & Australia is that in the US, the public is generally a lot more trusting of business over government. US business interests have a long history of influencing US public opinion- there's examples of stuff like business interest groups creating educational materials & getting them into schools, so kids learn early about the wonders of capitalism & free markets. It's unsurprising that you might not find unions so popular in such an environment. A book that details quite a lot of that history is Kerryn Higgs' book Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet [1].
[1] https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/3683/Collision-CourseEndle...
One of the reasons that unions in the US are unpopular because they function as the funding arm of one of the political parties. In some states you have to join these unions to get a job at a state agency or at a government funded school. This is obviously incredibly corrupting, where the unions donate huge amounts of money to politicians who then feed back more money to the union members, and it's all paid for by taxpayers.
There's also ridiculous rules that many of them have adopted. My favorite example is that in my state a teacher was awarded the "Teacher of the Year" award, which is a pretty prestigious award, and requires you to be nominated by your students. Before the next school year she was fired because they had to make some cuts and the union had set it up so it was a Last In-First Out arrangement. So the teacher of the year was let go as that was her first or second year teaching. The teachers union prioritized its older members at the cost of that school losing their best teacher.
American unions are very different, in my experience, from what I saw from the European companies I've worked for. Those employee unions seemed solely focused on the people working at the company and did a good job representing their interests and solely their interests. If that's how unions in the US functioned, many people would have a much different opinion of them.
They would not. If its harder to fire people, then there would be less employee turnover, which is where all the income growth comes from.
There are plenty of legal "safety nets" for American employees, regardless of if you're in a union or not. Could they be better? Sure, anything can be improved, just like every other country on Earth.
What kind of boggles my mind is that people online think they have an understanding of almost every part of American society because of what they read online or saw in the news. I wouldn't for the slightest second think I would have a clue about the working conditions in Australia, nor would I think I have the ability to read stuff online and get an actual understanding of it.
The most glaring example of this were all the people who came here for the world cup, afraid of all the crime and all that nonsense, and realized that living in America is actually pretty fucking great.
> its an extreme example of giving all the power to the employer
And yet, we make the most money, which seems to kind of go against that idea. If all the power was with the employer, you'd expect low wages, not high ones.
Apologies if that was a harsh response, it's just tiresome reading all of these foreign online "experts" on American society.
Comparing US safety nets to those of “any other country on Earth” is just patently absurd and disingenuous. EU has mandated - mandated - 4 week paid leave. In the US you are obligated to exactly 0 days of paid leave.
I get that this is HN and most people here haven’t worked the bottom-of-the-barrel retail jobs that this applies to, but there is very little difference in take home pay for this income regime after accounting for necessary expenses such as housing, transportation, and food; in some cases EU take home is even higher. https://boundlesshq.com/blog/us-vs-europe-employment-costs-s...
Like, sure, if you want to larp as a low income oligarch the US is the best place to do that. Otherwise, you’re going to be regularly crying after 10 hour shifts because you’re in the red each month after necessary expenses. Most people would like tech talent fall into the latter category out of schadenfreude or profit motive.
Tech needs to unionize.
> disingenuous
What's disingenuous is comparing government mandated minimums and acting like that has any reflection on what the situation is for the vast majority of people. In addition, plenty of states and localities have their own requirements for PTO, sick pay, etc. You act as if the US is some homogenous place.
> I get that this is HN and most people here haven’t worked the bottom-of-the-barrel retail jobs
I worked 50+ hours a week while pursuing my CompSci degree. The place I worked was officially commission based (Circuit City) so it didn't matter how many hours they put me on the schedule. I was frequently working 9am - 9pm retail shifts. My easy shifts were 10am-9pm or 12-9:30. Life is hard, but somehow I managed to get my degree while working that schedule for years. My favorite thing was when we did entire store inventories. It was required to be there, but we didn't get paid. Was it legal? Who knows!
