Cleanliness is booming too, but cleaning persons also live in poverty.
It's because:
(a) we don't compensate jobs based on their difficulty or the financial success of the product, but on how hard it is to find people to do them when we need them.
If there were 100 qualified surgeons for every patient needing an operation, and would stampede each other for a chance to work and get paid, we'd pay them $25/hour too.
(b) we allow businesses to profit wildly while not paying enough (by exploiting (a)), because we have the taboo that not meddling with the market is the best course of action. A more englightened society that didn't pay too much attention to economy pundits working for rich people, might find a way for better revenue sharing with employees...
(b) Minimum wage and safe working conditions are a thing in most developed countries.
However, enforcement is another story. While Japan's prefectural minimum wages range from ¥714 to ¥932 per hour (6.71+$) for all workers, that’s often ignored.
> , but on how hard it is to find people to do them when we need them.
This isn't even the case. Last season in my country fruits were rotting in the fields cause nobody was there to pick them up. Did farmers increase salaries in order to get more fruit pickers? No.
Here, I suspect the obvious in the anime industry, like in many entertainment sectors including VFX: salary fixing between studios to keep pays low.
> If there were 100 qualified surgeons for every patient needing an operation, and would stampede each other for a chance to work and get paid, we'd pay them $25/hour too.
Given how opaque the healthcare industry is when it comes to cost for non elective surgeries, I doubt costs would go down even if you multiplied the number of surgeons by 1000. Case points: there are loads of restaurants yet the hospital will steal bill a meal 20 times what it would cost in the nearby restaurant.
> This isn't even the case. Last season in my country fruits were rotting in the fields cause nobody was there to pick them up. Did farmers increase salaries in order to get more fruit pickers? No.
Is the fruit worth picking if salaries need to be increased to get workers? In a lot of cases the answer is no.
A lot of work only makes sense at a particular salary. If market salaries are above that, the work just isn't done.
In a competitive market long term subsides don’t actually benefit the industry’s profit margins. Suppose we subsidize toilet paper, suddenly prices drop and people might start using toilet paper for random other stuff if it’s cheap. However, the industry would simply expand until things stayed about the same.
Where farm subsides play a role is dampening the boom bust cycle.
There's also a very big national security concern. Each country should be able to grow enough food to support it's people. If it can't, it literally faces the threat of starvation in the event of war or natural disaster.
Far from 1:1, like everything there are diminishing returns from fertilizer use etc. So the efficiency per unit of corn etc would be pushed up as the effective price* declines. The price gets pushed up if insufficient food supply gets produced, but demand in a world of obesity is somewhat elastic.
Net result fewer workers, a shift in which farms are profitable, and a ripple effect up the supply chain, but most bankruptcy would be from farms that do so sooner. Aka they would have been bankrupt in a 10 years and now it happens in 5.
*Effective price being the sales price plus total subsidies.
Modeling such interactions is the entire point of economics. We focus far to much on the math but very complex economic system really can be modeled rather accurately. Farm subsidies have been studied extensively and like all long term subsidies end up being harmful to the overall economy.
Approximation don’t have issues with the halting problem only exact solution do. Your argument no more meaningful than suggesting useful simulation of fluid flows is impossible as you can’t keep track of all the individual atoms.
The difference is that you can bound any macroscopic quantity in fluid dynamics even if you can't solve the equations, however you can't put a bound on iterative processes. Or have economists figured out busy beaver numbers too?
I guess it was only a matter of time before economists stopped misunderstanding physics and started misunderstanding computer science. I mean there's not much prestige left in physics since the end of the cold war. Are we going to see a Turing prize in economics like the Nobel prize?
This is by design, you don't want your farms to underproduce for even a single season. Subsidizing them is worth it. However, we can always talk about whether the current subsidy structure is good for us. I don't think USA's obsession with corn is healthy.
Fruit picking is a very small part of the cost. Doubling the pay of the pickers wouldn't double the price of the fruit in the stores. Most likely, they'd cost about 10 cents extra or something. Easily worth it.
Whenever the milk price is low, we get farmer's protests that they don't get enough for their milk. Turns out they get 9 cents per liter for which I pay more than a euro. You could double their pay, include it in the price, and I wouldn't care.
You say that and yet they opted to shut down production as opposed to raising wages. That seems to be a better indicator of the underlying reality than your opinion.
I think part of the consideration is that if they pay fruit pickers more now, they fear they may have to pay them more in the future as well. It's also possible they simply refuse to pay fruit pickers more because they strongly believe fruit pickers don't deserve better pay.
There are often a lot more factors at play in these sort of things. Some rational, some maybe not so much.
So they set a whole season's profits on fire to stick it to seasonal workers? That seems so irrational as to require at least a smidgen of evidence to take seriously.
“The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country.”
Yeah, except if fruit is left rotting in the fields, then the supply could well be overabundant anyway and the profit margin isn't worth even that small cost for the workers. Absent evidence to the contrary, I will believe that business owners are chiefly rational actors.
Fruit picking is a large part of the farmers' cost. All the extra cost of transportatation, storage, wholesale logistics, retail and markup matters for the retail price, but that's not relevant - the farmer is competing for a tiny share of that retail price, and if that extra ten cents goes out of their share that easily makes it unprofitable.
Your example with milk is a very good illustration - something that raises the farmers costs by a few cents is much more important than what it might seem based on the fact that the difference is small compared t owhat the retail buyer pays.
All the leverage that farmers have can't get them more than 9 cents/liter. That's it, there's no hope for them to earn 18 cents/liter - sure, the wholesalers probably could, but why would they gift money to other businesses without any need to do so? So if your milk production process gets 1 cent/liter more expensive (but your competitors, possibly far away, are still willing to keep the same price), you can't get 10 cents/liter, it simply wrecks your profit margin - if your profit margin was 11% (1 cent/liter profit out of 9 cents/liter revenue), you might as well go out of business since you won't be earning anything.
Actually, in developing countries there is a lot of money to be made by optimizing fruit picking and pruning afterwards.
Mango farms are a pretty good example. Old farmers have grown their trees very tall and let the fruit grow as big as possible. It is very difficult for pickers to harvest the fruit. If you train the pickers to prune the trees and ensure a consistent size you can often plant more trees, have each tree bear more but smaller fruit with superior yield.
Because of the decreased height fruit pickers can harvest more fruit per shift and the risk of fruit falling to the ground and only being used in food processinng is minimized. Overall it's a net gain for poor farmers and fruit pickers in Africa and consumers benefit from a greater availability mangos.
These techniques are very common in developed countries though.
Salaries for fruit pickers didn't go up because demand for fruit pickers didn't go up. The farmers knew that they were screwed no matter what they did- if they paid the pickers more and tried to pass the costs on, they wouldn't be able to sell the fruit, and if they paid the pickers more but ate the cost, they wouldn't actually net a profit. So they were going to lose money no matter what, and did it in the least-impact way possible (let the fruit rot).
So, why didn't the growers offer better wages to get their fruit picked? Were they ambivalent because of insurance? Or perhaps they thought raising wages was futile? Some other reason?
price elasticity[1] might be an issue. Fruit picking is seasonal work, so even if the wage were attractive you'll have a tough time finding people willing to quit their current job just so they earn slightly more picking fruits.
To a first approximation: the value of the labor is a ceiling on how much you can be paid to do it. The availability of laborers determines the floor of the price of labor.
> Last season in my country fruits were rotting in the fields cause nobody was there to pick them up. Did farmers increase salaries in order to get more fruit pickers? No.
Probably because raising the wages would cost them more than the loss of the harvest since the price per tonne of fruit was already decided by long term contracts and there were no financial penalties for spoilage / mis-harvests in these contracts.
Ever since food became a global commodity, the conditions in food manufacturing became a ruthless race to the bottom - with the worst offender being meatpacking. The John Oliver segment last weekend was horrifying to watch, even from an European viewpoint (where we also have a history of exploitation and animal cruelty, but nowhere even close to that).
I think pay is largely a matter of power. Even bad managers get paid well. CEOs that drive their company to bankruptcy often still get massive bonuses on the way out. There are lots of people who want to do that job, and the people doing it aren't always good at it, yet still get paid a ton.
The worst paid are always the most powerless.
Of course having rare skills that are in high demand also gives you power, but it's one of many kinds of power that can give you more control over your own salary.
> This isn't even the case. Last season in my country fruits were rotting in the fields cause nobody was there to pick them up.
It is the case, but leaves some assumptions on the table. Namely that you understand that price exists to be a deterrent, and when price rises too high you will decide that you don't need something anymore.
The fruits rotted in the fields because they weren't worth picking. There was no need to pay anyone to do a job that wasn't deemed worthwhile to do in the first place.
> The fruits rotted in the fields because they weren't worth picking.
That may be true, but why weren't they worth picking? In agriculture, large buyers often enforce artificially low prices (monopsony). Even if farmers were willing to pay pickers more, there's no point if the buyers refuse to pay a fair price that accounts for increased wages.
The exact same reason. As the price rises in the grocery store, you and I stop buying those fruits. When we stop buying them, there is no need to produce even more of what is already not being purchased.
> This isn't even the case. Last season in my country fruits were rotting in the fields cause nobody was there to pick them up. Did farmers increase salaries in order to get more fruit pickers? No.
Sad that this is one of the plot points of The Grapes Of Wrath and is still happening today.
This same story is playing out in the Videogame Industry.
That industry is arguably booming too, making more than it ever has in the past and growing wildly year over year.
And yet game programmers make some of the lowest salaries among all devs, last I checked. Especially at entry level.
To me, that entire industry seems geared towards grabbing fresh faced grads who are loaded up on dreams of making games, putting them in infinite crunch, and discarding them later when they are burned out.
Not only do they make some of the lowest salaries in the industry, they work the longest hours as well. Employers that allow people to "work on their passions" use that as a bargaining chip to lower salaries.
"If you have large profits you should share more with your employees [1]" could also be a reality encoded into law woth harsh penalties for doing otherwise...
([1] "And don't try to bypass it by building in another country and then come to sell your wares here")
gee, shouldn't they be required to reduce their costs for the consumer, first? a lot of the folks buying video games have even less money than video game developers.
If you have large profits you should share more with your employees [1]" could also be a reality encoded into law woth harsh penalties for doing otherwise
Hollywood is already one step ahead of you [1]. No reason game studios wouldn’t follow suit, given a law like that to incentivize them.
Hollywood accounting doesn't actually work anymore. It depends, in part, on the people getting played not being willing to sue for their correct share and just taking their lumps.
