Generally I've found unions only to be remotely effective in hourly wage jobs which regards to physical labor (or service labor).
Only half-joking here, if I had a strike by my programmers I'd dump them immediately and get a new team. It'd be a hassle, yes, but I've seen union/management "negotiations" before, and if the company waited they'd miss their deadlines by a year and a half anyways. Might as well work with known variables.
Something like the SAG might be helpful, but even then 99% of programmers probably wouldn't qualify, not being valuable enough individually to be worth bothering to negotiate. Not when you can get the few core design people you need and hire the rest from China if need be.
It would be fun to see a few development teams turn on each other during the process though.
Unionization works because you can't do that.
You think GM would find it harder then a software developer to restaff if a strike happened?
To be fair re: Australia. Their federal minimum wage is literally twice that of the us, and cost of living isn't much higher at all in a lot of places. I'll pay 90$ per game if I literally can't make less then 15/hr flipping burgers.
To be fair re: Australia. Their federal minimum wage is literally twice that of the us, and cost of living isn't much higher at all in a lot of places. I'll pay 90$ per game if I literally can't make less then 15/hr flipping burgers.
American median wage is higher then Australia so that argument is kind of void
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Generally I've found unions only to be remotely effective in hourly wage jobs which regards to physical labor (or service labor).
Only half-joking here, if I had a strike by my programmers I'd dump them immediately and get a new team. It'd be a hassle, yes, but I've seen union/management "negotiations" before, and if the company waited they'd miss their deadlines by a year and a half anyways. Might as well work with known variables.
Something like the SAG might be helpful, but even then 99% of programmers probably wouldn't qualify, not being valuable enough individually to be worth bothering to negotiate. Not when you can get the few core design people you need and hire the rest from China if need be.
It would be fun to see a few development teams turn on each other during the process though.
Unionization works because you can't do that.
That's the issue I'm seeing with the claim that an entire dev team could be fired and easily replaced. Yes, there are a lot of programmers out there; however, programming isn't the only thing involved in game development. What about the music guys? Art guys? Project managers? How many stories have we seen about people who really wanted to get into the game industry, had programming experience, and got told "no" because just being able to program isn't enough?
Or how about the part where you've got an entire team of folks who know the ins and outs of a given project? Even if you could 100% replace the talent, there's still going to be a noticeable hit in the development time as all the new guys try to figure everything out, especially if they're just a bunch of rookies new to the field.
And on top of all that, there's no way an entire team that is green to game development could immediately make a major game with the quality to justify the budget.
Obviously it's a complex issue, but I don't think there's any way publishers could simply replace thousands of experienced, trained individuals overnight with people who would have anything near the level of competence necessary to make something that can make a profit. That's not to say it would be easy to get enough people organized and on the same page, but I think it's far, far from impossible.
Generally I've found unions only to be remotely effective in hourly wage jobs which regards to physical labor (or service labor).
Only half-joking here, if I had a strike by my programmers I'd dump them immediately and get a new team. It'd be a hassle, yes, but I've seen union/management "negotiations" before, and if the company waited they'd miss their deadlines by a year and a half anyways. Might as well work with known variables.
Something like the SAG might be helpful, but even then 99% of programmers probably wouldn't qualify, not being valuable enough individually to be worth bothering to negotiate. Not when you can get the few core design people you need and hire the rest from China if need be.
It would be fun to see a few development teams turn on each other during the process though.
Unionization works because you can't do that.
That's the issue I'm seeing with the claim that an entire dev team could be fired and easily replaced. Yes, there are a lot of programmers out there; however, programming isn't the only thing involved in game development. What about the music guys? Art guys? Project managers? How many stories have we seen about people who really wanted to get into the game industry, had programming experience, and got told "no" because just being able to program isn't enough?
Or how about the part where you've got an entire team of folks who know the ins and outs of a given project? Even if you could 100% replace the talent, there's still going to be a noticeable hit in the development time as all the new guys try to figure everything out, especially if they're just a bunch of rookies new to the field.
And on top of all that, there's no way an entire team that is green to game development could immediately make a major game with the quality to justify the budget.
