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by FirmwareBurner 460 days ago
>Again, labor laws saved lives in the past, they can save and/or benefit lives today.

They can, but game dev is not a critical national industry that politicians are gonna fight for with laws to protect labor. Otherwise we could have had unionized clothes making union but what saw instead was the entire textile industry shipped oversees. Game dev will follow a similar fate.

You can unionize if you want, but unless you're guarantee to have a blockbuster IP on your hands capable of raking in billions, you won't be able to compete with game devs from lower CoL countries.

In a globalized free market with no tariffs, high CoL labor can't compete with low CoL labor making commodity goods, which a a lot of games are nowadays. Unions won't fix this, but accelerate offshoring at the expense of the local industry.
1 comments
Apocryphon 460 days ago
> you won't be able to compete with game devs from lower CoL countries.

I mean, those devs might unionize as well. Certainly would've helped both the ZA/UM and CD Projekt Red devs, for different reasons.

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FirmwareBurner 460 days ago
>I mean, those devs might unionize as well.

The word "might" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. If unionization in Asia was so easy we would have seen it happen a long time ago, but what we saw instead was suicide nets on buildings.

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Apocryphon 460 days ago
That caricature was so long ago a new caricature (from seven years ago) has emerged to lampoon it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpB9Aeq8lUA

Granted, I have no doubt that the work culture is much tougher than in North America. But even the Chinese government has recognized 996 and taken steps to address it.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/east-asia/china-neijuan-invo...

Also, Foxconn manufacturing isn't exactly the same thing as NetEase video game development, even if they both exist within the same labor environment.

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FirmwareBurner 459 days ago
>That caricature

Foxconn workers killing themselves by jumping off their office budling is a caricature to you? How out of touch can you be?

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Apocryphon 459 days ago
Those tragedies largely ended after 2011. One would assume things have changed since then.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012...

https://www.foxbusiness.com/features/apple-foxconn-factory-c...

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