In part, this is because so many people were burned in the past that it's now standard for contracts to include provisions specifying which profits the talents/investors are getting a % of. There's also many A-list talent that simply refuse to work for a studio which uses Hollywood accounting. And finally, the public-trading status of so many studios today basically renders Hollywood accounting impossible at a legal and financial level.
But the primary killer of the Hollywood accounting system is the big switch to streaming, in which royalties/etc are paid upfront (at a time-value discount) rather than over time, which essentially eliminates all of the opportunity to include "costs" (like usurious interest or marketing expenses) that had been used to generate paper losses on otherwise successful films.
A lot of what you said doesn’t apply to game developers or animators in the anime industry. Hollywood workers, famous and otherwise, are all represented by powerful unions. Game developers and anime animators (cf. western animators) are not.
The Hollywood guilds were fine with Hollywood accounting for decades. It was individual actors and directors and producers that filed the lawsuits that made Hollywood accounting too much of a risk for the big studios.
And more importantly, unlike Hollywood talent, game developers and anime animators as a group have never been entitled to a share of the profits of the products they helped create.
Would you also argue that when companies need additional funding during hard times or to expand, the employees should be forced by law to invest their own money into the company? With harsh penalties if they refuse?
If not, then it seems like someone else is taking all the risk but the employees are reaping all the rewards.
It would be great for me personally if my employer was forced to share his profits with me during the good times. But the reality is that during the hard times - when there's a global pandemic for example - he's the one who has to remortgage his house and max out his credit cards to make payroll, whereas I'm just a guy who can walk away with a month's notice.
Right, putting your time into working for a struggling company isn't taking any risk, and the executives deserve further rewards than just their salary.
Oh boo hoo for the ownership class, somebody might have to sell a yacht to make payroll!
They got 40 years of sending labor to developing countries, dismantled our infrastructure to privatize it, ALREADY got a 1.9T tax break (from Trump, even though almost all economists were AGAINST it) now they might have to SCROUNGE DEEP as...as people flock to the information services they largely own?
Boo hoo for them! Oh no! They might lose a house, something the millions of people who are going to be evicted as soon as the moratoriums end will also get to experience! They'll be left without their SUMMER home! What a terrible loss! We'd better give them another tax loophole!
I know programmers are insulated and have a very warped view of the world, but let's not forget we're (generally) labor, and let's not lick the boot that's on all of labor's collective necks TOO hard, neh?
The reality of LTD companies is precisely that investors don’t have to do that. If the company goes under, well, too bad; they will take some of the fat accumulated in good years, and start again. That’s the whole point of modern capitalism: the capitalist is insulated from the worst outcomes of his enterprise.
At the moment, the risk/reward equation is unbalanced. For owners, it goes from outsized risk at startup to outsized reward at success; for employees, it goes from outsized risk at startup to moderate risk at success
Owners can (and do) draw a salary in the same way as employees, and don’t lose any life saving they have not invested, same as employees. If the business die they end up without a source of income, same as employees. If the business succeeds they reap much bigger rewards than employees. I should know, I was one.
>Would you also argue that when companies need additional funding during hard times or to expand, the employees should be forced by law to invest their own money into the company
What, you mean, like, bailouts? Because we do bailouts. Only difference is that, while the taxpayers pay, they see no return.
No, because that was their risk to take in starting a business and if it fails the worst position they are in is the exact position their employees were always in. Businesses should have no guarantees, individual people on the other hand probably should, if not for moral or ethical reasons, just for the fact that it improves our economy, our culture, and out entire society.
Artificially supporting failing businesses has negative consequences upon society, supporting a struggling individual has positive benefits to society.
So you agree that business takes on the risk, but then go around to say profits should then be redistributed by law? Where is the incentive to do business then? Why is artificially supporting failing businesses bad, yet artificially punishing successful ones not?
Strangely there is always lots of talk about “profit sharing” and not “profit and loss sharing”. And I’ve never had to sign a business loan guarantee as an employee, but I’ve done so as a business owner.
> Strangely there is always lots of talk about “profit sharing” and not “profit and loss sharing”.
That's because corporate limited liability shields stakeholders from losses beyond their sunk costs.
As an employee, you probably are close to last in line behind most of the other creditors, and may have to just write off that last (missed) paycheck. But that paycheck you are never going to get is the full extent of your liability for the company's losses, even theoretically.
Not that it encompasses all the risks you're exposed to (time not working, looking for a new job, etc.) But those are the same regardless.
> As an employee, you probably are close to last in line behind most of the other creditors, and may have to just write off that last (missed) paycheck.
you're simply making things up. stop it.
you can look up the hierarchy of creditors, and see where employee compensation lands. they're fourth priority, after domestic support obligations (probably not relevant to a business), administrative expenses (gotta pay the courts and court-appointed bankruptcy trustee), and claims from involuntary bankruptcy.
employee benefits are in the fifth priority. there are four more priority levels (6 through 10), and then all of the unsecured creditors.
Look, businesses don't go bankrupt completely out of the blue. There are so many ways to ensure that various parties get their pound of flesh while loading up the company with additional liabilities that it is ridiculous.
Sure, technically employees are near the top, but that doesn't help if all the cash and assets are long gone.
I think most people agree with this in general, but the difficulty is in the specifics. How large of a profit are we talking? How much sharing do we expect?
On the one hand we want to incentivize risk-taking and entrepreneurship. On the other, we recognize that it takes a village to launch a successful company, and we want to share the wealth.
On the one hand we recognize that all work is not equally valuable. On the other, we we value people beyond their work.
Abstract discussion of this is always disappointing and policy based on abstract discussion is always disastrous. I really wish we could be more precise in our language, because then we would at least recognize the tremendous difficulty at hand.
It is encoded into law, except instead of sharing just with employees, you share it with everyone through taxes.
There's no reason that an employee who just happens to work at a firm that becomes successful should get profits from that, while a similar employee doing the same work who just happens to work at a failing company should get nothing. How could you justify that?
Putting business profit taxes in a big pot and spending them on everyone evens this out.
Fundamentally all you're really saying is you want corporate taxes to be higher. Which is arguable given the well-understood negative consequences of that which hurt everyone (e.g. taxes dissuade business formation, which means no jobs at all).
Big difference is that Startups usually offer some amount of equity. Instead of just being exploited, you're gambling on taking a lower salary now and having it pay off later.
It never really pays off later for game programmers.
Often the dice are loaded, you can find many stories on here on about some financial trickery whereby the options become low value or worthless as the founders and VC's cash out. I personally evaluate them at $0 because of this. It's a shame too because that sounds like my ideal work setup.
What startups fail to disclose is that the equity they offer is not the same class as the investors have, even though they are taking a huge risk of the startup failing.
Even if the equity is in the same category, it's unlikely to be extremely valuable.
A $2M exit sounds great until you factor in the extra taxes and 5 to 10 years to realize that. Many software developers could make a substantial amount of that, without the risk, simply by aggressively working career changes.
To be fair, part of the startup pitch is also that you'll be building systems from the ground up and getting exposure to lots of different aspects of engineering, rather than being stuck optimizing or maintaining one small part of that gigantic unknowable web of technology you can get at a larger company.
So what you're saying is that when supply goes up, market price goes down? Not much of an insight there. Not something you really could (or even should) fix.
That's actually something kind of funny to me. I've never worked in the game industry but I have done game jams in the past and I am very interested in making games as a hobby.
One of the biggest barriers to me is getting over my need to make code that I think is clean. And every time I try to read about best practices in game code I come across the same mentality: Who cares, write code quick and dirty, as long as it works it's fine.
And that's fine, it's just intimidating for me to write code like that. Too much perfectionism or something. Maybe too much "What if I do it wrong and introduce a bug so entangled in everything that I can't unravel it".
I wish there were even some bare minimum best practices suggestions for game code.
With all due respect to Jon Blow (and I respect him a whole lot!)-- I don't think he'd be able to do what he does if he didn't make a boatload of money off of Braid.
Braid itself was novel because it took game state and made it immutable, immutability often needs a lot of consideration
This is definitely speculation on my part but maybe he didn't become a coder focused on his craft because of the finances afforded to him from Braid, maybe he created Braid a quality game because he was a coder focused on his craft?
You say he doesn't write garbage code, yet none of his source code has been released so you've never seen it. How do you know if it's good code or not?
Let me offer you some advice, based on a few years in the games industry: I think every other industry's approach to code cleanliness breaks down for complex, intertwined simulations with strict performance requirements.
If Google cared at all about the targets that game developers cared about, my Gmail wouldn't take 10 seconds to load and run at 2FPS once the page is there.
I've read some of the best code I've ever seen, written by programmers in the games space. Code with very few tests, heavy intertwined behavior, wide-reaching global effects, and lots and lots of state.
Ultimately, treat the code as an artifact of the project: make it as clean as you need to get the game done, but any extra scaffolding you add will only come back to bite you later once you want to change how something is wired. From that end, all the usual suspects apply: make code easy to delete, make it have clearly-defined boundaries, and depend on other code as little as possible. Push yourself to use copy/paste more than you think you should, you'll be surprised how easy it is to delete wild experiments if you don't have to untangle the web of dependencies.
I worked at EA for eight years and have worked at Google for the past ten. Google and the GMail team most certainly understand how to write performance critical code. Your favorite game would take 10 seconds to load and run at 2FPS too if it had to be pushed over the Internet every time it started up and run inside any of a few only mostly-compatible VMs for a dynamically-typed scripting language never designed for anything more important than making buttons light up when you hover over them.
You're correct that optimized code is generally harder to maintain. Optimization often requires punching through abstraction layers or calcifying certain constraints or assumptions in the code.
I'm a game dev, and I work on high-performance websites in my spare time (e.g. https://noclip.website/#mkwii/beginner_course ). It's actually possible to make stuff that runs fast in "mostly-compatible VMs for a dynamically-typed scripting language never designed for anything more important than making buttons light up when you hover over them" if you actually try. But Google does not, so we end up with gmail.
If the GMail team understands how to write performance critical code, then there must be something else to explain why they no longer do. Hmmm... by making old hardware unusable, they cause hardware upgrades, and somehow that drives licensing? The simpler explanation, fitting Occam's razor, is that the GMail team does not understand how to write performance critical code.