Obviously it's a complex issue, but I don't think there's any way publishers could simply replace thousands of experienced, trained individuals overnight with people who would have anything near the level of competence necessary to make something that can make a profit. That's not to say it would be easy to get enough people organized and on the same page, but I think it's far, far from impossible.
They couldn't replace the whole dev team immediately no. But that only becomes an issue AFTER you create a union.
But because one doesn't yet exist, you only need to replace people slowly and blackball "troublemakers" to make unionizing extremely difficult and unpopular. This is really common across many industries.
It's just worse in video games because so many people want to work in the industry just for the privilege of working in the industry and so blackballing becomes a major threat few want to deal with.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
edited April 2012
Which is a logical point, sure.
But the folks on development teams are surely capable enough to be able to contact one another through private channels and get a union set up before the publishers can deal with everybody piecemeal. This isn't the 1800s, after all; clandestine communication is as simple and quick as a free email account and a phone call. Granted, that's not spy-level stuff, but as long as it's all private communication then the publishers can't touch anybody.
And again, yes, I know it's pretty easy for me to just say "why don't they do X?", but if developers want something to change in the industry, they need to make that change happen. Writing bad things about a given publisher after the fact won't do anything meaningful. I feel for these folks who keep coming out with these development horror stories, but I wish they'd try something instead of getting ground down to nothing.
The problem with private channels is that there is a ton of evidence, ranging from lowly families and their iphone texts to world governments and their national secrets to prove that nobody on this planet is capable of keeping a secret.
No way anybody would organize something of this scale through "private channels" before someone fucks up and lets the cat out of the bag.
"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
You can actually do that yourself. If you add ?cc=XX, with XX being a two letter country code, to a Steam url, you can view the store as seen from that region. You can still only buy at the prices set for your region, but you can view international prices and see what's region locked.
The problem with private channels is that there is a ton of evidence, ranging from lowly families and their iphone texts to world governments and their national secrets to prove that nobody on this planet is capable of keeping a secret.
No way anybody would organize something of this scale through "private channels" before someone fucks up and lets the cat out of the bag.
True, there would absolutely be some number of people who would let things slip; people are terrible at keeping secrets.
But that would be part of the reason for keeping things to private channels. As long as nobody is divulging proprietary info, they have no obligation to tell the publishers anything whatsoever about their private communications. There's also the converse side of that, where the people ratting out other people get blacklisted and end up in a field where nobody will work with them.
There's also things like only certain people knowing actual names, running the union in cells, etc etc, but that's all going pretty far down the rabbit hole. But if developers aren't willing to make the attempt, can they keep claiming that industry conditions are so terrible? Because if things aren't bad enough to even attempt unionizing, then just how bad can they really be?
Keeping in mind that I don't actually work in the gaming industry, so this is all conjecture. However, it's not like a devs trying to unionize would have to deal with thugs kicking in their door and beating them to death, so the difficulty here is all relative.
The prices of games in Australia have always been at $100. Perhaps it made sense a decade ago when the Australian dollar bought 50 US cents, but now it is at parity, and prices haven't shifted at all.
Publishers in Australia make a killing. It certainly isn't the stores, because much like the US, they make less than $10 per game. They used to use the "importing is expensive" excuse, but now that everyone knows you can buy a PAL game from the UK for half the price with free shipping.. yeah.
A lot of stores now get their stock from the UK, meaning they can sell it cheaper and still make a tidy profit. Even the bigger stores do this now, despite previously being afraid of pissing off the local publishers.
Oh, and as for steam prices, Activision Australia tend to be among the worst offenders. Who'd have thought?!
well, i wasn't saying it negatively, i like smash bros and i can't see them messing it up. i compared them and then he decided to list every difference between the two when anybody can see they are nearly identical looking games.
smash bros rip-off is pretty much a compliment
Sorry I didn't get to this sooner, but I got waylaided by a D&D game
I say "disparaged" as the term "rip-off," which, even if you're comparing it to a good product, has pretty negative connotations. But that might just be me.
Generally I've found unions only to be remotely effective in hourly wage jobs which regards to physical labor (or service labor).
