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▲United Wizards of the Coast (self.__VINEXT_RSC_CHUNKS__=self.__VINEXT_RSC_CHUNKS__||[];self.__VINEXT_RSC_CHUNKS__.push("2:I[\"aadde9aaef29\",[],\"default\",1]\n3:I[\"6e873226e03b\",[],\"Children\",1]\n5:I[\"bc2946a341c8\",[],\"LayoutSegmentProvider\",1]\n6:I[\"6e873226e03b\",[],\"Slot\",1]\n7:I[\"3506b3d116f7\",[],\"ErrorBoundary\",1]\n8:I[\"a9bbde40cf2d\",[],\"default\",1]\n9:I[\"3506b3d116f7\",[],\"NotFoundBoundary\",1]\na:\"$Sreact.suspense\"\n:HL[\"/assets/index-BLEkI_5r.css\",\"style\"]\n") target="_blank">unitedwizardsofthecoast.com)
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnuipPQDd_w
I don't work in games, but I am a software developer and a member of the Communications Workers of America. I've also taken leave to help workers in games organize.
I'm seeing a lot of ideological takes that are disconnected from the reality of unions with software developer members today. If anyone has questions about the CWA or game worker organizing campaigns, I'll do my best to answer.
If you assume that most of the crowd that visits this website works in tech or tech-adjacent fields, how can you be against an entity whose main objective is to safeguard and work for your interests over your employers? Unfathomable that people are willing to do so much against their own best interests. Or...they are bots.
https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/feature/everything-you-nee...
>We've created an all-new Games Rules Engine (GRE) that uses sophisticated machine learning that can read any card we can dream up for Magic. That means the shackles are off for our industry-leading designers to build and create cards and in-depth gameplay around new mechanics and unexpected but widly fun concepts, all of which can be adapted for MTG Arena thanks to the new GRE under the hood.
At the time, this claim of using "sophisticated machine learning" to (apparently?) translate natural language card text into code that a rules engine could enforce struck me as obviously fake. Now nearly ten years later, AI is starting to reach a level where this is plausible.
In their letter, the union writes:
>Over the past few years, pressure has ramped up from leadership to adopt LLMs and Gen AI tools in various aspects of our work at WOTC, often over the explicit concerns of impacted employees
I'm curious if this would include fighting against turning WotC's old fanciful claim into a reality as the technology matures?
[1]: https://www.clipsrules.net/
I have no idea what rule 722 has to do with prepared.
Rule 722 is the rule for "Preparation Cards", so I fail to see how it could not be relevant.
The text "its spell" only occur in reminder text, which is not rules text and would not be included in template language.
Are you active in judge forums or social media at all? Huge threads on prepared with these arguments (I didn't come up with the idea as I now longer play or judge).
Regardless of whether you think this one example is confusing, WOTC came out a few years back and said they were sacrificing clarity for more natural language as a development goal and it's clearly noticeable in the cards.
Sorry, throwing out a text because its reminder text is a cop-out, that's the only way 99%+ of players are going to interact with the rules. The rule makes sense when demonstrated but from a logical step-by-step when following what it says on the actual cards it does not actually function in a way that conforms to the way it is supposed to work.
Looking back further, there was confusion during preview season when people were looking at "fake/leaked" mockups that had incorrect text on them, but this also isn't a problem for the issue of "WotC themselves writing systems that can parse card text".
It's a parser + (de)compiler and rules engine which I'm trying to get to 100% coverage over all Standard/Modern/Vintage/Commander legal cards. About 23000 of them are partially supported, while 15k currently work in full (~3k more than what MTGA currently supports, IIRC). It also allows for P2P 4-way multiplayer which Arena unfortunately does not :/
I assume the wording in this letter is referring to using LLMs to generate slop as creative assets like images and music.
The ability to unionize has very little to do with the ideology of the workforce and everything to do with the structure of the industry.
Unions tend to catch on when labor is irreplacable, workplace is large and centralized, if they can halt critical operations beyond their industry (ie railroads, ports, etc), there is low exposure to competition/off shoring, etc. The video game industry itself is not very ripe for unionizatoin.