FYI, about a dozen years ago I comfortably used GMail on a 450 MHz PowerPC with 512 MiB of RAM. The javascript ran without a JIT, completely interpreted. It all ran just fine. Now here I am, on a multi-GHz multi-core box with gigabytes of RAM and a JIT, and I have to keep GMail in HTML-only mode. I simply can't run the javascript and still operate my computer. Mail is piling up because I can no longer select lots of email for deletion; it isn't practical to click every single item.
I've never been in the gaming industry, but what I've heard from some developers is that writing very dirty throwaway code is the norm, since most of it is thrown away anyway when the game is done. Which leads to the buggy mess we get even from many triple A games, and a never ending cycle of re-writing the same things for each game, even within the same studio.
Engine code is very often a small, small part of what makes games "buggy". Bugs come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but a majority of the bugginess of games that I've seen stems not from code, but from the large matrix of combinatorics that game developers can create for themselves in their designs.
Simple, contrived example: if I create an open-world game with open-world design, I can complete quests in any order. Maybe I can start doing a quest, and then decide to stop doing it halfway through, or maybe I can switch quests halfway through.
The test case matrix for this is now: every quest x every other quest. If some quest spawns a timer that will do something in 3 minutes, and something else forgets to stop it when I switch quests, that's a bug. Maybe the timer spawns some NPC, and it should stop when I switch quests. Or maybe the timer will reset some world state, and should fire immediately once I switch quests. But maybe not always -- if I complete the quest but the game internally 'switches quests' to the next one in the cycle, I don't want to despawn the NPC.
Is this code? Not really engine code, it's more like data, or scripting? It's not really the code that's reusable between games, and between engines; it's custom-built for the game's flow itself. That's where, in my experience, a good majority of "AAA bugginess" happens.
Every engineer knows interacting mutable state tends to make code buggier. Well, a game simulating a virtual world is essentially a huge ball of deeply interacting mutable state by design.
I work in game development; the amount of care and craft depends on whether I am working on a reusable component / shared system, or one-off code for a specific feature.
The real hell comes when you think you're working on one and it's actually the other; you either burn time on an overcomplicated solution or invent a maintenance nightmare.
Just like any other development, you need to make guesses about what will change and what will stay the same and your efficiency depends on the accuracy of those guesses.
It's because there are so many young people who think that they absolutely want to be video game developers, so it simply doesn't matter how much the companies abuse them, there's a fresh horde of possibly-misguided fresh faces right behind them. Pretty much every other programming job is in a shortage, but here there's a glut.
I say "possibly-misguided" because there are some people for whom that is their one and only dream, and if that is their choice, hey, great. Go for it. I just want people to go into it with open eyes. However, I think the bulk of such people are simply misinformed about A: the nature of game programming and B: the nature of non-game programming. For the most part, they're a lot more similar than a lot of young people realize. You don't go into games programming and get to "design games"; you're going to consume tickets and do a lot of repetitive scut work. Frankly your odds of finding a good job where you're self-directed and not entirely doing scut work is better outside of the game industry.
So... do your part... spread the word that the games industry is mostly bad jobs and the non-games industry actually has a lot of good stuff in it, so that by giving young people a better understanding of the real situation they can make better choice, and help starve the games industry of its continuous supply of fresh-faced naive grads to exploit.
This is absolutely the trajectory I took. I wanted so badly to make games. Still do, one of my life goals is to make a game that I actually publish.
But I had some great professors in university that steered me away from the game industry. I'm quite happy working as a web dev now and I can do games as a hobby.
The main reason is that there isn't enough competition. Video Game Companies are pretty much in a monopoly. No one is making a game like GTA. No one else is making a football game (You need the license), No one else is making doom. No one else is making Counter Strike.
Games became brands. The only thing that drives you out of business is your own greed of recycling your franchises/ideas.
Oh and also many of those companies do not need that many of the "expensive" devs because many of those video game companies are using middlewares like unity or unreal engine.
With more competitions better video game companies would hire better engineer at better salaries. that will lift everyone else.
Your explanations are all demand-side. That doesn't account for why the supply-side of programmers for games is so high. Every game programmer also has the skills necessary to do a good portion of non-gaming jobs. The thing that game companies have a monopoly on is not on jobs the games programmers can do.
As evidence of what I'm talking about I also cite the absolutely huge number of "indie" developers, the vast majority of them not being the ones you've heard of, because most of them aren't famous and face sales figures in the hundreds, if not dozens. Many of them are actively taking a negative salary (that is, burning somebody's savings) to work in the game industry.
People make weird career choices for the perception of prestige or being able to call themselves part of a team. I got a friend who is an Agricultural Mechanic who works for some local owned companies. A few years ago John Deere built a facility nearby and you'd be surprised how many mechanics, who by all accounts liked their jobs, moved to work for John Deere for less pay, less benefits.
Video games aren't that much different. People will harm their own career goals thinking they can work for a brand name when an unknown company might have a better fit. I'm sure they have valid reasons for making the decisions they do, but from the outside looking in, it just looks like fanboyisms.
It’s abusing the definition of monopoly. There isn’t a single super-dominant games company choking out competition. In fact, companies steal each others’ lunch all the time; Fortnite surpassed PUBG, Cities Skylines from a small Finnish dev surpassed EA’s SimCity, and Stardew Valley was created by a single developer who surpassed Harvest Moon before him.
Monopoly doesn’t just mean “this company is bigger than I’d like.”
>The main reason is that there isn't enough competition. Video Game Companies are pretty much in a monopoly.
I'm sorry, but this is completely wrong.
First, there is immense amounts of competition in video games; the industry is bigger than ever but there are so many companies and even small fry indie shops can make it big with talent and a bit of luck.
Second, there are tons of GTA/Doom/CSGO/sports games clones, licensing notwithstanding, that fail for various reasons that usually boil down to "bad game." Brand popularity matters, sure, but many studios blasted their way to huge sales and fame through having a damn good game, like Minecraft, Terraria, and Rocket League, to name a few.
There's so little barrier to entry in the gaming industry at the moment. If you make a good game, you will generally get tons of sales.
A fair amount of game brands have also been destroyed due to "bad game". SimCity basically blew up what was left of its brand, Harvest Moon and the whole thing around that destroyed its brand, etc.
I wouldn't necessarily say "make good game get sales", just because there are a fair amount of devs who don't get marketing right, but the point stands.
Where are you getting monopoly from? Large game franchises that have launched (or become popular) in the last decade or so all started from small, independent studios, or even just a couple people modding an existing game. DotA and PUGB are big, started as mods, and have spawned (or at least popularized) entire new genres. Valve has a history of buying popular mods and turning them into franchises (TF, CS, Portal), and they pay exceptionally-well. Minecraft exploded from a one-man endeavor to a gaming behemoth.
Successful games tend to get purchased by larger companies, but there are a lot of large game companies. Valve, Epic, EA, Nintendo, Sony, Rockstar, Activision Blizzard, Ubisoft, Bioware, etc. And that's not even getting into mobile/Facebook games, which are easy to speak derisively about, but are still major players in the game space.
Game companies are about the most-diverse and least-monopolistic of all media we consume.
I have to disagree with this, at least as far as the statistics are concerned.
According to Stack Overflow [1] the median age of a developer is 33 years old, whereas the median age of a game developer is 31 years old [2]. That's not likely to be a big enough difference to substantiate your position.
Stack Overflow is not exactly validated market research. Comparing two completely different sources of statistical data with different collection methodologies is not evidence.
It's not proof, but it's absolutely evidence and it's enough evidence to place the burden that the video game industry consists mostly of young people back on the person making the claim.
If there is such evidence, by all means produce it.
The median age doesn't contradict the above model at all. What it tells you is that of the developers employed in the game industry at any given time, half of them are under 31. But it doesn't say a thing about the churn below that age.
You can have a bunch of people who jump in at 23, get super exploited, and burn out in two years balance against one single person over the median age, so long as that stream of younger people is serial. The median is unchanged, but a lot more people leave the industry feeling exploited and abused by it than remain.
That wouldn't be possible without a corresponding behavior in those above the median age as well. If what you said was true and there's a disproportionate group of people below the median age leaving the industry without an equal number of people above the median age leaving, then you'd get a constantly rising median age over time and at this point that age would have be considerably older than 31 years.
I am not disputing that the game industry has a lot of churn. I'm disputing that the game industry has substantially more churn among younger people than older people and that the churn is significantly different from the rest of the software development industry.
It's not so much that young people are uniquely exploited and leave after a couple of years, it's that the number of software developers doubles every 5 years so that there is a huge imbalance of young people in the industry in general.
> I say "possibly-misguided" because there are some people for whom that is their one and only dream
There's also a ton of societal pressure to "follow your dreams" or "pursue your passion", and people conflate their passion and enjoyment of playing video games for what it would be like to make the games.
First off, people need to differentiate the enjoyment of something with the making of it. Not the perfect example, but I like to eat meat, yet I know I would hate to be a butcher.
Second, if you really enjoy something it's often better to keep it as a hobby. Most people find all the joy gets sucked out of their passion when it also involves the business of selling, supporting customers, and managing costs.
Furthermore, don't conflate the apparent glamour (which is at least apparent) of those at the top of their profession with the working routine of the vast majority. For example, the very top professional photographers probably mostly have a pretty good life. The university photographer who spends their days shooting pictures of alumni receiving awards? Not so much.
I worked in the game industry for eight years before leaving and I have a more nuanced perspective on this. Yes, the large supply of aspiring game devs has a lot to do with it. And I think the crunch is driven in part by a lack of project management expertise caused by the brain drain that endemic crunch leads to.
But it's not just that. Every job has a mixture of tangible and intangible rewards. Game development scores relatively poorly on the tangibles: less pay, fewer benefits, less free time. But for many people, it scores incredibly highly on the intangibles:
- Spending your day writing code that makes insurance rate calculations comply with the latest changes to Iowa tax law versus making an orc explode if you hit it with an axe just right.
- Working in an office that lets you wear chinos on casual Friday versus wearing whatever you like, coming in when you like, and being surrounded by culture and people that resonate with you.
- Working with accountants and lawyers versus artists and sound designers.
- Working on a product used begrudgingly by employees of some giant accounting contractor versus make a game you love to play.
- Sitting next to folks doing the bare minimum just to get a paycheck versus the comradery of being on a team that really believes in what they're doing.
- Writing code that's difficult because it encodes Byzantine legal regulations versus code that's difficult because it uses the latest graphics algorithms to push hardware as much as possible.
- Being at a company no one's heard of making software know one knows versus being at a brand your friends all know working on products they're excited about. (Anecdote: When I flew to Orlando to interview at EA, I ended up mentioning it to a guy sitting next to me at the airport. He looked at me like an absolute celebrity. "Dude, you're gonna be working on Madden?" I still remember that moment.)