Only half-joking here, if I had a strike by my programmers I'd dump them immediately and get a new team. It'd be a hassle, yes, but I've seen union/management "negotiations" before, and if the company waited they'd miss their deadlines by a year and a half anyways. Might as well work with known variables.
Something like the SAG might be helpful, but even then 99% of programmers probably wouldn't qualify, not being valuable enough individually to be worth bothering to negotiate. Not when you can get the few core design people you need and hire the rest from China if need be.
It would be fun to see a few development teams turn on each other during the process though.
Unionization works because you can't do that.
You think GM would find it harder then a software developer to restaff if a strike happened?
I was referring to hourly employees, which are indeed that easy to dump. Hell they already are due to the hand-to-mouth nature of a lot of developers.
If they're salaried, well good fucking luck getting a union up and running on that. Company doesn't have to do a thing either, you'll find that the discrepancies in pay for every single member of a union despite doing identical work leads to the worst fights you can ever imagine. Usually leading to quite a few people to quit, and this is looooooong before the union talk becomes seious.
Also someone said something about THOUSANDS of programmers in a company. Don't have the industry numbers in front of me but I don't think most developers emply QUITE that many people. EA/Activision as a whole maybe? Even the largest layoffs I hear of are under 500 at most though.
Now, it could be a general union, across all companies, but then you rapidly run into an issue traditional unions don't have: You're all competing against each other, though some of the more laid back ones would like to claim not. But you are. This would mean union discussions end up mini-politics on trying to screw over specific development teams.
I mean I'd say 1% it could happen, and 1% of THAT it would work. But probably 99% giant clusterfuck and death of a few studios.
Hell, I even think Wal-Mart has a realistic chance of being unionized SOMEDAY, but I don't think technology/financial products have a real shot at it due to the way they work. Nor do I actually think it would do much to solve problems. You'd be better off trying to make the government have better guidelines. Of course government currently is at an all time low in competence so wheee.
I remember a few years ago, Steam prices were the same here in Aus as in the US. Maybe around 3 years ago, new releases started showing up for $100 or more.
Also, I don't think Nintendo are the worst offenders. New titles are still $10 cheaper than stuff on PS360. And many Nintendo-published Wii titles come out at a $70 price point. A recent example being Kirby's Adventure Wii aka Return to Dreamland.
To be fair re: Australia. Their federal minimum wage is literally twice that of the us, and cost of living isn't much higher at all in a lot of places. I'll pay 90$ per game if I literally can't make less then 15/hr flipping burgers.
American median wage is higher then Australia so that argument is kind of void
I dont know where you get this from I know this is only tangentially on topic but:
In May 2010, the median adult hourly ordinary time cash earnings for females was 93% ($24.70) of the median adult hourly ordinary time cash earnings for males ($26.70).
Occupation code Occupation title Group Employment Employment RSE Employment per 1000 jobs Median hourly wage Mean hourly wage Annual mean wage Mean wage RSE
00-0000 All Occupations major 128,278,550 0.1% 1000.000 $16.57 $21.74 $45,230 0.1%
Considering AUS and USD are at parity pretty much, and these reports are slightly old (Though australia keeps going up.), that uhh... what, roughly 62% higher median income?
So, yeah, really they are paying about the same, adjusted for earnings.
Edit: Curse this table for not displaying right. Hnng.
It's based on nothing tangible other then Aussies will pay more. Suppliers have flat out said this about Canadian prices in the past. Canada pays more then the US because they are willing to take it.
That's basically it for these kind of bullshit pricing scams.
It's based on nothing tangible other then Aussies will pay more. Suppliers have flat out said this about Canadian prices in the past. Canada pays more then the US because they are willing to take it.
That's basically it for these kind of bullshit pricing scams.
We don't pay more than the USA anymore, though. Once our dollar was close to or on par for a significant amount of time, the game prices went down to par as well. Of course, what we can do that Aussies can't is hop down to the USA to shop, since we're all huddled along the border for warmth. When we started doing so, game stores stopped gouging. Our sales aren't as good and games don't go down in value as quickly, but at least new games are priced at $60 instead of $70 now. Also, we're on US Steam, which is nice.