If everyone at a game developer goes on strike, there is basically no amount of outsourcing or scab labour that can replace them. This is actually probably true of basically all software
Just refusing to share passwords into key systems would be enough to significantly halt any attempt to bring on an entirely new development team
I would be a lot less shocked if Hasbro sends in the Pinkertons to do some "persuasion" in the coming weeks and months:
https://www.dicebreaker.com/categories/trading-card-game/new...
If truckers or dockworkers go on strike there's no food on the shelves, if coal miners go on strike the lights go out, and so on.
As a consequence of this, employers are motivated to make a deal not just by missed opportunities to make money, but also by politicians, other powerful capitalists, and public opinion.
Of course there are plenty of unions where this isn't the case; theatres and hollywood are unionised despite the fact nobody freezes or starves when they go on strike.
Game developers are, I think, closer to the hollywood position than the dockworkers position.
This alone is enough reason for anyone to be up in arms and unionize. Kudos to them for banding together for better working conditions. I hope more big companies follow suit.
It answers a lot of the questions I see being asked in this thread.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic%3A_The_Gathering_Arena
> Our Free Time is Our Own: Currently, if an employee makes anything creative in their free time, with their own resources, Hasbro may claim ownership. What we do in our free time should not be dictated by the company; neither should what we make in our free time be owned by the company.
How common is this in creative fields?
From my perspective this seems outlandish. Imagine doing FOSS work or a side project on your personal computer and your company tries to claim it. Odd...
[1]: https://unitedwizardsofthecoast.com/letter
> have a clause that says that the employer owns everything you do while you’re working for them
Good companies will have a clause that says the employer owns everything you do in the relevant field of the company while working for them, explicitly naming that field.
If you work for a logistics company, you would be able to write your own video editor without any worry. If you work for a not-shitty company.
Three times in my career I've returned hiring agreements with redlines and never once had them questioned or countered.
Yeah, this is my whole point. The rest of your comment, I agree with. In practice you're unlikely to have an issue for something orthogonal and especially something financially worthless.
But you might. There are a lot of people out there that have predatory attitudes towards IP, especially among C-level or would-be-C-level.
And companies that restrict to competing IP do exist.
And even then there's normally a "Sufficiently Different Sector" requirement for those personal projects - which makes sense, but it is inevitably worded vague enough that it would likely require going to court for pretty much any project to show it's not directly related. And that would be near prohibitively expensive for me as an individual if the relationship actually became adversarial.
A handful of states including California disallow this condition.
The common attitude of companies is that they’re paying for the whole of your life inside and outside of “work”, and these Unions are a response to that encroachment (and associated under-compensation in general).
Good on them. Best of luck negotiating a fair contract!
When someone is empowered to work remotely, and is salaried and not held to specific hours, then it's very hard to identify what work is "theirs" and what work is "the company's" in a legally consistent way. Yes, it's usually obvious from context, but context doesn't always carry to a court of law. It can be particularly messy because the kinds of open source projects one contributes to often overlap with the work they do in their day job.
So most companies which are salaried and allow WFH will usually ask employees to explicitly list any project they work on which they don't want owned by the company, with the expectation being that everything unlisted is owned by the company. It's a bit cumbersome, but generally the least bad option.
At our company we have a form to file if we do work outside of hours on OSS or pet projects, and to the best of my knowledge nobody has ever had their application denied.
edit: it's important because it's symmetric - not only does this define what _isn't_ property of the company, it defines what _is_. So if you come up with a clever solution to a problem for a company purpose and introduce it into an OSS project, it doesn't come back to haunt the company.
Any halfway decent company will restrict in the contract to IP that's related to the company's area of business. If you write logistics software, the company will say "we own all logistics software you write". You can't create a competitor. But if you work for a logistics software company and decide to go write a video editor on your own time, the company wouldn't own that.
The problem is there's no clear legal definition of what "logistics software" is. A video editor is a seemingly obvious example of what is not, but what if you came up with a novel optimization technique which is not necessarily only applicable to logistics? Could you spin off that software into a separate business? What about something more fundamental, like tooling? Think about something like Slack, which was just meant to be an internal messaging tool created as part of the development of a video game. Imagine after Slack took off, that an employee claimed that because they had written Slack at least partly outside of working hours and it was not "video game software", the company didn't have ownership of the software.