So, yeah, the hours and the pay suck. But when you're in your twenties you tend to have a lot of time and not a lot of bills. Working on something that resonates with your peers, your culture, and your passions is really valuable.
I wish big companies exploited that less, sure. But you see low pay and crunch even at small non-exploitive companies which implies to me that much of this is simply people rationally trading off tangible rewards for intangible ones that are more meaningful to them.
I find it really weird how much software engineers criticize taking a pay cut to make games while simultaneously romanticizing leaving tech completely to become a farmer, writer, chef, social worker, etc. (all of which, for the record, have miserable hours and shit pay). Game devs are essentially doing the same thing but at least they get to use their tech skills in the process.
I'm glad I'm not at EA anymore because my values and priorities changed. But I don't regret my time there and it got me my current job at Google. If I'd spent that time chasing some other low-paying dream like writing fiction, it's much less likely I would have been able to make that transition.
I think you've got a warped notion of what non-game dev is like. Most of the statements you've made are untrue.
> Working in an office that lets you wear chinos on casual Friday versus wearing whatever you like, coming in when you like, and being surrounded by culture and people that resonate with you.
Most dev jobs are the second thing. Most dev shops don't have a dress code. Many have adopted flex time. And further, with covid, a lot are fully remote now. Modern development is nothing like Office Space.
> Working with accountants and lawyers versus artists and sound designers.
You seem to think accountants and lawyers are boring, uninteresting, etc. That's just silly. Just because someone's job is boring, doesn't mean they are. A lot of my co-workers have hobbies in art, music, blowing shit up, etc. Just because they spend their day job combing over the tax code doesn't mean they aren't every bit as fun and interesting as someone who's day job is art.
> Sitting next to folks doing the bare minimum just to get a paycheck versus the comradery of being on a team that really believes in what they're doing.
I find it hard to believe game dev doesn't have the "I'm just here for a paycheck folk" Probably not for long, but again, surprised if that's the case. In anycase, comradery and teamwork exists in a lot of dev shops. Just because you aren't making an orc's head explode doesn't mean you can't get excited about increasing stability, performance, or getting a product that saves a bunch of time and money for the company. There's a lot to celebrate beyond "That looks pretty".
> Writing code that's difficult because it encodes Byzantine legal regulations versus code that's difficult because it uses the latest graphics algorithms to push hardware as much as possible.
Both are puzzles to solve, so why diss the one you don't understand? Further, what makes you think regular dev DOESN'T look to push hardware harder and faster than it previously went? Performance work is universal for development.
This isn't to say there aren't boring dev jobs that pay well. Certainly a large number of jobs are "Make REST API over the database". But even those can have opportunities for growth, learning, and finding coworkers you love to work with.
Sure, but you're comparing the best of game dev to the worst of software dev. That is an unfair comparison. I work on a crypto exchange app, with hundreds of thousands of users buying and selling crypto. We take user feedback seriously, we iterate hard on performance and stability, and I go home knowing that I make a product people like using.
I think you have a really warped sense of what the average software job is really like.
What about embedded systems designers? What about machine/traffic control systems? What about cutting edge stuff like tik tok's recommendation algorithm (which disregarding the politics, has to be marvelled at for its ability to pair users with content they like)?
There is more out there than just Big 4 corporate paper shuffling to make the suits in head office more money..
I agree with you in some regards - but honestly, the intangibles you described were just not enough to overcome the tangibles for myself. I had the choice to go into a game development concentration and focus entirely on going into that market, which I thought I'd love as I'm a life long gamer (and probably would have, really). However, really the thing that drove me away from the industry was exactly the lack of tangibles - more hours at work and less pay. I opted to go into a field that I wasn't entirely a fan of, purely because of this. I ended up working long hours anyways, but did end up receiving significantly above average pay, especially compared to game dev, letting me pay off my student loans and get a mortgage on a house in a relatively short period of time.
Also, I'd argue the number one tangible you're missing vs something like, say web dev, is flexibility. Pre-covid, none of my friends in the gaming industry had any flexibility to work in a remote fashion and was very studio based. Whereas remote working has been becoming increasingly popular in the web dev world, and I've been working remotely for years now which was a huge QoL improvement.
I do romanticize about leaving the tech industry in a kinda similar-ish fashion to what you were stating in that example, but really it's more about romanticizing an early / soft retirement for myself, which is only made possible because I took a higher paying path than game development. But yeah, I do have friends in the industry that love it despite the hours and lower pay, because the people they work with are great and they're very passionate about their projects, whereas yeah, I'm not exactly passionate about some of my projects and am doing it purely for financial and career advancement reasons so it contributes to sometimes really extended burnout periods and decreases in my mental health.
So yeah, to each their own with this. I love gaming and have made some of my own games as a hobby, but I just couldn't justify it as the core of my career despite loving it. Kind of a shame in some regards I would say, but it is what it is.
Speaking as a fairly serious indie dev who's got a non-gamedev day job, actually having it as your day job tends to destroy most of the things that would make it desirable as a career.
If you're AAA, the obvious problem is one of agency - just like being "guy #4968 who worked on Michael Bay's Transformers 5", you … basically have no influence on anything meaningful about the work - you generally have no voting rights to affect the gameplay, or the storytelling or the balance, or just about anything you'd care about as a gamer looking in from the outside. You're just a machine that produces assets (the vast bulk of coders working on those games tend to be scripting together content, whether it's shaders or level scripting).
But if you're not AAA, and it's your job, there's an equally bitter compromise: you have to make a living. There is a significant overlap between the venn diagram of "doing truly excellent work" and "making a decent ROI", but there's a reasonably significant area where they don't overlap. More importantly - I think the most meaningful questions lie smack dab in that area that doesn't overlap, because that's always the part that gets axed in the interests of expedience.
In order to even approach most of the interesting questions in gamedev (whether they're questions of gameplay design, storytelling, balance, etc, etc), you have to essentially start with a full, finished game, and iterate on what's flawed about that title to try and push it from mediocrity into excellence. Many devs do this by making spiritual successors to games they love; some do it by making their own game, and then iterating from there. RAD/Prototyping can "short circuit" an answer to some questions, but we're at a point in the industry where most of that low-hanging fruit has been harvested, and if you really want to make any progress, then the point at which you've finished a 1.0 of a game isn't the "finish line", but rather, is just when you're really getting started. Even if you're making a "spiritual successor" that tries to make something better by tweaking the recipe, that's still your first experiment - now it's time to drive the car you just built around, and learn what works and what doesn't.
But this absolutely trainwrecks right into the typical economic model for a "we're actually making a living off this" gamedev - except in rare cases with new revenue models, that point right there is precisely the point at which you've got to tie off that existing game, call it done, and move on to a new one. If you quit right there, you don't really learn anything - you just make a series of mediocre games (or occasionally, a lucky good one), but you never really understand why they're good or bad, because you're too busy churning out new ones every couple of years to experiment with reworks.
Almost all of the truly great games we've got going right now are cases where there's been such incestuous cross-pollination that multiple studios have essentially done this to each other (major genre titles like FPSes, fighting games, etc), or are small indie developers who've just knuckled down on one "crazy idea" and churned on it for like 10-15 years (minecraft, dwarf fortress, etc). There are other examples like the Civ series, where the devs have essentially made "the same" game 6 times in a row, letting them iterate massively on the formula.
Furthermore, the brutality of having to make a living off of it really hurts friendships - game development is an absolutely savage industry, financially, and chances are perhaps 90% that you're just not going to stay above water as a business. It takes some extraordinary friends to hang together in the face of that. If you're at all human, people will get scared and lash out at each other for not putting their backs i...
Great post! Something which particularly resonated with me:
> Being at a company no one's heard of making software know one knows versus being at a brand your friends all know working on products they're excited about.
I noticed a dramatic shift in people's reactions when my introduction conversations changed from "I'm a programmer" to "I make iPhone apps".
Both of you are missing a key ingredient that the article goes over -- fanboyism.
“A lot of people just felt that there was value in being able to work on anime that they loved,” Mr. Hirakimoto said. “No matter how little they got paid, they were willing to do the work.”
Looking back at his departure, he said, “I don’t regret the decision at all.”
And the same story is in the video game industry. Take Blizzard for example. When I moved to SoCal I applied for lots of tech companies including Blizzard, and got several offers. Blizzard was by far the lowest offer. And I noticed during the interview process, everyone I talked to kept asking what I thought about Blizzard, and it wasn't the standard "why do you want to work here?" I got the impression they were testing how much of a fanboy I was. And from others I've talked to afterwards, that is exactly what they were doing.
>To me, that entire industry seems geared towards grabbing fresh faced grads who are loaded up on dreams of making games, putting them in infinite crunch, and discarding them later when they are burned out.
This is the way it's "always been" for game development. When I was in college 15 years ago, it was the same environment. It turned me off from pursuing a career in game development (among other factors). I'm sure more senior people than me have similar anecdotes.
A friend is on the Call of Duty team, and Medal of Honor before that. The way MoH turned into CoD is the owner of the studio that made MoH was unwilling to sufficiently share the profits, so basically the entire team walked out in mass, got their own publishing deal and made CoD.
But only the people who've made a runaway hit have that kind of bargaining power. The other 90% of the industry is pretty grim.
Things are a lot better on the indie/casual/mobile side, as those tend to be smaller studios with close friendships/partnerships.
While there are similarities within the videogame industry, one has to understand that the plight of a developer is no where near as tragic as that of an animator in Japan.
For a developer, the skills learned for working in the videogame industry are highly transferable to better paying jobs outside of video games. Skills learned on the job are also equally valuable outside of industry. When a developer is ready to leave the videogame industry, they have skills that are in demand and are able to get positions equal to their experience.
For a 2D animator, keyframing and tweening are not well-payed skills outside of the anime industry. Skills learned on the job are equally not well payed. When an animator is ready to leave the anime industry, they have to start at the entry level of whatever new industry they're entering.
To find that the last few years of your life are deemed meaningless by the job market after working your ass off day and night... That is a real gut punch.
That's when you market out your skills to satisfying niche fetishes on the Japanese equivalent of Patreon.
On a serious note, there's a slew of skills an animator has on their Talent Stack (https://personalexcellence.co/blog/talent-stack/). Mere fluency of Photoshop, Illustrator, being able to DRAW period, work ethic, are no mere skills at all.
