12mo ago

Game workers forced back to office oppose “reckless decision” from Rockstar

iwgb.org.uk Game workers forced back to office oppose “reckless decision” from Rockstar

* Rockstar Games announced on 28th February 2024, that workers will have to be in the office 5 days a week from 15th April 2024 as remote working provisions are withdrawn for the majority of staff. * The news comes one year after 170 Rockstar Games workers in the UK signed a petition oppos...

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Must be the most pointless thing in the world, and terrible for the environment, have everyone travel in separate cars to work in the exact same way as they could at home.
Add in the fact there's always 1 person not there or with a client/customer based elsewhere, so all your calls and meetings are still done through video.
- Yeah but think about the property prices... Rich people losing money. What a tragedy.
- I love going into the office my one day a week. It's a new, less comfortable place to sit on Teams meetings! /s
- I don't see that rockstar is mandating people to commute by car, this is the UK, they have public transport
  
  That doesn't fix anywhere near all of the problems with this.
  
  Not feasible or possible everywhere, I certainly couldn't commute by public transport where I live it'd take double the time, my point wasn't directed at this specific case but the force to offices in general and there's no doubt huge amounts of people are using cars.

All unions should be taking up the issue of the right to remote work.
- Don't most union workers currently work in jobs that don't make sense to be remote like manufacturing? I wish there was a tech workers union that could push for this. I'm no union expert though
- All tech workers should join a union first .. but yes, agreed.
- That would require that office workers unionize. Which, while hopefully being more common nowadays, is still seen as antithetical to most office workers.

I have a friend who works in the R* office in Massachusetts. The whole fucking company sounds like an abject nightmare to work for. Between the Stasi-esque HR lady that wanders around making notes of who is at their desks, to the legions of indoctrinated kool-aid drinkers, onto the just bizarre behind the scenes decisions and poor management.
He's been dreading this announcement for a while now, and it may just be the one thing that will rip the scales off the otherwise creepily loyal workers.
- Corporate America can absolutely be a cult. I've jumped around a fair bit, but you can always tell who the lifers are. Think the company is their savior, love the CEO even though they only met them once, go to all the functions, it's sad to me. Most of those lifers were making much less than me because I jumped around to bump my salary, they are constantly passed over for promotions because "now just isn't the time", and usually they ignore their home life and never take PTO.
  
  Not just corporate America, corporations around the world have it.

This will always be about power and useless managers feeling they aren't important.
- Or it's a layoff without actually doing the layoff process because they don't want to pay severance, and it would look bad in the headlines when they just announced GTA6.

Everyone working a desk job with a computer in a physical office space together is just about as practical as a large group meeting where one or two people speak with no input from others.
Some people may need to be in an office/meeting sometimes but most do not usually and it's a waste of time for the employee and a waste of money for the company. Just my opinion. ;)
It's also basically a pay cut and a huge loss of benefits. What does Rockstar have to say about that?

The article also links to another interesting article that begins by summarizing the disadvantages some employees experienced when the initial switch to working from home happened.
Balancing work and kids at home;
Finding space for a home office and learning new tools;
Workdays at home alone;
The line between work and life blurred.
Number 1 & 2 should not be an issue for most people now. Number 3 & 4 are personal and should not be used as an excuse to implement a company wide policy on everybody.
What does this say to the employee who disagrees with the company return to office "culture"? It says to them they aren''t welcome here. Imagine turning on your computer and being locked out. That's what happened during the Twitter X Corp takeover.

are they just trying to get some people to quit before they do expensive layoffs

Tbh, game studios often require special equipment such as dev kits and high-end PCs for development. It makes sense that they might not want to send this equipment home, especially if it is an unreleased console"s dev kit. Game studios honestly seem more justified in not having WFH
- Dev kits are accessed remotely. High-end PC 's are accessed remotely. Everything is done remotely. Hardware stays on-site. Source? Am game dev who works remotely full-time, using 4K streaming.
  
  Maybe the tools have changed since last I worked in the industry (or maybe we weren't good at using all the features), but I never saw that anyone had remote access to the devkits. I could remote into my workstation, but it surely was not the best way to work.
- I worked for two triple A studios and we have had both our dev kits and high end PCs at home. There are so many tools to encrypt, secure, remote access, manage, etc, that it’s no problem at all. And most are tools these companies are using anyways, in office.
  Both companies actually got MORE productive with work from home. My old company is forcing people back to office, but my new one isn’t. I wonder if it has anything to do with that big office building they just bought…
- All that stuff is not hosted in the work computer, they use virtualization.
- Tbh you shouldn't defend rockstar just because you like their games.
  
  I actually don't like their games. I am speaking as someone who used to work for a AAA, both before and during COVID shelter in place
- Not every dev is compiling code to run on a devkit tho? Also, not gamedev, but surely they're not running a new build every day
  
  Not every dev is compiling code to run on a devkit
  Depends on the studio. There will be a lead platform, and if that platform is a console, then a majority will run on a devkit.
  surely they are not running a new build every day.
  In the studio I worked in, we ran new builds almost twice a day. That doesn't include the iterative changes you make if you are a programmer. If you don't run new builds contantly, that means you aren't doing any actual work if you are on the engineering side. If you are in art you might not really screw around with too many builds. If you are a director or producer, you might not either if you're bad at your job.
- I'm sure you can install an HP anywhere concentrator and remote into the machines from home, networking has solutions for things like this.
- Though, you don't have to force everyone to come in every day, just don't let people take that stuff home, so if they need that stuff, then they come in that day. Videogame devs are actually more likely to be nerds that get full value out of on-line social contact and have even less reason to benefit from seeing colleagues in-person.
  The company should also have secure remote tunneling, so the powerful pc's can be used by even a 10 year old tablet at home if need be. They can save some room and power by not needing those powerful computers set up at a desk with monitors. Have a couple out for the people that want or need to come in, and the rest can be in a server mount configuration.

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