From what I’ve read over the years, Valve’s thing isn’t making sure everyone’s equal, it’s about a lack of explicit supervision or structure. People still get paid different, it’s just decided by “peer review” rather than management. Meant to be the ultimate meritocracy, which, we all know how well that always works out in practice.
If anyone wants some (necessarily limited) insight into Valve/flat structures, pcgamer just ran a story about a former employee talking about it, which Rob retweeted recently.
Yeah, with Motion Twin, you’ve got the company coming together and asking “how can we create a collaborative environment in which everyone’s contributions matter and everyone is compensated equally for their contributions?” At Valve, you have a company dumping their new employees into The Cabal Chamber and saying “try to see how much money you can make us!”
Kind of bummed that even a company structured like this still has crunch and isn’t willing to disclose wages.
Last one in particular because to me it says they don’t believe that their fellow workers aren’t also believers of that structure and would just drop the job if someone came around with a better offer.
Kind of curious how firing works in that structure. If it’s vote based that seems like it could cause a lot of internal problems if a vote happened and failed. Some might take it as needing to self reflect while others are definitely going to hold a grudge.
They are probably disclosing wages to the people that they are paying…they aren’t disclosing to you and other random people on the internet, which is very different and probably wise.
It’s entirely possible that it is less than average. Software devs in the worlds of academia, non-profits, and NGOs are often funded by grants or have other restrictions that keeps salaries lower than those at large companies for similar work. But as was stated above, there are benefits to working at a place where you might feel more valued, your contributions are more meaningful, and you have more freedom and flexibility. A job that pays less because it’s better in every other way is an option that people would take more often than you might think.
The firing question is a good one, and a simple majority vote seems odd. We don’t know how they’ve decided to run the place, but there are certainly rules in place for it that you agree to when you join.
Is it though? Like I mentioned it shows to me they have little belief that the others in the studio are there for the right reasons if they think another studio can poach them with a higher salary.
For something like this to work everyone needs to believe in the system.
On a broader topic sharing salary information is considered taboo because companies want it to be taboo. There’s nothing to be lost by knowing how much your peers are making in your field compared to you and it helps you to determine if you are being paid fairly. HR would love it if companies like Glassdoor would not post that kind of data because it means they can’t lowball you as well.
Also important to add that companies try not to let salary information out because making that kind of info available makes it easier for employees to organise. The taboo of talking about how much you get paid in professional jobs is one that exclusively benefits employers because prevents workers from establishing common ground with people across the company based on your position with the company’s award structure, and fosters paranoia and competitiveness between workers.
Jumping straight to “since they didn’t publish HR records, it is obvious they do not believe in the system by which they organize their own workplace” isn’t being curious in good faith. It’s unreasonable to demand numbers just because you think they should give them to you when you (and keydemographics) are both are clearly aware this is a complicated topic, subject to a lot of scrutiny by armchair economists that other industries don’t get.
I’m not defending the interviewee’s answer as much as imagining if a bunch of twitter randoms started questioning my commitment to my politics, then asked me what my take home before taxes is.
Speaking from the perspective of someone whose partner has to manage a small payroll and who has never forced employees to keep their pays secret: y’all are 100% right about why the taboo exists in the first place, but a lot of y’all are ignoring the fact that companies can’t just erase the culture it created. My partner has had to deal with so much crap from people being pissed off about other people making more than or even the same as them, despite pay being determined entirely and specifically by position and seniority. Which is not to say that that is probably the specific reason, but just that there are consequences to revealing information that y’all aren’t considering and that we may not be able to forsee at all.
There’s also just the fact that, it’s not really necessary information for the story? It’s both very personal information, for a lot of people who (because of the company’s structure) would all need to be ok with sharing, and info that would be deeply revealing of the company’s financial status that they may not want to share. Not to mention, I’m sure it changes year to year, and so would either quickly become inaccurate or require a great deal of additional context that for any number of good reasons they might not have wanted to go into just then.
Point is, I frankly can’t think of very many good reasons to give that info to balance out the many many reasons not to.
This is nice, but the problem of governance isn’t in extended family sized units (where evolution is on our side in terms of uniting a small in-group under values of equity and compassion, against a larger environment), but in much larger groups.
My company went through the same change — started small, as it grew we added (all good) people, but we hit a point where just being a group of cool guys and gals no longer served as sufficient driver in operating the company effectively, and in came bureaucracy, HR, corporate horseshit, and the general sludge you inevitably encounter when pushing past the small tribe/extended family sized unit we are evolutionarily adapted towards cooperating in.
