this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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Starfield
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Of all the things to get upset about, the game leveraged too many studios to produce too many assets is a weird one.
Luckily for that poster there's a bunch of indie games where the end credit screen is barely one full page. He has lots of people he can support instead of going with Bethesda and their contracted studios.
I think it's more they're upset about exploiting sweatshop labor though...?
4chan is all about blaming bad stuff in computers to 'underpaid indian laborers who barely know how to copypaste'. It's not about the exploitation they're upset about.
Always found that argument kinda weird, do you think the people working in video game development in Vietnam would prefer to be unemployed? I know them, they like their jobs. They want to work. And they will switch jobs to a better one when it's available. But until then they want the money
let us presume that Video Game N has 100 currency in it budget.
The studio producing Video Game N spends 90 currency on essentially nothing, by purchasing contracts with shell companies owned by their own board of investors, then they take the remaining 10 currency and offshore basically ALL of the actual productive work to 50 developers. Those 50 developers must split the 10 currency between each other while collectively doing 100 currency's worth of work.
I want them to get paid 100 currency.
I do not think "they should be grateful to get 1/100th of what they deserve" is a productive or helpful position to hold.
If the available budgets of these games were not squandered on laundering and graft, and less spread thin across a vast army of people who barely get to take home pennies on the hour, it would be a good thing, you see.
And even if you can't have empathy for sweatshop workers who are getting paid 1/100th of what they're worth, I think it's inarguable that a studio that devotes the smallest possible fraction of its budget to producing a game will turn out an overall worse product than one developed with the full budget.
And then we wonder why games from "AAA" studios kinda suck now.
Well there's our problem: they rigged the budget for maximum graft.
Theres a difference between a good employer and abusive employer. And countries without strong labor laws tend to have abusive employers.