It sounds like they could make the transition to graphic design or similar industries. They would be jumping into dangerous waters but at least it wouldn't be from scratch
Physicians at "renown" institutions actually tend to make less (on average) than the average physician. They can do it because so many physicians are willing to move to a high CoL location, work more, and take a pay cut.
The best jobs actually tend to be in rural states and areas. Pay is better and work/life balance tends to be better.
I mean, they know what they're getting into, it's supply and demand. More people simply want the job more than there is demand, so they'll be paid less.
It is also true that it was once really hard, from a technical knowledge and skills point of view, to make video games. There were no engines like Unity or Unreal. Every feature your game needed had to be written from scratch. The artistic tools, particularly for 3d modeling, were crude and had to be adapted by people who understood what the engine was doing.
Now all those things are much easier to do and understand. There are thousands of tutorials on the internet. So making games is becoming more like writing books, putting on plays, making a low budget movie. More people can do it than there is an audience.
The best are still very valuable, in every discipline. But the supply of average people is almost limitless.
One could argue the same for almost any field in software development. Despite that, game development has always been lower paying thanks to its passion industry roots. Meanwhile, web development still dominates most of the job market and makes big bank even for average developers doing mostly data plumbing.
There is not an overabundance of quality content. Almost nobody pays a lot more for a "better cleaner". Popular art is not commodity . The problem here clearly is the lack of an easy way to pay .
> (b) we allow businesses to profit wildly while not paying enough (by exploiting (a)), because we have the taboo that not meddling with the market is the best course of action. A more englightened society that didn't pay too much attention to economy pundits working for rich people, might find a way for better revenue sharing with employees...
And because we've been taught that discussing how much you earn is taboo, especially with your colleagues.
Animators are more rare and much more in demand then programmers relative to the size of the industry IMO. The skill is also harder overall. Drawing and animating the human form in three dimensions is harder then programming.
I don’t think it’s a supply side problem. Another phenomenon is happening here. Animators do have the option of unionizing which mitigates these sorts of issues.
Animation is not a difficult task, yes it's difficult in the sense to be amazing you need skill (same with programming) but the rest is actually just copying and pasting with slight tweaks based on someone elses art/direction.
But it's also art. Painting, cobbler, pottery, blacksmith, etc have always been sought after jobs and yet are and have been the least paid throughout our history.
No they don’t do that. Especially for anime. What they have found is that the copy paste and tweak method produces stiff results so no one in the industry does that. It’s a weird phenomenon.
Every frame is literally sketched by hand entirely which makes actual skill required. Anime especially given the more realistic human proportions and extensive use of z-axis. For something like sponge bob or South Park in the US it’s much easier... but in Japan the animation is a real skill.
You've cherry-picked examples of big budget scenes.
The vast majority of anime is static backgrounds with slow pans and static characters with mouth flaps. The backgrounds and characters often get outsourced and the studio just adds facial features and mouth flaps.
It’s not that cherry picky. There’s thousands of scenes like the one I posted that require raw skill. Yes the majority of anime is mouth flapping but every episode usually contains at least one or two or more action scenes where real skill is involved.
If anything the people who do these scenes which I’m assuming is the same people who do the mouth flapping requires raw skill that is not easy to come by.
If there is a role for a low skill artist that exclusively does mouth flapping then yes it’s an oversupply side issue for those people, but it does not explain the low wage of the person who does the action scenes.
I think is not that is harder but that is easier to tell a bad animator than a good one than it is with programmers.
Unless you see coding as art, animation jobs are going to be more fulfilling and that is always exploited (people willing to do it for less because it feels better) by the market.
> If there were 100 qualified surgeons for every patient needing an operation, and would stampede each other for a chance to work and get paid, we'd pay them $25/hour too.
The number of surgeons is artificially low because of limits on the number of residency spots in this country. So I agree that prices can probably come down, somewhat. However, attorneys are not limited in the same way but can still cost a fortune, because people are willing to pay a lot for perceived value when there's a high stakes outcome. Some things just aren't worth farming out to the lowest bidder.
You need to do a residency to be properly trained to handle all kinds of situations. Your surgeon can't be in a position of "well I've never done this in a supervised setting so let me go find someone to teach me" as the lead surgeon. That's exactly the reason they do a residency.
What's artificially low is the number of residency slots. In other words, it's not just that you have to clear a bar to be a surgeon. It's that there are literally X number of slots and if you don't get one of them, you're out, regardless of whether you would qualify. I'd say it's an artificial constraint since there are far more people trying to get into med school (not a specific school... med school generally) than there are slots.
With law, for example, you have to go to law school and pass a test, but if you do, you are in. There's a lot of law schools out there, to the point where a large percentage of people graduating don't get good jobs. The same isn't true for medical residency graduates.
The idea behind having a privatized healthcare system is that, yes you are massively overcharging for life saving procedures, but that money will then be spent on training more surgeons to lower the price in the future. The end result is an expensive system with superior outcomes.
>It's that there are literally X number of slots
This is fundamentally incompatible with the idea of a privatized healthcare system. It simply cannot be functional this way. I hope Americans will wake up and realize that this sort of welfare should not exist.
It's always sad when I see Americans brag about their highly efficient free market systems when they fail the basic requirements needed for a free market to actually work.
Yes it can work and yes you'd be allowed to brag but as it is you haven't figured out how to make it work yet.
From what I can tell the salaries of american surgeons are high enough to justify training more. There is no need to restrict training of more surgeons. Heck, by your logic we should train as many surgeons as we can and then get rid of the worst ones instead of being dependent on a small subset that we let into the training program in the first place.
And this is why we need to break down the apprenticeship based training system in medicine. The monopoly on knowledge that such a small group of people have is tremendously bad for society and more importantly, progress.
What would be a suitable alternative? Not necessarily against this, but I can say that I'd personally never go to a doctor who hadn't had extensive clinical training as part of their education, at least not for anything serious.
There are plenty of things I'd go to a doctor for even if they had 90% less medical training.
Get prescriptions to variously mostly safe drugs anti depressants/weight loss drugs/blood pressure medicine, dandruff shampoo.
Refill any prescription.
Those two items are probably 80% of the reason anyone I know goes to a doctor.
Now for surgeons.
It's true that you want someone with a lot of experience for surgery but there are still ways to get more highly trained surgeons. Throw out undergrad requirements for med school, if the average career for a fully trained surgeon in 16 years we've just increased the supply by ~25%.
Allow surgeons from other countries to come practice in the U.S. without completing a full residency. We could easily suck up the worlds surgeons because we pay so much more.
> There are plenty of things I'd go to a doctor for even if they had 90% less medical training.
As mentioned below, PAs and NPs already do a lot of these tasks. However, the big value-add I see in MDs as opposed to seeing NPs or PAs with problems is that they have the depth and breadth of training to have first-hand experience with the exceptions to normal circumstances.
The standard medical mantra of "if you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras" works great for normal scenarios. If there actually is a zebra situation, though, I have far more faith in professionals with extensive clinical training at identifying those situations.
> Those two items are probably 80% of the reason anyone I know goes to a doctor.
Regarding prescriptions, this may be blind faith in regulatory institutions, but I assume that there is a reason that mostly-safe drugs require a prescription. If the criteria for prescription refills or simple procedures doesn't require the full breadth/depth of clinical training, though, then NPs and PAs already exist to fill that role.
> We could easily suck up the worlds surgeons because we pay so much more.
I'd argue that this is an explicit non-goal. We don't want to attract the most surgeons/doctors, we want the surgeons/doctors we have to be trained and practiced to an extremely high bar. You're definitely right that there are lots of scenarios which don't require this extremely high bar, and that's the reason why not all medical personnel are doctors. Nurses and physician assistants play a critical role in healthcare specifically because they can tackle those 80% of cases you mentioned, but the way around this isn't to dilute the training of medical doctors, it's to delegate the work that's better performed by others to those others.
>A more englightened society that didn't pay too much attention to economy pundits working for rich people, might find a way for better revenue sharing with employees...
How would this avoid (a) and (b) though? Your society needs to somehow balance what jobs people do. There is no real way to measure how difficult a job is. You could argue that hard manual labor is a very difficult job, yet there are many people who prefer that to sitting down, learning a lot and then doing a mentally exhausting desk job. The willingness of people to do a job needs to be accounted for when you're deciding whether a job is difficult or not, but this very much depends on the person. How would you account for this without looking at how difficult it is to replace a person doing a specific job?
Society is also structured in such a way that for the most part every job will have folks clamoring for it. When you are born without capital, you have to take what you can get.
Unfortunately I think it's going to keep getting worse as wealth inequality increases.
Imagine walking into a monopoly game where each piece is already bought and owned. Try to win at that. Instead, I could imagine you wind up working for someone, and feed them a majority of the profit while you get scraps.
I don't have good solutions for how to fix this, other than perhaps universal basic income would alleviate things.
You should look up the Mondragon Corporation. It's a worker owned cooperative. Highly democratic institution. I'd postulate that by and large due to the nature of it, and with tens of thousands of similar edifices in concert we could excise a great deal of power (wealth) from the government and corporations, placing it in the hands of the people who earned it.
Entities like this can't get funding though, since it endangers the contemporary business model and leaves little in the way of profit for banksters since by nature company stock is traded only internally, exchanged between employee and the company to prevent external interlopers from gaining a foothold. Governments would also see a great deal of their power dissolved as a product of the internal democratic processes dealing with social issues.
It comes with issues, but with multiplicity, I think the stratification would be greatly remedied. The stratification comes from non-owners participating in the business, they don't have voting rights and they're subject to lower compensation, generally. That's what we're subject to now, generally, in any case. With more companies following this modality, I believe that would be alleviated to a degree where if one was insistent they could always find an opportunity to become a worker-owner.
We don't allow businesses to profit "wildly" because we don't want to pay people more. We allow businesses to profit because it isn't fair to make someone pay X when someone else is very happy to get paid a fraction of X. It's about justice and fairness. I mean I'd love to get paid Silicon Valley programmer wages, but I'm perfectly happy to program for a fraction of those wages. And it would be an injustice for me to be unemployed because my employer was forced to pay Silicon Valley wages.
And what are "wild" profits? Because most companies are making far less than 8% of revenue as profits.
I think I understand where you come from. A job is better than no job.
But I don't think that is necessarily true nor that things would follow suit if we think like that.