I wish I had the pay and benefits that every single major big box store provides now. It would have been glorious. $15-$20 an hour to start, plus full benefits, PTO, sick days, paid breaks(!), etc etc? Heck, quite a few would have helped pay for my tuition too!
> Tech needs to unionize.
There is no job sector in the US that needs unions less than tech. I'm not sure how you can go from talking about "hard" retail jobs to the absolute cushy profession we enjoy. Sitting around in a comfortable office or working from home, poking at a keyboard, attending meetings, stock awards, ridiculously high pay for the amount of effort it requires - the list goes on and on.
This is a whole lot of talking for someone that doesn’t have much on their mind.
This is really needed right now. I suspect with studios adopting AI en masse for software development and the creative side of things the studios that unionise and/or treat their real workers well will come out on top. We need studios filled with talented and passionate people who aren't worried about getting laid off next week and not making rent.
The time to unionize was 15 years ago. But the majority didn't want to because they got theirs and screw everyone else.
Now with downsizing and AI knocking at the door, funny how willing everyone is to unionize.
Union release: https://cwa-union.org/news/releases/blizzard-entertainment-w... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49627164)
It's interesting to observe that there seemingly is a very high relationship with groups of people producing garbage and seeking extra protection through other means to "level the playing field" aka force everyone to be on their level.
This is my immediate thought too; feels like the final nail on the coffin for Blizzard. Unions exist to benefit workers at the expense of product, and if they're already not producing leading class games then not being able to fire low performers isn't going to help
Does Blizzard plan on releasing a good game soon?
No need, Jason Hall said that a single World of Warcraft cosmetic mount generated more profit for Blizzard than the entire release of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty
I hear they may be re-re-re-releasing WoW Classic again.
Haven't they done this with the "Season" model they've moved to?
The Starcraft site is clearly doing some sort of intentional glitch out ARG, and the rumour going around is that they are doing some sort of singleplayer shooter set in that universe.
https://www.tweaktown.com/news/113435/blizzards-next-starcra...
StarCraft: Ghost?
Most of SC Ghost's plot was absorbed into a special DLC campaign for Starcraft 2. They'd need to do something else.
(The site also seems to indicate the new game's plot takes place about 75 years after the end of SC2.)
Meanwhile the 40k universe keeps releasing game after game. Obviously not all good, but it’s better than being stagnant
Well 40k sell branding to just about anyone who is willing to pay. On other hand I have heard that they are increasing prices on everything physical...
They always do. The price of plastic crack has always gone up and up. This happened even before they had videogames.
Overwatch had so much promise. I could have seen an Arcane style series featuring characters. But no. I'm not expecting anything good from them again.
Overwatch (as a game and as a franchise) was just straight up killed by Bobby Kotick (intentionally, and slightly unintentionally by Jeff Kaplan wanting to still build Project Titan). Since OW2 under MS its been back to being a fine game.
definitely not now
Spectacular. Many people have been disappointed with moves by Blizz in the last 5-10 years and anything that improves livability for those that make what used to be great games is a huge win
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I don’t necessarily think meta complaints about the HN crowd are productive, but…
Worker proportion of total company profits is at a historic low, but “unions bad” is often the most that the HN contingent can come up with. A lot of it is “I once knew a union guy who was lazy” kind of discourse. The consistency of the anti-union takes reads to me like a lot of well-internalized propaganda. Many people have bought the SV exceptionalism lie hook, line, and sinker.
Just because you’re a few more months away from homelessness than somebody working a different job doesn’t make you part of the capital class.
Alas Hacker News posters see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed trillionaires.
I've always heard "millionaires" (the quote was always apocryphal, anyways), and that belief is much less delusional than the belief that we're part of the proletariat, that class of workers who have nothing to lose but their chains. The vast majority of people here have lots to lose. These Blizzard workers, however miserable they are, have always had a staggering lot to lose, more than the proletariat could ever dream of possessing.