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Want to find me on a gaming service? I'm SwashbucklerXX everywhere.
It's based on nothing tangible other then Aussies will pay more. Suppliers have flat out said this about Canadian prices in the past. Canada pays more then the US because they are willing to take it.
That's basically it for these kind of bullshit pricing scams.
We don't pay more than the USA anymore, though. Once our dollar was close to or on par for a significant amount of time, the game prices went down to par as well. Of course, what we can do that Aussies can't is hop down to the USA to shop, since we're all huddled along the border for warmth. When we started doing so, game stores stopped gouging. Our sales aren't as good and games don't go down in value as quickly, but at least new games are priced at $60 instead of $70 now. Also, we're on US Steam, which is nice.
Not true at all.
Pull a book off the shelf, check the price printed on it. There is a US price and a Canadian price. The Canadian price is ALWAYS higher, by like 20%. This is even more pronounced in other products, but books are the easiest thing to spot it on.
Some of it's gotten better, but it was never about the exchange rate. I used to import DVD boxsets from the US because even with the exchange rate and paying for cross-border shipping, it was still way way cheaper then buying them in Canada.
Yeah, it's gotten bogged down in discussions last I heard. Which means they are going to be "working on it" until people stop making it an issue then they "won't be working on it".
Nintendo News: Nintendo 3DS Gets a Royal New Color on May 20: Midnight Purple
REDMOND, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Just as lilacs and hyacinth bloom throughout the spring, so too a new color is blooming for the Nintendo 3DS system. Midnight Purple gives the hand-held a royal new look. The new color will launch May 20, the same day Mario Tennis Open becomes available.
The Midnight Purple Nintendo 3DS, offered at a suggested retail price of $169.99 in the United States, becomes the fifth color in the always-stylish Nintendo 3DS color palette, joining Cosmo Black, Aqua Blue, Flame Red and Pearl Pink. Now fans have another option to customize the look of their systems to suit their individual styles and personalities.
Nintendo 3DS lets users enjoy games and videos in 3D without the use of special glasses. Mario Tennis Open adds to the strong library of Nintendo 3DS games, which also includes Super Mario 3D Land, Kid Icarus: Uprising and Spirit Camera: The Cursed Memoir. Fans also can check out 3D videos on Nintendo Video and access new and classic downloadable games in the Nintendo eShop.
Remember that Nintendo 3DS features parental controls that let adults manage the content their children can access. For more information this and other features, visit http://www.nintendo.com/3ds.
Pics from Nintendo's press site:
On every forum I visit, for every new color of every device, there's always at least one person saying "oh damn, now I have to buy one." Or more likely, "son of a bitch, I just bought one and now I have to trade it in for this one." :P I've always been fine with launch colors or black when available, but I admit that some colors are very sexy. DSiXL had great color choices when it came out, in particular.
Activision’s Prototype 2 is No.1 in the UK, the latest UKIE GfK Chart-Track All Formats Top 40 reveals.
Despite the success, the game actually fell short of beating the week one sales of its predecessor from 2009.
The Xbox 360 SKU accounted for 63 per cent of sales, with PS3 claiming the remaining 37 per cent. This is roughly in line with the performance of the first game.
Last week’s No.1, Namco Bandai’s The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings falls five places to No.6 after a 73 per cent fall in sales.
EA maintains its strong position in the higher echelons of the listings, claiming second, third and fourth with FIFA Street, FIFA 12 and Mass Effect 3 respectively.
Here’s the All Formats Top 20 in full for the week ending April 28th:
1. Prototype 2 (Activision)
2. FIFA Street (EA)
3. FIFA 12 (EA)
4. Mass Effect 3 (EA)
5. Kinect Star Wars (Microsoft)
6. The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings (Namco Bandai)
7. Tiger Woods PGA Tour 13 (EA)
8. Battlefield 3 (EA)
9. Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games (Sega)
10. Saints Row: The Third (THQ)
11. Batman: Arkham City (Square Enix)
12. Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure (Activision)
13. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda)
14. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (Activision)
15. SSX (EA)
16. Moshi Monsters: Moshling Zoo (Mind Candy)
17. UFC Undisputed 3 (THQ)
18. Just Dance 3 (Ubisoft)
19. Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception (THQ)
20. F1 2011 (Codemasters)
It's based on nothing tangible other then Aussies will pay more. Suppliers have flat out said this about Canadian prices in the past. Canada pays more then the US because they are willing to take it.