I mean, we employ much more people today than in the industrial revolution. Yet, people are paid significantly more, child labor has been abolished, all that working 8-9h a day instead of 14-18 which was common. We are not in a cooperative environment, when it comes to salaries. Companies are legally obligated to show gains to their investors, and if they can cut salaries and keep the profits they will do so. We are in a competitive game against employer, where the balance is found when both parties compromise. But make no mistake, as soon as the working force stop fight for better working conditions, it will not stay the same, only degrade.
Don't read that in a personal way. We are in no way personally against the employer, but the employer as an authority figure. The balance is not found through cooperation but rather through clash of professional interests.
> And it would be an injustice for me to be unemployed because my employer was forced to pay Silicon Valley wages.
No, it would be good, because it would mean that they were more efficiently utilizing their current workforce, probably through technological advancement that should ultimately benefit the entire industry. Technology is almost entirely driven through higher labor costs and dictating better conditions for employees. The benefits of technology improvements are also not zero-sum (equal to their costs to develop or maintain), and are redistributed through those higher salaries and through taxes.
If you end up unemployed at that wage level because your skill level has not made the new cut, there are other things you can do. Wanting to program but not being able to find somebody who wants you to program at the minimum wage is no more tragic than wanting to program but not being able to pay your rent doing it.
So let me get this straight. You think it is justice for me to be unemployed because my employer can’t afford to pay me $180k/year to write internal software because they will magically use technology to do without me? More likely they would go without, because if there was magic to replace me they’d already be doing it.
How is it "more efficient" when individuals who can do the job are not allowed to do the job because of some arbitrary price control floor? Literally nobody in society benefits from this arrangement besides a tiny class of programmers who can actually command that kind of salary. What you are recommending is the classic kind of supply constriction rent-seeking behaviour that used to ensure economic growth was utterly impossible in most economies.
>(b) we allow businesses to profit wildly while not paying enough (by exploiting (a)), because we have the taboo that not meddling with the market is the best course of action. A more englightened society that didn't pay too much attention to economy pundits working for rich people, might find a way for better revenue sharing with employees...
You have to be careful there because the overwhelming surplus of cheaply acquired goods/services goes to the people who received the goods and services and not the person selling the goods and services.
Businesses only capture it when they have a competitive advantage (either because they have no competition or b/c the cost savings can't be matched by a competitor).
Grocery clerks are lowly paid. But grocery is a competitive, low margin business. So those low wages mostly mean cheap food.
So we want government setting pay rates for anime artist?
How about quotas.
Government pays on a per episode completed. More content created the more is paid.
Lawyers are a counterexample. There are more law graduates than jobs. But starting salaries haven't gone down.
David Graeber made this observation, and suggested some sort of class tribalism.
Btw, to use cleaning as a specific example, taxation of domestic services is broken in almost every (western?) country and skews how people spend their time and money. Most professionals would happily trade an hour of work for an hour of cleaning services, however, by the time you put income tax (and VAT in my case) on top, your hours need to be about 2.5x times as valuable as your counterparty.
Law is a very status-conscious industry (even more than software) and so most of that oversupply of law graduates are not "in the club". They get paid relatively low wages and have to fight with each other for peanuts.
Some much smaller fraction of law graduates from top schools or who otherwise have the right connections get paid extremely high salaries because they are only competing with each other.
Journalism is quite different in that most journalists don't make all that much. Also credentialing isn't nearly as big a factor. In fact, a lot of people in the industry look down on J-schools. The common career path among the non-freelance journalists I know at more prestigious publications is knocking around trade pubs and (at least formerly) small city papers before getting their break. (But, yes, connections matter too.)
This is pretty recent, I think. There used to be a lot more newspapers with dedicated newsrooms in smaller cities. Carl Bernstein's first job was in Elizabeth, NJ. CJ Chivers started in Providence, RI. Dean Baquet started in NOLA.
There is some middle ground of corporate lawyers and partners at smaller but relatively prosperous practices. But, yes, for the many it's making partner at a white shoe firm which tends to require attending one of a fairly small number of law schools and getting a prestigious clerkship--or you're running ads in the subway.
You do get supply demand corrections over time though. If you know you'll be making minimum wage if you didn't go to a top law school a lot of people would stop doing so.
There are very few to no situations where your company or reputation or even your way of life depends on your cleaning service.
Or another way to look at this is that lawyers get paid based on their reputation. Firms with a high reputation only have the ability to hire so many new lawyers. Those positions are indeed highly sought after, because that's how you get paid well, by getting in with a firm that already has a reputation. You're going to have a hard time starting out on your own, building up a reputation. Hell, sometimes you need to have built enough of a reputation just to get a position with a firm that has a high reputation.
While people/companies are looking for the best person/firm they can afford to represent them... cleaners are still just cleaners.
My take is that our (economically) liberal social order refuses to accept interdependence, especially towards the services that guarantee our otherness from our wild state (basically all essential ones such as nurses, garbage, etc)
It’s basically a psychological refusal of our vulnerability in the world
>Edit: What I mean to say is, the good lawyers make the same good money, the vast majority of lawyers do not.
It's also not even about being a "good" lawyer. It is completely determined by your law school and GPA. The big firms won't even look at your resume if you're not from a top 10 school.
T13, and with some exceptions (some law firms will draw a top few students from more local law schools, for example, also certain specialties get different treatment).
The lawyer who helped my mom write her will was a co-worker at a department store before he went to night school and got a law degree.
He was good at that area of law, one which everyone encounters at least once in life. He did not do the work million-dollar lawyers do and he did make millions.
Yeah I know some folks who are attorneys and you mention another lawyer and they don't care, but once they hear where the other attorney works they're suddenly ALL ears.
The difference is vast when it comes to the lawyers who I know who are making incredible amounts of money and those who are just... somewhat independent small business folks.
The difference between lawyer jobs and house cleaning jobs, is if suddenly the demand of both jobs surge such that they all pay $500k/year, people could quit their $499k-and-less job today and start their house cleaning job.
That's not the case for starting lawyering, you have to: Go to law school, pass the bar, have a set of specialized skills than cleaning doesn't require.
This combination of skill and long (and costly...) processs is what keeps lawyer salaries higher.
It's why comp sci is still a high paying field. You have to know low level programming, basic circuitry, and how coding works. And the hardest part is you can't bs your way through this field. It's extraordinarily easy to point out someone bluffing on a resume with a simple linked list or binary tree test. With lawyers or business people, it's all about connections.
Well there is that pesky problem where animators and cleaners not being used or existing won't land you in jail or fined beyond your means to pay but having a lawyer can help mitigate or prevent it.
we live in a society that is heavily litigated because we have governments at all levels churning out laws and regulations to their benefit and those of their supporters.
There are some fields that exist to protect you from physical and financial harm and those will always exist and be desirable until we can eliminate the causes.
> You may realize you've wasted your life in jail because you hired a bad lawyer.
I thought parent's argument is that you get thrown into jail because you didn't hire any lawyer. It's not that you got a bad lawyer, it's that you must hire one to defend yourself in the first place. Thus there is an always growing need for lawyers, bad or good.
> There are more law graduates than jobs. But starting salaries haven't gone down.
Perhaps this isn't true? It's possible that salaries for lawyers are not going down, but that salaries for law graduates are going down (because not all law grads become lawyers).
Also, I thought salaries outside the major firms have cratered? (Or maybe were never all that high to begin with but law school has become crazy expensive and the lower ranked schools are churning out more and more people? IDK.)
My local bartender has a JD and passed the bar. He bartends because it pays better.
Lawyers don't give away their trade secrets and have something like trade union that is not trade union, unlike engineers and artists.
If you want to learn how to solve any engineering problem or how to create an illustration you can choose from ample amount of tutorials that are free or very cheap and teach specifics. If that's not enough, you can ask veterans for guidance and most will happily help you out and even give you specific detailed answers to your problems. People also would be hired based on their performance and no one will ask for diploma if you show performance.
On the other hand, if you ask a lawyer they will be extremely vague and would never solve your problem or guide yo without a pay even if the solution is something practical like "Go to the Home Office, find the whatever manager and ask for the hr-103/B form".
They also would limit practicing through memberships to professional organisations, limiting the practice only to formally trained lawyers.
I know someone who did law school career counseling at one point. The glut of lawyers has had a downward pressure on law salaries, but pay and even hiring tends to be highly correlated with the tier of the law school a lawyer grated from. I'm not sure I'd call this class tribalism, so much as a great filter. People who get into top law schools tend to be super competitive and are going to tend to be competent as well, so you're at least partially filtering out people who are likely going to be willing to work for low compensation. If starting pay dropped low enough, these lawyers would be going and getting other jobs. My friend used to laugh about the low end internships complaining about why students weren't rushing to fill their position, and she had to constantly remind them that if their pay was even marginally close to the local minimum wage then her students had better options elsewhere.
>(b) we allow businesses to profit wildly while not paying enough (by exploiting (a)), because we have the taboo that not meddling with the market is the best course of action. A more englightened society that didn't pay too much attention to economy pundits working for rich people, might find a way for better revenue sharing with employees...
Governments meddle with the economy all the time, there was a short period of laissez faire being the dominant thought in the Western World in 18th and 19th century, but after WWI. Nowadays governments command 30-60% of GDP.
When I changed careers and did a coding bootcamp there were a handful of "thought I wanted to make video games but too many other people felt the same way" guys and girls in there.
>Median annual earnings for key illustrators and other top-line talent increased to about $36,000 in 2019 from around $29,000 in 2015
So it would seem this article is truly about the animators responsible for the animation between keyframes. Unfortunately I can't find the article on the making of anime I had once read, but basically, the key frame artists are drawn by those truly responsible for the art style you see. The animation work between frames truly is grunt work (this is the truth, I'm sorry if you find this offensive) that is accomplishable by many.
And lets not pretend that shows with good animation are automatically a success. You need a good story, good pacing (direction), and in most cases you need to choose the story from a pile of hundreds of possibilities.
And, as is often forgotten when the whole "revenue sharing with employees" is brought up, the employee is staking no capital and can leave at any time. If the anime fails, surely you don't suggest "revenue sharing" that loss with the employees.
The vast majority of anime does fail, or only serves as an advertisement for the source. Just look at any given season of anime, the majority of anime is not well received.
> (b) we allow businesses to profit wildly while not paying enough (by exploiting (a)), because we have the taboo that not meddling with the market is the best course of action. A more englightened society that didn't pay too much attention to economy pundits working for rich people, might find a way for better revenue sharing with employees...
