1y ago

Bungie Devs Say Atmosphere Is ‘Soul-Crushing’ Amid Layoffs, Cuts, and Fear of Total Sony Takeover - IGN

www.ign.com Bungie Devs Say Atmosphere Is ‘Soul-Crushing’ Amid Layoffs, Cuts, and Fear of Total Sony Takeover - IGN

One month after a major round of layoffs impacted roughly 100 Bungie employees of 1,200, those remaining at the Destiny developer say the cuts, as well as other cost-cutting measures, came alongside an apparent scramble by studio leadership to avoid a total Sony takeover.

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My heart goes out to the Bungie team. It's a terrible feeling to have to rely on your job for a paycheck and healthcare and to have to endure the anxiety of thinking you'll lose your job or benefits any day. Especially with the industry being in such turmoil right now. Dozens of gaming dev houses are laying off their staff and shuttering their doors, so it's not like you can just pick up another job in the industry when veterans are competing for the small number of positions available.
- While terrible, the most of these people make a lot of money and could have also unionized over the past years. Covid also showed them what was on the horizon. But instead the prevailing US worker strategy in these high paying jobs seems to be "get yours".
  
  This is about the worst take I've seen recently.
  Blames the workers for not leaving sooner, for not seeing it coming, for not unionizing, for making a decent living.
  So you blame the victims of corporate greed instead of the corporations themselves.
  Maybe you should consider keeping your opinions to yourself?
  Bungie has show themselves to be a good employer for a decade or more. You can't blame workers because the company was sold to Sony and now are being mistreated.
  
  Corporate greed can only be stopped by disallowing the divide and conquer strategy they employ. Individual bargening against large corporations only works if the employer works in good faith. So when the relationship was good they could have also formed a union and work together to have a fair footing if anything changes in that good relationship. The employees as a group missed that window and now that it's needed the framework for collective bargaining is not there and individuals are left holding the bag.
  Unions should not be demonized as a bad thing or punishment for the employer, it is a counterweight to the corporate machine if it ever shows it's ugly head. Good employers have nothing to fear if they work together.
  
  @Tosti have you ever tried unionizing a workplace? Turns out it's actually pretty hard, especially when people know it's a million times safer to just go get a new job than get fired for union activism
  
  Actually I successfully have, just not in the US. The US has pretty hostile regulations against unions. Or maybe lacks regulations against companies squashing them.
  
  you're not wrong, but you are being unnecessarily antagonistic, and i would appreciate it if you didn't push people against unionizing by being antagonistic about it. it's hard enough to get a union going without shaming people for not doing it sooner
  people are already suffering at the hands of capitalism. you don't need to throw it in their face. and, y'know, maybe some people from the game industry browse lemmy. it's almost like they're probably just people like the rest of us
  
  I sort of get your point, but sometimes the truth also stings a little and people need to be aware that when it's good is when you need to prepare for the downturn, that is the moment to prepare your nestegg, unionize etc.
  As I said in the other comment, the Union has been villofied by corpo's that people in the US think they are only to antagonize the company.
  
  you can explain all of that and be nice about it, you don't need to assume that people's motivation is to "get theirs". like you say, most people have grown up with several decades of propaganda, it's not their fault they see unions as bad. it takes time to undo that stuff and it's hard enough as it is without assuming their motivations or blaming them for something they had no control over
  
  You seem to be making a mountain out of a molehill. Attacking the tone of the message adds nothing.
  The "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" view of the world is something most Americans ascribe to. It might not apply to an individual but it definitely describes the group.
  Yes years of corporate propaganda made an impact, I hope for them they can be the change they want to see.
  
  it's not a controversial take to say a message's tone affects how it's taken. could you explain why it's so difficult for you to hear the request "could you be nice"?
  or do you genuinely believe a message's tone doesn't affect how it's received? because if so, i've been wasting a lot of effort on being nice to you, myself :p (that's a joking tone, because it's almost certainly not going to be obvious)

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