Another point no one has touched on, is that design-by-committee is good for some applications, but you will never get a Dark Souls (to take an influence on Dead Cells) from this methodology. Design-by-committee excels at smoothing out edges and hammering down the nails that stick out, but you also hit a wall in terms of highest common factor. Design-by-committee is not good at innovating or the highly personal and visionary nature of creating great art. Dead Cells is a polished implementation of existing genres that, while artistically competent, isn’t trying to tell us anything new about the human condition, making it a wise choice of project for a design-by-committee.
It’s interesting that Japan is considered the more collectivist culture, yet the Japanese gaming industry does a much better job of supporting the best of the best auteurs by giving them resources to realize their vision in AAA projects. In the west AAA funding is tied to moderation and playing it safe. This is one of the main reasons film (which supports auteurs) continues to be the superior art form, and gaming, at least in the west, has stagnated (despite a thriving indie scene in which auteurs like Johnathon Blow are creating games out of pocket).
I would argue that arteur-ship and singular vision is not necessarily a very good indicator of the quality of the artform personally. We are talking about an industry that throws hundreds of millions of dollars at David Cage every time he decides to parade his stilted monstrosities out at E3, the idea of putting creators pedestals like that has just as many drawbacks as benefits, and probably even more.
I think that’s a different angle at failure to foster the great auteurs — fostering the not great auteurs
but if it’s not clear in gaming, you need only look at the wider art world to show that in mature art forms, the great works, both in terms of innovation and in terms of being widely accepted as great, are products of personal artistic vision
I reject the idea that collective artistic vision doesn’t exist or is somehow lesser. I would even say that a lot of the “great products of personal artistic vision” are collective in nature.
I don’t know, I feel like so much of the issues we see in the industry these days are kinda hung up on the idea of singular artistic paragons, when in reality a game is the product of a massive collective effort of an entire team. One of the reasons that workers rights in the gaming industry are so paltry and the general apathy towards the issue seems to me to be at least partially linked to this idea of the single artistic luminary who brings it all together. And those people definitely exist, don’t get me wrong! But I think we as a culture would do well to remember how many people work on and contribute to games.
It also isn’t actually design-by-committee, right? Not any more than it is program- or art-by-committee. Design is just one more discipline, and the article talks about how they absolutely do specialize in the standard roles, even if there is the usual small team-related wearing of multiple hats. Just because everyone gets a say in big decisions and everyone gets paid the same doesn’t mean there isn’t room for individual authorship (as opposed to auteurship).
So something I’ve been thinking about on this topic is that while the precise distribution at the studio making the game matters, it may matter somewhat less than we’d like. Then a few days ago this article popped up (with the note that 12% is actually a lot better than it was in 2000 when the number was about 7%):
If ~90% of the total revenue for a creative industry is picked clean by middlemen, lenders, executives etc then really the distribution inside a creative group starts to become arguing over the crumbs. Identical pay or not (assuming it doesn’t exceed, say, a Platonic range), the loss of total income makes it significantly harder for people to survive on their work (and also allow for a range of working desires, from people who want to dedicate full-time to a project, to those who want to work on several projects part-time, to those who are only able to provide limited labour for many other reasons and still deserve fair compensation).
I think that issue is incredibly complex and hard but is one that needs addressing. I want to champion things like BandCamp where artists make 85% of their sales because that’s more money in their pocket but it would be also disingenuous to downplay how streaming services like Spotify have also improved the ability to be discovered. I’m sure I’m not alone in saying that if it wasn’t for the “Discover Weekly” playlist I wouldn’t have found some really cool small bands. But me using Spotify and paying for a subscription means I’m not likely to actually go out and buy the bands music since I can just add it to my growing save list and just listen to it whenever I want. However I might end up buying a shirt or seeing them play live.
The internet has largely solved the issue of distribution and selling of one’s creations but something that’s always going to be tough for an individual or small group is discoverability. It’s why for a long time not being on Steam was practically a death sentence for a small studio because people wouldn’t buy games from anywhere else and it was where everyone went to go find new games.
Sites like GiantBomb and Waypoint covering smaller games is great because it gets them out in front of people who might not have seen it but it’s never going to be on as big of a scale as say getting Adult Swim as a publisher who can get you potentially in front of millions on TV or on a stage at E3. It’s why if you are going to self publish you really need to focus hard on building a community because word of mouth is some of the best PR one can have.
I think as a whole society is slowly moving in a way that allows for people to be more self sufficient by giving them easier to access knowledge and easier tools to use but it is still going to take time. I hate Wordpress and CMS in general but I would be dumb to not see the power it has brought to people who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to make a website.