This is why the common approach is that the company owns everything except anything explicitly carved out, it avoids ambiguities like this.
Having carveouts for obviously not-related software is easy. At a decent company populated by reasonable people, if you wanted to work on something you felt fell into the grey area, you would ask and get a written okay. Which is how it also works at many of the shitty companies! The difference is that the shitty companies there's never a route to do anything, however unrelated, without running it by HR. Because they think they own you.
> Imagine after Slack took off, that an employee claimed that because they had written Slack at least partly outside of working hours and it was not "video game software", the company didn't have ownership of the software.
On the contrary, using a nonzero amount of working hours to work on something pretty clearly makes it company property.
"Shitty" companies have legal obligations to include these kind of clauses though, because investors and board members don't want to deal with a situation where there's exactly this ambiguity about what counts as "obviously not-related software". HR exists to protect the company. What counts as obviously non-related to you may not count as obviously non-related to a board member who hears about the new optimization algorithm you wrote and realizes the company can monetize it.
> On the contrary, using a nonzero amount of working hours to work on something pretty clearly makes it company property.
How recently have you seen a tech employment contract where you were obligated to work exactly 8 to 5 with a 1 hour lunch break? Flexible hours means any hour is potentially a "working hour".
> How recently have you seen a tech employment contract where you were obligated to work exactly 8 to 5 with a 1 hour lunch break? Flexible hours means any hour is potentially a "working hour".
Not what I meant. In the Slack example, it was planned work within the company, made using company resources. Working on something for internal company use that the company has a Jira ticket for is pretty blatantly on the side of "Company time".
> "Shitty" companies have legal obligations to include these kind of clauses though, because investors and board members don't want to deal with a situation
Not wanting to deal with something isn't a legal obligation not to do it. I don't want to deal with filing taxes but that doesn't mean I now have a legal obligation not to file taxes. It's just laziness.
It's easy. Work done on company issued hardware belongs to the company. Everything else does not
See also "anti-moonlighting" and "anti-social media" clauses. Hell, I've seen the odd story of folks being fired/disciplined for their dating profiles before. If the government doesn't tell them no, companies will take every inch they can get.
Whatever you do in your spare time is up to you and your employer has no saying over it, unless he can prove that it negatively impacts your job performance.
I feel like that's .. the reasonable take here? If you don't agree to their conditions, then .. just don't work there?
in practice that is either unenforceable or else a giant waste of the company's money, but it's CYA in case someone doing engineering or creative work decides to rip it off elsewhere.
like Meta ain't gonna try to steal your local cupcakes at the farmer's market side gig
That doesn't mean it is enforceable, though.
During the launch of Windows 8, Msft's moonlighting policy was also part of their Windows App Store strategy: we were all heavily encouraged to make an "Windows Store App-app" so that SteveB could claim MS had N-many apps in its app-store, because that's how Leadership thought they could build credibility vs. Apple's established app store (of course, what actually ended-up happening was hundreds of cr-apps that were just WebView-wrappers over live websites).
In contrast, I understand Apple might have the worst moonlighting policy: I'm told that unless you directly work on WebKit or Darwin then you have to deactivate your GitHub account or else find yourself swiftly dragged onto the proverbial Trash.
There is the famous lawsuit of Mattel suing Bratz, on the basis that the Bratz creator started to work on his new dolls while being employed by Mattel.
I'm not sure how it ended, but it wasn't dismissed right away and they spent years in court.
That's at least reasonable considering Bratz is a competitor.
If the Bratz creator started working on them while working for a company that made water filters, that would not be reasonable.
It’s called “broad assignment of IP.” Some jurisdictions disallow that clause.
And then of course there is the distinct but thematically similar anti-moonlighting clause.
Overreaching but common. Like most things, lawyers will take as much as they can possibly get.
The bigger the company is, the more power they have typically.
If you want to make more money or get better benefits or otherwise negotiate a better contract, you need more leverage.
Unionizing is one way to gain more negotiation power by negotiating together with your co-workers instead of individually.
It also makes it easier to address cross cutting concerns like safety and fairness.
