[Michael Saba] - DOOM Eternal, Counterculture, and How We Talk About Labor

[artdeco]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfroFmy6Z2U

[Mort Strudel]

I feel like this video really meanders around without a very coherent thesis, you can tell by how he calls it "how we talk about labor" while only discussing labor or anything directly related to labor for a tiny percentage of the video. But most of the video is talking about doom, and how he prefer a smaller-scale indie approach. And that's fine, being disappointed in changes to an IP that's important to you is perfectly valid. But given that the indie market does exist, and is producing the smaller projects that he's interested in, I'm not really sure where the problem is at an industry scale? Indy projects exist, and so do big budget ones. You'll probably not get a triple a game that feels like it was made by a small team, because it's not. But the work of individuals still shines through in good games like DOOM 2016, just as he said, and the larger budgets allow them to do things that wouldn't be possible in a 90s startup. Obviously the shitty treatment of employees by many big companies is awful but the connection he makes between "big budget game development makes it harder to glorify auteurs" and "the games industry is suffering from poor worker treatment" is remarkably flimsy. Hell, even employees in many indie studios suffer from the same thing. There's much more meaningful criticism to be made of the big budget gaming industry than "they have a big budget"

also the jab at people not liking shitty monetization is weird

[Azza]

most of his points are not exclusive to the game industry, its an issue in nearly every workplace in similar ways.

[GalaxyMan]

Indie game developers are almost always working extra time and sacrificing their health to push out the games.

Unfortunately working overtime is a symptom of our extremely competitive society(especially in the US) . There will always be people willing to do that extra work and sacrificing their health, social life, etc...