The highest profit margin I can find is Toei Animation, which in 2020 made 11.4 billion yen in profit on 54.8 billion yen in sales[1], giving them a 20% profit margin. If every animation studio had that high of a profit margin and 100% of profits went to workers, industry wages would rise 20%. Though if that were the case, the company's profits would be zero and one bad year would end them.
We can't be completely sure, but the assets, sales, and employee numbers look reasonable to me.
The only weird corporate structure I found was Studio Ghibli. Their museum's store (but not the museum itself) is run by Mammayuto Co., Ltd.[1] This company loses 60 million yen a year but has only 1 million yen in liabilities. I'm guessing it's a way for Studio Ghibli to avoid taxes of some kind.
Raising the minimum wage would help with that. Why would someone clean for $25/hour when they could do something less physically demanding for the same money? Then you would have to pay cleaners more in order to attract them.
People would complain about cleaners getting more money than their white collar jobs, but that's classism embeded in part because of the current situation. As soon as people realise job X makes good money, suddenly the stigmas go away.
I'm sorry, what? Ask anyone in the trades if a 'mentally demanding' job is worse than a physically demanding one. People in tech really are out of touch if they think being a coder is somehow more grueling than being a roofer.
As someone who has done plenty of physical jobs over the years, I found the physical jobs much more satisfying. This is for someone who is not even in that great a shape.
Sure I was very tired afterwards, but at least it was a nice kind of tired. The mental tiredness/stress from coding is much worse in my opinion. If I could earn the same doing a physical job, I would probably switch now.
I do want to acknowledge that some of these physical jobs will destroy your body long term.
Mind you, american work ethics is an omnibenevolent angel compared to japanese work ethics. See "Sewayaki kitsune no Senko-san" for an example how people work there.
In contrast to your statement, which sounds wise but I doubt it, I find that there's way more programmers, then there are animators; and programmers are usually paid very well.
I did some 3d animation in the past, and once in awhile do some 2d animation. I've never met anyone else who does traditional 2d animation in person, in comparison with the zillions of programmers out there in the wild.
We don't have unlimited capacity for everyone who wants to make a good living doing $X to do be satisfied. They can hustle for a low-paying opportunity or they can just be told "no" by a central planner, hiring hall union, credentialing admissions process, etc.
That may solve an observer's concern about profit/exploitation, but it leaves the worker with strictly fewer options.
People not getting what they want is just as bad whether or not anyone else is benefitting at the same time.
> These workers earned an average of $12,000 in 2019, the animation association found, though it cautioned that this figure was based on a limited sample that did not include many of the freelancers who are paid even less.
How is that either legal or possible to survive on such wages?
Exactly my thoughts, maybe they're all interns that live at home with their families? Idk it seems surreal!
But this part ..
Freelancers paid even less? What on earth?
They aren’t slaves they can refuse work. The problem is they keep taking these “work for hire” deals which revolves around a project not hours.
There is this magical internet they can create their own IP and charge whatever they want. Nobody is obligated to buy it, just as they aren’t obligated to go into crap contracts.
So the entire industry is just stupid people who can't look out for themselves? They are clearly being taken advantage of and are suffering as a result.
I'm not sure either. Minimum wage in Japan (2019) was about $8.50 USD/hour, and working 40 hours/week at that rate would be about $17,000 USD/year. My guess is they are not working 40 hours every week, or they have signed contracts that pay them less than minimum wage.
I wish the article had been clearer about this. I'm sure animators in Japan work really hard and aren't paid much, but while the article made it clear how I should feel about the situation, it left me uninformed on the details, which would seem the more important part of a news article.
Really? Tokyo isn't super-expensive for an American compared to NYC or SF but it isn't especially cheap in my experience. The same could be said of at least most of Europe. There are cheap countries where maybe 10x is a reasonable figure for living like a local in a developing country vs. living like most Americans in the US.
Median household income in Japan is about 30K USD, which is lower than the US but a lot more than $12K.
Do you actually think that’s the norm in Japan, especially for animators making $12K per year? In any case, the exact same logic applies to the US where there are more two household incomes. The claim that the US has 10X higher costs than other countries in the developed world is simply nonsense.
Clearly, animators need to lobby for additional licensure, safety and educational requirements, and restrictive trade organizations to thin the herd of “acceptable” laborers.
While this is true, I think there is more nuance to it. We also value cheap food but we don't care that migrant food pickers make $10 an hour (or less). We are a selfish race, as long as we get a deal, screw everyone else. As long as the exploitation benefits us, we don't care. Amazon, diamonds, food supply, new mobile phones, etc.
On the other hand, I'd like to assume that other people are making the best decisions they can in their own lives. Picking fruit for $10 an hour could likely be better than their alternatives. I've worked for much less than that as a programmer. At the time I didn't see better options. People have different limitations. Some limitations might not even make sense to others, but those are the constraints that they work around.
I agree. I was only trying to highlight that we basically don't value other's time as much as we value our own. We want to shop at the dollar store but we would never work for the wages that the hated Chinese will to make this crap. We want food delivered to our house but we don't tip because we can't "afford it" to value the minimum wage workers that are busting their ass and destroying their cars to bring to us. The thing you highlight is that a lot of people don't really have a choice so they will take anything, regardless of how exploited they are. This makes me sad as it feels like we've regressed to the 1900s. If all these gig economies eventually have to treat their works as employees and $15/hour goes national, I don't see how any of these companies are profitable except in the biggest cities.
While that is true, it is a non-trivial task to make actionable change on any of these propositions. Even boycotting certain companies is a job unto itself.
right, in OC's mind that should be A-OK. Viewing everything through the lens of supply & demand without any other consideration will make monsters of us all.
Monopolies and colluding oligopolies break capitalism. It's why we have antitrust law, which we don't really seem to use anymore (probably due to regulatory capture).
Most people who know about that case are mistaken about certain crucial facts. The collusion was that some companies agreed not to cold call each other's employees.[1] Hiring was still allowed, as were other recruiting methods such as e-mail or LinkedIn messages.
The particularly nasty bit of collusion was between Apple and a few other companies (Google, Adobe, Pixar). This collusion only happened because of Steve Jobs's vindictive personality combined with interlocking directorates[2]: Jobs was on the board of Pixar, and Google & Adobe executives were on Apple's board. Despite Jobs's best efforts, the collusion fell apart after only 4 years because the companies kept poaching from each other. It was over a year later that the DoJ filed its first complaint.
Despite what most people think, it's really hard for companies to cartelize. There is a massive incentive for any one member of the cartel to pretend to collude while secretly not colluding. Typically, such arrangements fall apart unless there is a governing body that can sniff out and punish defectors.
It's easy to understand once you realize it's a propaganda outlet. We have smart minds doing their best to tell a particular story regardless of facts. Here is some good reading on the phenomena https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/145660.The_Captive_Mind
Blindly following 'supply and demand' for the labor market does not make sense, for the obvious reason: participation by the suppliers is effectively mandatory.
For the vast majority of people who need to work to be able to afford rent/food/etc, they _must_ sell their labor somewhere, and that choice is additionally restricted by the skills and experience they have (you can switch careers, but an animator can't just pack up and become a programmer immediately - significant time/money is invested to gain the skills and/or experience and/or credentials needed for another job).
In aggregate, the labor market generally follows "higher skill (i.e. lower supply) job = higher wage", but zoom in on any smaller part and that is not guaranteed.
This is a sad story. I have been working on a project for a couple years now called Pastel Network (http://pastel.wiki/) that is all about making NFTs/rare digital art on the blockchain accessible and affordable to everyone with very low fees. This is unlike all the hot NFT projects based on Ethereum, where it currently costs hundreds of dollars to "mint" an artwork, which makes it risky for artists in case the work doesn't sell, and also makes it impossible to sell art for low dollar amounts while still making a decent profit margin. My hope all along was that artists like this from poor countries would be able to participate, and I was thinking about anime in particular (the project started out being called Animecoin).
It sounds like the same problem as the gaming industry, where people are really passionate about it and are willing to work for peanuts to be in the industry. I started doing some hobby game development, and I was suprised at how many "good enough" art and sound assets are freely available because of artists trying to get noticed.
It boggles my mind that an anime as popular as One Punch Man got awarded to a bottom-of-the-barrel anime studio for S2. I mean, you can see the stark contrast between seasons 1 and 2. Season 2 has very sparse action scenes, and heavily utilizes off-screen talking (i.e. the camera is panning some static background while a conversation is taking place so the animators don't have to animate). That leads me to believe the money/profits generated by the success of a season is getting eaten by ip owners and middlemen, and that the studio itself is fighting for the scraps. If so, that incentive structure needs to change if you want to increase the quality of the anime. Can anyone who knows more about the anime business model in Japan chime in? Is this a case of IP owners holding an iron grip on the rights and profits and being stingy with anime studios?
At any rate, I'm surprised more American-based anime studios aren't springing up to poach Japan's top animation talent with top pay.
How does that affect the executive making that decision, who is already wealthy? It's not like executives are ever punished for poorly running a company.
>Their bonuses are linked to company performance, and they can be fired just like any other job.
So they get fired, then what? They get hired by another company for more money because now they have experience. That's what I mean about not being punished.
No executive ever ends up destitute and on the streets. We should strive for all workers to have the same safety net as executives.
You shouldn't think of the anime in isolation. They are multimedia franchises. The anime is there to sell the manga, the figures, the light novel, etc.
It's probably widely why Pokémon is so successful. It's not about the show, it's about selling all the other products. The show is one big advertisement. And it's good, too.
Or at least it was, when I was a kid watching it on a CRT. I have no idea what it's like now.
Gundam has some really amazing animation though. So many beautifully animated battles! I do spot some reuse here and there when I rewatch but still. It never struck me as a mere advertisement for merchandise.
That reminds me of how excited I got when I got a pokedex and workable pokeballs from Santa. It's been a long time since there were only 150 Pokemon. I wonder if they're even still using pokedexes in the series.
I also got a couple of digivices from Digimon, from the second and fourth(?) season. I remember they had story modes and contacts at the top for multiplayer gameplay, as well as a walking sensor for story advancement which you could cheat by just shaking the device for hours. My friend with whom I battled it out never had a chance because he actually tried walking the distance. That's until he noticed the gap between our digimon was getting too big despite all the walking he did, and I ended up telling him the trick. Quite a facepalm moment right there. Those were neat little devices for our ages back then.
My friend was the one with the working pokedex and boy was I jealous. Lots of Pokemon nostalgia thinking about all the gizmos and toys I bought, trading cards, video games, marbles, action figures, you name it.