Eg, that they necessitated so called "rubber rooms" like these in the NYC public schools, where teachers got paid to do nothing while waiting on arbitration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reassignment_center
That's in a country with a median household income of $84k [2]
I think it's understandable why someone would feel they were doing well at bargaining and negotiating if they were taking home 4.7x as much as their neighbours and loved ones.
Folks in the games industry by all accounts have really shitty pay and working conditions so I can 110% understand why they'd unionise.
[1] https://www.levels.fyi/?tab=levels&compare=Google%2CMeta%2CA... [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
Collective negotiation power can help with all of these, if we let it. It doesn't just stop at compensation.
If they're not, then you're just caught between two powerful, unaccountable entities. You have to join the Union, after all. I see a lot of folks in Education who feel that the Union simply Exists and does not really help them (their employers being rather sympathetic as well).
When they are, of course the Worker benefits. Healthcare and Airline employees seem to fall into this camp.
All of my friends that are teachers do admit their union has flaws, but also are very grateful to have strong contracts, benefits, and people willing to fight for them when the school system tries to screw them over.
I have a pretty simple litmus test for them: are they opposed to H1B hiring, and would they have defended James Damore when he got ousted from Google for basically being autistic? I think the answer for many of them is a resounding no.
On opposing H1B as they are implemented now I agree with you, but in a hypothetical world with tech unions James Damore would still be advocating for large swathes of fellow union members to be removed. He was being misogynistic not “basically being autistic”.
But whether or not you agree with him, you should agree with the idea that one of the primary jobs of a union would have been to give him a fair defense regardless of whether the union leadership likes him or not. I don't think any of the tech unions would do that.
edit: Let me put it this way. Suppose you make an post in an internal politics discussion forum saying that you oppose the H1B program as it is, and then get fired because people claim that you hate immigrants and want your fellow coworkers to be deported. Do you think these unions would defend you?
Uh, how? This might be a country thing but you don't have to join any union in my country. You do, if they represent your interests. Big companies have multiple, competing unions, and the anarchists (which refuse state subsidies and are fully self-funded) are pretty good at what they do.
If you have to join a union isn't that essentially a racket?
Having a union (assuming that the union is run well),
- ensures a better product for customers
- ensures better working conditions for workers
- ensures better pay and benefits from workers (at least in programming roles, the games industry is generally underpaid compared to developers in other industries)
- provides protections against undue firings and layoffs
I would be curious to know why you don't think a union would be good for these people.
There's not a lot I can say that isn't covered in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_union
2) There is already a major labor surplus for video games. It's famously hard to get into and low paying because of it. There is no doubt someone else is willing to step in.
A union represents workers in a company, nothing to do with society. If workers strike the company stops making money, that's their leverage
It’s the leverage that the nascent union has over the company owners and management, who presumably still want to make money.
That being said the video game industry does have a deluge of naive young people willing to sell their bodies and souls for their dream, so I don’t have high hopes for this group.
Oh, they definitely deserve a union.
>unstable and poorly paid, low status job. Abused and exploited often.
Hmm… their job doesn’t really seem “cool enough” to have a union. They should just take it and shut up. I mean, they’re losers after all.
I’m sort of joking but it’s interesting how so many people “gatekeep” unions when people in unglamorous lines of work need unions more than almost anyone else.
I can't speak to this particular group, but Hasbro (parent company of WOTC) has been a horribly short-sighted steward of Magic and DND, so perhaps this will encourage other WOTC divisions to unionize as well.
For tech, it's largely a different set of reasons, like high wages, no real grievances per se, and the ease of transferring to other companies, plus the work is all virtual so there is no reason why companies cannot outsource to another area where the union has no power, if the workers are just on their computers for work anyway. This latter reason is actually exactly why Netflix is investing heavily in South Korean productions.
As for what solutions union provide - I have already explained. They exist to protect workers' interests. They do not exist to solve company's problems. That is the job of the company.
You said "It is to make sure that the company has done its absolute best to find another solution to the problem," and I am asking, what solutions have unions "made sure" that the companies have done instead of layoffs? I am looking for concrete examples as I often hear this claim but I'm not sure what a union can do if the solution is layoffs, so my question is, what other solutions are there?