That's basically it for these kind of bullshit pricing scams.
We don't pay more than the USA anymore, though. Once our dollar was close to or on par for a significant amount of time, the game prices went down to par as well. Of course, what we can do that Aussies can't is hop down to the USA to shop, since we're all huddled along the border for warmth. When we started doing so, game stores stopped gouging. Our sales aren't as good and games don't go down in value as quickly, but at least new games are priced at $60 instead of $70 now. Also, we're on US Steam, which is nice.
Not true at all.
Pull a book off the shelf, check the price printed on it. There is a US price and a Canadian price. The Canadian price is ALWAYS higher, by like 20%. This is even more pronounced in other products, but books are the easiest thing to spot it on.
Some of it's gotten better, but it was never about the exchange rate. I used to import DVD boxsets from the US because even with the exchange rate and paying for cross-border shipping, it was still way way cheaper then buying them in Canada.
I was talking specifically about video games. I'm well aware of how the publishing industry dicks us over, but consumer pressures seem to have done their job on the video game retailers here. I don't know why video games in particular have followed the exchange rate pretty well while other goods have not... perhaps because EB Games/Gamestop makes most of its profit off used games anyway, so it keeps the new prices on par as an incentive to buyers, and then the other retailers have to follow suit to compete. All I know is what I've observed of the prices since moving here 9 years ago.
Want to find me on a gaming service? I'm SwashbucklerXX everywhere.
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syndalisGetting ClassyOn the WallRegistered User, Loves Apple Productsregular
I mean, we all know there is going to be a 3DS2 or something equally confusingly named soon that will have the extra controller part built in, right?
There is no way they are riding the next 4-5 years of that handheld with the second analog stick being a breakaway accessory.
SW-4158-3990-6116
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
I'm more shocked at what a blockbuster that FIFA Street game is, it's fun for what seems like it should be an XBLA game but it's really unpolished from what I played of the demo.
Activision’s Prototype 2 is No.1 in the UK, the latest UKIE GfK Chart-Track All Formats Top 40 reveals.
Despite the success, the game actually fell short of beating the week one sales of its predecessor from 2009.
The Xbox 360 SKU accounted for 63 per cent of sales, with PS3 claiming the remaining 37 per cent. This is roughly in line with the performance of the first game.
Last week’s No.1, Namco Bandai’s The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings falls five places to No.6 after a 73 per cent fall in sales.
EA maintains its strong position in the higher echelons of the listings, claiming second, third and fourth with FIFA Street, FIFA 12 and Mass Effect 3 respectively.
Here’s the All Formats Top 20 in full for the week ending April 28th:
1. Prototype 2 (Activision)
2. FIFA Street (EA)
3. FIFA 12 (EA)
4. Mass Effect 3 (EA)
5. Kinect Star Wars (Microsoft)
6. The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings (Namco Bandai)
7. Tiger Woods PGA Tour 13 (EA)
8. Battlefield 3 (EA)
9. Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games (Sega)
10. Saints Row: The Third (THQ)
11. Batman: Arkham City (Square Enix)
12. Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure (Activision)
13. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda)
14. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (Activision)
15. SSX (EA)
16. Moshi Monsters: Moshling Zoo (Mind Candy)
17. UFC Undisputed 3 (THQ)
18. Just Dance 3 (Ubisoft)
19. Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception (THQ)
20. F1 2011 (Codemasters)
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Unionization works because you can't do that.
You think GM would find it harder then a software developer to restaff if a strike happened?
"We have years of struggle ahead, mostly within ourselves." - Made in USA
American median wage is higher then Australia so that argument is kind of void
That's the issue I'm seeing with the claim that an entire dev team could be fired and easily replaced. Yes, there are a lot of programmers out there; however, programming isn't the only thing involved in game development. What about the music guys? Art guys? Project managers? How many stories have we seen about people who really wanted to get into the game industry, had programming experience, and got told "no" because just being able to program isn't enough?
