John Carmack is not a "game developer", John Carmack is an independently wealthy man who sometimes develops game engines (or VR tech, as the case may be).
Picking your random, above-99th-percentile literally-owns-multiple-Ferraris outlier and using him to discredit people who might be pulling $50K-$60K a year as line employees is downright disingenous.
John Carmack got to where he is by being a game developer. If you discount all wildly successful people in a field that is known to be a winner takes all environment then you won't have that many successful people to listen to.
John Carmack got to where he is by owning a game development company. That does not imply he didn't work at it and it doesn't imply that he didn't work hard but the difference between capital and labor is obvious and that is precisely what a union seeks to address.
(He's also a genius. And good for him for that. Most people aren't.)
He talks about this in the video. In his own experience in his studios he never noticed someone being unfairly pressured to work more than they wanted, and he had colleagues who worked 9 to 5 and who did just fine. He also claims that from people in the industry he spoke to, most people under these situations choose to work overtime because they value their work a lot, and that he doesn't buy into social engineering arguments that people are pressured into doing it because otherwise they'd get fired.
"Never noticed" is doing a lot of work for you there. Making line employees work more to achieve goals that cannot otherwise be reached except by pushing those employees to crunch is what managers are for. Why would an executive or a founder "notice" this? The work's getting done, what else do they care about?
It's possible that iD was well-run when he was there. (And, from what I've anecdotally heard, that's probably true--Todd Hollenshead gets a lot of respect from folks I know!) That doesn't mean other studios are run so well and it doesn't mean that Carmack's anecdotes cancel out, or even meaningfully put into question, those of people not in his rarefied circles. There are a lot of game developers out there and most don't have nearly the funding or the schedule luxuries that iD always did pre-Bethesda, when Carmack was most involved.
well, if he's right then people might just reject the union. if his experience is biased and/or anecdotal, we'll find out the truth. either way, no point in trying to undermine or discredit grassroots unionization efforts.
The article isn’t describing a grassroots unionization effort. The CWA, a large external organization which expects to benefit from the creation of game developer unions, is pumping in an unknown amount of resources and funding.
We should be quick to encourage genius outliers, but thats not most people, and those people shouldn’t be forced into death marches to ship games. The two concerns aren’t antithetical. Major industries like sports and entertainment, both of which are a heavy mixture of average and high-performers, are already unionized without any real drag on the exceptionally talented nor their compensation.
But it’s still an important example, because a union would not have allowed John Carmack to exist, and we would have none of his fruits. If you read Masters of Doom, it will be obvious why.
Yeah, a union definitely would have meant that half a dozen friends couldn't quit their employer and go work for themselves. That's definitely how it works. Because unions are slavery.
Why are you bad-faithing your way around this entire discussion?
OK, fine, then, I'll bite. If that's not the "claim" you want people to extract from your drive-bys, then please substantiate: how--exactly--would that evil specter of a union prevented Carmack and his friends from founding iD to make Keen, Doom, and Quake? Be specific.
There is already a book that details the origin story, but like most things, happenstance and early opportunities play a big role.
Carmack would have never met Romero or the others, who first worked for SoftDisk, and were later allowed to cherry pick “cool” kids willing to work crazy overtime and spin out their own business unit called Gamers Edge, much to the dismay of the senior developers. That’s where they made Keen originally. According to the story, the rest of the developers actually did “organize” and threatened to quit en masse because they were jealous of the special treatment that Carmack and Romero were getting. The owner had to tell them, like it or not, Gamers Edge was what was paying their salaries and he had no choice.
iD would not have existed without Gamers Edge, and Gamers Edge would not have existed without SoftDisk.
Wolf3d and Doom would not have existed without both of them. And the world would be very different without those.
Carmack is smart and might have done something else cool, perhaps in a different industry with a different group, but it wouldn’t have been Wolfenstein or Doom. He would have been unemployable because he could not stand college, and he would likely not have started his own company, because business and management was what he detested and relied on his partners for.
John Carmack was hired as a starry eyed novice without degree. A union would probably prohibit such things by enacting a high minimum wage and so on.
Edit: Since you probably missed it, the question where how unions would prevent John Carmack from existing as he does now. John Carmack entered the gaming industry as a low skilled cheap abused worker, if he couldn't have done that at a young age chances are he would never have started his company and so on. Being able to work for 3 years instead of finishing your degree is an option unions likely would close.
Picking your random, above-99th-percentile literally-owns-multiple-Ferraris outlier and using him to discredit people who might be pulling $50K-$60K a year as line employees is downright disingenous.