My naive view: in the US, unions are all about creating another set of assholes to counterbalance the existing assholes. In the EU, there's at least some thought towards "hey, maybe we shouldn't all be assholes?" (Or at least, not all of the time.)
That doesn't address your question of why it doesn't happen in the tech sector, but perhaps my anecdotal opinion is widespread enough to be added to your (already good) set of hypotheses?
As I said for tech workers it's a different set of reasons.
In Canada, unions are often shop-wide with no mechanism to opt out, which makes them very sticky and allows them to grow predatory if they can maintain enough corruption or apathy. I'm led to believe that many US states have similar problems, but that's only based on how American unions are portrayed in news and fiction.
Also, flip the hierarchy: a business that puts employees first and profits for owners last can often have a shit ton of profits for owners. Executing isn't easy and requires wisdom and work - but that's why owners are paid the big bucks.
If owners can't hack it... Then it's a skill issue. Get gud.
Owners can make 100x that shit ton if they put profits for owners first, so why wouldn’t they do that instead? Out of the goodness of their own hearts?
Why do you hate them, when you recognize that they are general the result of abuse? I'll cop to unions not always being great; the rules can be counterproductive, or sometimes limiting, but they are up to the union members, so at the end of the day there is some kind of reason for them.
And the second paragraph - barring ESOP or employee-owned co-ops a union is pretty much the only game in town other than crossing your fingers and hoping the company owners, or board, or stock market are capable of pulling their head out of their ass. this can be a big lift.
In the short term all the franchises have proved incredibly popular (just like in Fortnight), but in the long run I think it means the death of the game (just like where Fortnight is headed).
The game(s) are more popular than ever, especially D&D
Also: Yes, Hasbro did some shit, but they also had to relent and CC their SRD. This all happened years ago.
I say this as a committed Pathfinder player who hasn't seen a good reason to return to D&D (PF2e is good enough). D&D is doing numbers and no one cares that us nerds moved on because of weak tea from the previous decade.
It's their house now, and it's fine.
Several of the top D&D people who were advocating for players resigned around this time.
WOTC/Hasbro since relented under this pressure, but the bridge was already burned. My group hasn't played a D&D campaign since. We switched to Pathfinder 2e and found that it was a better system altogether.
Every year seems to be the best-selling year so far. Magic: the Gathering is Hasbro's primary revenue source.
And look, I don't like the sheer amount of product they're pumping out every year now. But I realize I'm clearly in the minority opinion based on sales.
EDIT: it is incredible how hostile HN is now to ant-union sentiment. None of the would-be founders here would support unionization at their companies. :)
>Layoff Protections
Businesses need the ability to layoff employees when markets change and projects are no longer viable.
>Remote Work Protections
Data has shown proven benefits of in person time and in a competitive environment such as gaming every advantage matters.
>Generative AI Protections
AI is revolutionizing all industries. If you refuse to use it to disrupt yourself someone else will.
These demands are very dangerous to the company and should not be considered.
Companies often expect employees to give advance notice of termination of employment, but employers do not feel beholden to their employees to reciprocate. This is unreasonable.
> Remote Work Protections
Many companies showed improved productivity when people were given flexibility. Claims to the contrary are often not backed up by actual data outside of cherry-picked results chosen by those in managerial positions.
> Generative AI Protections
MTG is a creative endeavor, and its output is protected by copyright. Copyright is, so far (thankfully), only enforceable when the media is produced by humans. Protections against the use of generative AI are not only good for workers' long-term productivity, but also for legal purposes.
---
I think maybe you should stop licking boots and start understanding why any of our society works today at all. As a hint, every protection you have ever enjoyed (40-hour work weeks, pensions or retirement funds, health insurance guarantees, mandatory paid time off, health and safety regulations, and so on) was paid for in blood by someone a company decided was not more important than profit. Unions are a fundamental capability by workers to ensure their own safety. Shockingly, I think it more reasonable to rely on the interpretations of those working in these jobs who want to unionize than some random person online who thinks "no wait, but think of the poor endangered company! :("
At a company like WotC you will get more than 2 weeks of pay worth of severance which is more than the employee equivalent of providing 2 weeks notice. There is also things like WARN in California which require much more than a 2 weeks notice when a doing a layoff.