Or how about the part where you've got an entire team of folks who know the ins and outs of a given project? Even if you could 100% replace the talent, there's still going to be a noticeable hit in the development time as all the new guys try to figure everything out, especially if they're just a bunch of rookies new to the field.
And on top of all that, there's no way an entire team that is green to game development could immediately make a major game with the quality to justify the budget.
Obviously it's a complex issue, but I don't think there's any way publishers could simply replace thousands of experienced, trained individuals overnight with people who would have anything near the level of competence necessary to make something that can make a profit. That's not to say it would be easy to get enough people organized and on the same page, but I think it's far, far from impossible.
They couldn't replace the whole dev team immediately no. But that only becomes an issue AFTER you create a union.
But because one doesn't yet exist, you only need to replace people slowly and blackball "troublemakers" to make unionizing extremely difficult and unpopular. This is really common across many industries.
It's just worse in video games because so many people want to work in the industry just for the privilege of working in the industry and so blackballing becomes a major threat few want to deal with.
But the folks on development teams are surely capable enough to be able to contact one another through private channels and get a union set up before the publishers can deal with everybody piecemeal. This isn't the 1800s, after all; clandestine communication is as simple and quick as a free email account and a phone call. Granted, that's not spy-level stuff, but as long as it's all private communication then the publishers can't touch anybody.
And again, yes, I know it's pretty easy for me to just say "why don't they do X?", but if developers want something to change in the industry, they need to make that change happen. Writing bad things about a given publisher after the fact won't do anything meaningful. I feel for these folks who keep coming out with these development horror stories, but I wish they'd try something instead of getting ground down to nothing.
No way anybody would organize something of this scale through "private channels" before someone fucks up and lets the cat out of the bag.
You can actually do that yourself. If you add ?cc=XX, with XX being a two letter country code, to a Steam url, you can view the store as seen from that region. You can still only buy at the prices set for your region, but you can view international prices and see what's region locked.
So for example, http://store.steampowered.com/app/72850/?cc=US shows Skyrim with the American price and http://store.steampowered.com/app/72850/?cc=AU shows it with the Australian price.
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True, there would absolutely be some number of people who would let things slip; people are terrible at keeping secrets.
But that would be part of the reason for keeping things to private channels. As long as nobody is divulging proprietary info, they have no obligation to tell the publishers anything whatsoever about their private communications. There's also the converse side of that, where the people ratting out other people get blacklisted and end up in a field where nobody will work with them.
There's also things like only certain people knowing actual names, running the union in cells, etc etc, but that's all going pretty far down the rabbit hole. But if developers aren't willing to make the attempt, can they keep claiming that industry conditions are so terrible? Because if things aren't bad enough to even attempt unionizing, then just how bad can they really be?
Keeping in mind that I don't actually work in the gaming industry, so this is all conjecture. However, it's not like a devs trying to unionize would have to deal with thugs kicking in their door and beating them to death, so the difficulty here is all relative.
Publishers in Australia make a killing. It certainly isn't the stores, because much like the US, they make less than $10 per game. They used to use the "importing is expensive" excuse, but now that everyone knows you can buy a PAL game from the UK for half the price with free shipping.. yeah.
A lot of stores now get their stock from the UK, meaning they can sell it cheaper and still make a tidy profit. Even the bigger stores do this now, despite previously being afraid of pissing off the local publishers.
Oh, and as for steam prices, Activision Australia tend to be among the worst offenders. Who'd have thought?!
I say "disparaged" as the term "rip-off," which, even if you're comparing it to a good product, has pretty negative connotations. But that might just be me.
I was referring to hourly employees, which are indeed that easy to dump. Hell they already are due to the hand-to-mouth nature of a lot of developers.
If they're salaried, well good fucking luck getting a union up and running on that. Company doesn't have to do a thing either, you'll find that the discrepancies in pay for every single member of a union despite doing identical work leads to the worst fights you can ever imagine. Usually leading to quite a few people to quit, and this is looooooong before the union talk becomes seious.