> I've always heard "millionaires" (the quote was always apocryphal, anyways)
Gotta update it for 2026 because millionaires are broke bitches. Basically part of the permanent underclass that will never escape the singularity at this point.
But more seriously, your view of what constitutes the proletariat is skewed off of its contemporary meaning.
If you can't retire today and never work again without having to worry about money, you're part of the proletariat. You don't have to be poor, you just have to be a laborer. That's... almost all of us.
Also, attribution of the quote to Steinbeck would be apocryphal, but the core idea behind the oft-misattributed phrase has never been more true than it is today on social media and internet forums, so I wouldn't say the quote itself is apocryphal.
This was the essence of the actual Steinbeck quote, for the record: "Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams." Steinbeck is no Marxist, but at least he was right about the "game of dreams", which indeed is more true today than ever before.
> Gotta update it for 2026 because millionaires are broke bitches.
> If you can't retire today and never work again without having to worry about money, you're part of the proletariat.
This; this is a middle-class game of dreams.
Surprisingly, large, structural changes in society require non-zealots, who yet can still see the advantages of the vision, to be on-board.
I haven't read Steinbeck, but I get the feeling that you're mischaracterizing his thrust.
Uh, do you think that the labor class is defined by utter poverty or something? The labor class is defined by having to work for their livelihood, which most of us still do, even if we have a mortgage or a nice 401(k) or whatever.
You are most definitely not getting a seat at the campfire.
I'm going to guess that you want this to include SV/SF people as part of the labor class. This is a joke to the labor class and they are making fun of you
define livelihood, it involves a standard and cost of living that is different for different people
My parent did not say "labor class" (a mishmash of words), they said proletariat, which is an abstraction that has a real history. Most of us here are petty bourgeois, labor aristocrats, or settlers. A house or a 401(k) are literally capital. So, the proletariat is defined by utter poverty more than being wage laborers, yes. That's my point. Those conditions of utter poverty define the majority of the world's population, but exceedingly few in the imperialist sphere.
I mean, the wikipedia on proletariat disagrees with your definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proletariat
The proletariat’s primary economic value is their labor. They do not own the means of production. Having capital is not the same as being able to live entirely off your capital and the hired labor of others.
In Marxist terms, we are possibly the petite bourgeoisie, although I personally always viewed that as being only the small-business-owning or freelance-style non-capital class: i.e. people who don’t live off their money/property exclusively, but who own a business that they themselves must work to maintain. People who “are their own boss” but who still have to work, essentially.
A key point is that the petite bourgeoisie always wants to act like and identify with the capital class, despite not belonging to it. In an era of continuously deepening equality, the petite bourgeoisie would likely be better off identifying more with the proletariat, since the capital class is not itching to let them in.
Marxism is good. Here:
https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/p/r.htm
> "The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labour power and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labour...
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Almost every comment I can see from this account is a brief, snarky swipe, lacking any substance nor even a period at the end of the sentence, which is a hallmark of low-effort participation. It's honestly hard to know if these comments are human written or bot generated, so, in the absence of any redeeming qualities, the account is now banned.
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If only there were some sort of moderation on this site. Surely there's nothing that non-moderators can do. So it feels weird when a mod complains about shit like this which appears everywhere. If only you were willing and able do something about it. Meanwhile people like me are rate limited for daring to question the lack of and uneven "moderation" on this site.
There were times on this site where I saw some pretty bad comments that hadn’t been moderated. I emailed the mods at
hn@ycombinator.com
to let them know about those bad comments and the moderators were always super nice and helpful in response to me.
This is in response to a literal moderator on the site complaining about comments on the site. Why would I need to email anyone? The moderator is already involved and just wringing their hands.
But the moderator wasn’t just wringing their hands. The moderator banned the account. He even said so at the end of that comment.
There's no moderation but you feel the need to post more, not less? Sounds conflicting.