>Many companies showed improved productivity when people were given flexibility.
Except that individual productivity is very often not the bottleneck. The goal should be making the process productive and efficient.
>only enforceable when the media is produced by humans
Hollywood has used AI and other machine produced graphics for special effects for years and that does not prevent the studio from having copyright over the movie.
>stop licking boots
Acknowledging how much value companies bring to both society and investors does not require licking boots or thinking they are a "poor endangered company."
Nobody can force a worker to work, but an employer is often forced to employ someone they'd rather not. Maybe sometimes this makes sense, but it's actually the exact opposite of what you're trying to claim.
If remove work is so productive, then management should choose remote work without any coercion. If you want more benefits, then just be honest and don't make claims that you know better than management about what is productive. Copyright applies to works that are partially produced by AI and partially produced by humans. Refusing to use the tools that everyone else is using to be more productive is just going to make companies into dinosaurs. The union is also a corporation, which makes profit for its officers. Maybe you should stop licking its boots? I'm not a member of any union. The protections I enjoy are because of the law, which applies to everyone, and because of the economic situation. If the economic situation changes, I will be fired no matter what unions or governments do, the same way saddle-makers were after the rise of the automobile.Unions aren't really there for customer service. Nonetheless, there's often times where the worker demand benefit customers too: Nurses fight for better nurse:patient ratios, benefiting patients too; teachers fight for the resources for them to teach well; starbucks baristas fight for a work pace that allows them to actually engage customers like the brand used to offer. etc
The extreme is, are you only happy when your products are created in sweatshops, or, worse, by slaves?
I'm glad the employees are exercising their rights to organize. Whether this turns out to be good for the business and for customers remains to be seen over time.
Sure, they won't get to be customers any longer if that happens, but at least it will increase the likelihood that the products they have available are not the cause of other people's suffering.
High earners benefit from unions if union rules are made which benefit high earners.
The most well-known example of a high-earner union is SAG-AFTRA and they provide benefits to established performers, the big one being name exclusivity. e.g. even if your real life birth certificate says your name is "Tom Cruise" you cannot advertise your name as "Tom Cruise". Obviously, actors are still negotiating their own pay.
Another good one is the NFL Players Association which capped the rookie pay scale in 2011 to ensure the salary cap was going more toward veterans, people already in the union. However they still independently negotiate their compensation.
I don't know what people would want out of a tech union specifically but the idea that "union = payscale based on seniority" just plain isn't true.
Strongly disagree with this, and I'm in 'tech management' now so I'm not saying this out of self-preservation.
Tech workers are similar to athletes in skill disparity IMO. A handful of superstars makes a massive difference. Look at those superstar AI developers who are allegedly getting 8 or 9 figure compensation from Meta etc. They're still technically "just" tech workers.
??? This doesn't make any sense. There's a hell of a lot more background actors, which you can call fungible, than there are Tom Cruises, but they're all covered by SAG-AFTRA. "Tech workers are fungible except for the ones that aren't" is tautological and doesn't support your argument.
Because I gave examples of unions which contain and are beneficial to high wage earners, and you dismissed them as irrelevant because tech employees are "fungible" except for the ones who aren't. Except those unions also contain far more "fungible" employees (background actors, backups, practice squad players) than they do star actors and quarterbacks, so it's a close comparison. There's currently 2,314 members of the NFL Players' Association but only 32 starting NFL quarterbacks.
Fungible means all employees are the same, that's the exact definition of fungibility. If certain employees have a measurably different impact on delivery, that is the definition of non-fungible. Just because most employees deliver near-average performance does not change this--it's tautologically expected!
It's not a nitpick. There are some industries and jobs where employees truly are fungible. There's never going to be a security guard or Starbucks barista or janitor who does such an amazing job that they're able to negotiate significantly higher wages than their peers because of how much value they deliver. "Software developer" is not that kind of job, at least not right now.
> my overall point does not change that tech unions will depress wages for high earners.
And this goes back to the original point which is that unions only depress wages for high earners if the unions negotiate terms which depress wages for high earners. As has been pointed out in the thread there are many existing examples of unions for collections of high-earning employees.
https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/your-money-matters/going-for-go...