Also someone said something about THOUSANDS of programmers in a company. Don't have the industry numbers in front of me but I don't think most developers emply QUITE that many people. EA/Activision as a whole maybe? Even the largest layoffs I hear of are under 500 at most though.
Now, it could be a general union, across all companies, but then you rapidly run into an issue traditional unions don't have: You're all competing against each other, though some of the more laid back ones would like to claim not. But you are. This would mean union discussions end up mini-politics on trying to screw over specific development teams.
I mean I'd say 1% it could happen, and 1% of THAT it would work. But probably 99% giant clusterfuck and death of a few studios.
Hell, I even think Wal-Mart has a realistic chance of being unionized SOMEDAY, but I don't think technology/financial products have a real shot at it due to the way they work. Nor do I actually think it would do much to solve problems. You'd be better off trying to make the government have better guidelines. Of course government currently is at an all time low in competence so wheee.
Very true. The game used to be called "Heroes on the Move" which I thought was pretty spiffy for a pun.
Also, I don't think Nintendo are the worst offenders. New titles are still $10 cheaper than stuff on PS360. And many Nintendo-published Wii titles come out at a $70 price point. A recent example being Kirby's Adventure Wii aka Return to Dreamland.
I dont know where you get this from I know this is only tangentially on topic but:
http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by Subject/4125.0~Jul 2011~Main Features~Earnings~1210
http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm
Considering AUS and USD are at parity pretty much, and these reports are slightly old (Though australia keeps going up.), that uhh... what, roughly 62% higher median income?
So, yeah, really they are paying about the same, adjusted for earnings.
Edit: Curse this table for not displaying right. Hnng.
That's basically it for these kind of bullshit pricing scams.
And they wonder why piracy is so common here when they charge more and more.
Old PA forum lookalike style for the new forums | My ko-fi donation thing.
We don't pay more than the USA anymore, though. Once our dollar was close to or on par for a significant amount of time, the game prices went down to par as well. Of course, what we can do that Aussies can't is hop down to the USA to shop, since we're all huddled along the border for warmth. When we started doing so, game stores stopped gouging. Our sales aren't as good and games don't go down in value as quickly, but at least new games are priced at $60 instead of $70 now. Also, we're on US Steam, which is nice.
Not true at all.
Pull a book off the shelf, check the price printed on it. There is a US price and a Canadian price. The Canadian price is ALWAYS higher, by like 20%. This is even more pronounced in other products, but books are the easiest thing to spot it on.
Some of it's gotten better, but it was never about the exchange rate. I used to import DVD boxsets from the US because even with the exchange rate and paying for cross-border shipping, it was still way way cheaper then buying them in Canada.
Its a nanny state tax.
Did Australia ever get a mature level rating for video games?
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I wouldn't make any vegas bets on it.
Pics from Nintendo's press site:
On every forum I visit, for every new color of every device, there's always at least one person saying "oh damn, now I have to buy one." Or more likely, "son of a bitch, I just bought one and now I have to trade it in for this one." :P I've always been fine with launch colors or black when available, but I admit that some colors are very sexy. DSiXL had great color choices when it came out, in particular.
I was talking specifically about video games. I'm well aware of how the publishing industry dicks us over, but consumer pressures seem to have done their job on the video game retailers here. I don't know why video games in particular have followed the exchange rate pretty well while other goods have not... perhaps because EB Games/Gamestop makes most of its profit off used games anyway, so it keeps the new prices on par as an incentive to buyers, and then the other retailers have to follow suit to compete. All I know is what I've observed of the prices since moving here 9 years ago.
There is no way they are riding the next 4-5 years of that handheld with the second analog stick being a breakaway accessory.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Also, I'm not sure if Nintendo will have a revision any time soon. Maybe after they stop bleeding money with every sale.
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Well, it's either that or everyone, devs included, forgets the CPP even exists within the next year and we see virtually nothing utilize it.
By the end of the fiscal year, manufacturing costs will have dropped enough to make the 3DS profitable at $170
Why split the market and go back in the red for an accessory that's barely being used as it is?
And that is incredibly disappointing.