Fun time to be nostalgic since tomorrow is the 25th anniversary too.
you’d be wrong, as far as i’m aware. almost all anime in the current system is an adaptation of a manga or LN - the anime comes at the end of the multimedia expansion project.
Or an adaptation of a game; the ones with multiple endings even sometimes receive multiple anime projects to show off aspects of the different paths and different endings.
Adapted from a manga? Sure I guess. And most movies are adapted from books. I'm not sure that qualifies as a multimedia economic model. Is the anime really there to increase sales of the manga? Or is it supposed to be profitable on its own?
Very true pointing out the multi in multimedia. Just like musicians, they make a big chunk of their earnings off of merchandise and concerts and not just record sales and royalties.
Actually, the wast majority of musicians make nothing at all. Even fairly popular bands don’t.
“That you’d better be in it for the music, because you sure as hell aren’t going to make any money from being in a metal band, certainly in this day and age.”
In the traditional model, the anime is marketing material for the franchise. Money is in figures, merchandise, and manga, which usually all existed before the anime was created. Generally only established studios with plenty of funds do original (not first portrayed in another medium) anime.
OPM went to JC for S2 because the very expensive S1 from Madhouse had already satisfied the goal of bringing tons of new fans to the franchise.
This is changing though, as anime is getting cheaper to produce and international viewers are increasing.
A likelier hypothesis is that for every One Punch Man, there's a dozen mediocre series that flop and need to be carried by the profits of the series that succeed, analogous to the games industry and Hollywood movies, which are also hit-driven entertainment.
I'd hazard a guess that the industry is Power Law distributed, as opposed to Gaussian distributed. Power Laws take a few names depending on your field, but some common ones are Pareto distributions, winner-take-all, or fat-headed/long-tailed. The underlying math is the same though. These distributions are also quite wide ranging, everything from tax bills to the size of asteroids is Power Law distributed.
If anyone knows the 'mechanism' as to why so many disparate measures end up as Power Laws, I'd love to read more on it, as I;m sure other HNers would too.
Doesn't matter. Even if profit sharing were implemented, the boss gets to choose the percentage of the profit that animators get. Due to supply and demand, they'll still get the short end of the stick. Definitely better than nothing, but the problem will continue to exist in another form.
- If the studio doesn't own the IP, they'll likely have to pay a hefty amount for it.
- There's not much actual revenue from anime: historically studios have tried to monetize via extraordinarily expensive DVDs of the episodes (such that only die-hard fans would buy them), and merchandise, but apparently the studios don't even get all of the revenue from these sources. Streaming is becoming more popular but I'm not sure how much revenue Crunchyroll/Netflix/etc. shares with the studios.
- Anime is often seen as an advertisement for the original source material (usually manga), so there's less incentive for certain parties on the production committee to monetize.
For a counter example of why American-based anime studios aren't popping up, an ostensibly American production, The Simpsons, has had Korean studios in the credits for the major parts of animation from the very first episode, same with Avatar: The Last Airbender. If you watch The Simpsons on DVD, in one of the season one specials Groenig talks about getting the animatics from Korea and having to go back and forth with the Korean studio until they captured the look that was desired. The producers will outsource to get the cheapest production. IIRC American animation in all media was dwindling at this point because studios didn't want to pay Americans to do the animation.
The current Japanese studio doing Attack on Titan is outsourcing components to Vietnamese and Chinese studios probably for the same sort of reason.
I don't think the article makes this clear but animators are the people who are responsible to create the frames between key frames designed by the actual designers. This also means that the person described in the article is competing with studios in China and other asian countries that do the same work for very cheap prices because they have access to cheap labor.
Real money is in merchandising. Demon Slayer is big out here in Taiwan.. every kid has pencils, erasers, buttons, shirts, pencil cases, backpacks.. the animators are seeing none of that money yet they are a core part of why the show is successful.
Too many predatory gatekeepers offering dream jobs to kids who don’t know any better. It’s not just anime. In music, you got acts with albums in the top ten albums of the year lists with millions of plays making like hundreds of dollars per year on Spotify, same people are on tour each year in the red financially after being on the road. The economy isn’t kind to the creators who entertain everyone.
If I'm not mistaken the IP rights still remains at the publisher + the original creator (The manga writer), and often the animation studio just do it as contract work. So I would guess the studio won't get a proportionate slice of the merchandising success.
>the animators are seeing none of that money yet they are a core part of why the show is successful
because they are worker. they get paid with the wages that they agree on. Koyoharu Gotouge probably get a big chunk of that money since she created the manga.
Animators as a profession are like factory workers. Japanese animators compete with Chinese, Vietnamese and everyone else.
If something can be produced with little differentiation – bulk or standardized quality product or service, its all about cost and supply and demand. This is how competitive market economy works. Profit margins become razor thin.
It's generally closer to: "Every time it's been tried it's been either bad or disastrous, clearly we have no reason to learn from it or try again"
Which I think is fair! Hell, even the original strawman is a fair argument IMO. Fascism didn't work once, and I don't think there's much there to learn from (and we certainly shouldn't try it again).
I don't think the comparison to fascism is fair, as much as some would like to paint it that way. So many things are different now than in 1989, which is not to say a new system would be perfect, but Americans are inventive and we can improve it. We're not at the end of history.
The salary range was small so they properly got an relative okay wage. Demands of workers was heavily suppressed in the east bloc though, so the soviet system is not something championed by organized labour nowadays.
Truth is that if you do such job to live and eat...
You'll need to not only produce the production but also handle market sells... involving rights on your product... it's usually in form of contract with big distributors...
depending your shit... you'll get a certain amount of cent(s) for being used through the "distributors"...
Being from a third-world country, it it feels weird how western media so casually uses the word "poverty". Where I come from, living in poverty mostly means living in abject poor living conditions- without a decent place to live in, without guarantee of being able to secure meals for the day, etc.
People who can afford daily food and internet and computers will never be classified as living in "poverty" here.
The article isn’t talking about just western countries. The subheading is: “The workers who make the Japanese shows the world is binge-watching can earn as little as $200 a month. ”
When you're looking at policy to address lifting up the people struggling at the bottom in various ways the only reasonable course is to define it relative to local conditions. Looking globally ignores local prices and needs for example.
Gah. I can't remember the book but it classifies the different levels of poverty. There were 4 levels.
I'm going from memory but level 1 was what you describe.
Level 2 is being able to meet your needs but all your time goes into meeting those needs.
Level 3 is having enough extra money to pay for things you don't need.
Level 4 was IIRC basically not having to work.
Most countries have a range of 1-3 or 2-3 or 3-4 or some distribution of that.
Anyway long story short, western countries mostly have 2-4 and don't know what 1 even looks like (on a lived experience level). They've seen pictures of it and there are people living in Level 1 in western countries, they just aren't as front and center. If you've lived near Level 1 you know what real poverty looks like. If you haven't you think that Level 2 is real poverty. Both need to be addressed, but I agree that Level 1 poverty is so much worse for people living there.
I think it's much more about expectations. People from poorer countries have much lower "needs". They live in smaller homes, use worse electronics, use older cars etc. They expect less, so their needs are lower. Once they become richer their needs will grow too.
I don't think so, it's about relative cost. Everything is so much more expensive in richer countries, but comparatively speaking, cars, TVs, phones are much cheaper.
Like a phone is £20, but a weekly shop for a family might be £100. A TV might be £250, but rent is £500.
So you can be in the paradoxical situation of being able to afford to buy a phone or a TV one month, then next month run out of money for food or rent.
Expectations are definitely a big part of it. As someone who lives in the third world, (and only spends about one/two weeks a year in the first world), it always amazes me the minor (from my perspective) stuff that make some people in the first world really irritated.
Some that I can remember:
- Someone completely mad at their phone because the video on a call was dropping (just after landing, while the plane was still taxing, in the middle of the tarmac of a very large airport).
- The airbnb-mate in a shared Airbnb crying because the outside of the entrance of the house smelled a bit of cigarettes. I mean like real telenovela ending style tears.
- Someone kicking and shouting at a ticket vending machine because it was out of service (a working one was next to that one)
- Complaining about food choice in an event buffett that had like five different cuisines.
Fortunately my needs haven't grown that much, it seems that the only first world thing I want is a Japanese toilet.
Did a really good job of defining the levels and putting them in perspective. In addition, it's a refreshingly optimistic take on the direction humanity is trending. I read the book because it was recommended by Bill Gates
I totally agree, we hear so much negativity his approach to showing how humanity in general is better off today than any time in the past is encouraging.
If this is accurate, then only A-list voice actors are making any serious money because they're scarce and in high demand. I think that most of the money in anime just gets spent on creating more anime, so very few people end up making money.
Capitalism has always been based on exploitative relationships between the user (aka employer) and the used (aka employee). Why would anime be any different?
Short answer: because you are either money or you are talent and they are totally different understandings of how the world works. Skills aren't capital - people with skills are capital. What is capital? Something that grows and creates value while you sleep. How do you get some of that productive capital? Leverage. How do you get leverage? By promising a potentially better risk adjusted return on someone elses surplus capital than they can get from interest or an index fund. How do you create the better return? By moving something from one place to another better than the alternatives, etc.
While this is very high level, it is important to observe that none of this has anything to do with being really good at making hand drawn tentacle porn, or writing code for that matter.
Gee this makes me glad that I'm passionate about software rather than anime. I can totally imagine companies pitting workers against each other in our field too. I mean they do to some extent but people can make a reasonable living.
I don't have time to find source on the web to support that but in his graphic novel about Pyongyang, Guy Delisle describes how a lot of anime are made (if I am correct he is talking about Disney but it is all from memory so correct me if I am wrong). Basically Westerners make some designs and all the animation in between 2 designs is made in North Korea.
"Q:How is the North's animation seen in abroad? A:Compared to North Korea's general image around the world, their animation sector has a remarkably good reputation. The nation has been receiving many orders from abroad for quite some time, including many from France and Italy. The workers usually participate in original drawings and coloring. Some of the well-known foreign animation projects the North has been involved in include "Lion King", "Les Miserables", "Pocahontas" and an Italian production of "Hercules" and "Billy the Cat" from France"
"But even many grown-ups enjoy [animation in North Korea] because it is one of the rare television programs in the North free of political messages"
"Actually most researchers estimate that almost half of the households in the North have television sets. It's just another common misconception about the North to think that only the rich get to watch television. There are also many animated films released in theatres."
Would be interesting to see the overall social balance or GINI for north Korea with reasonable data. A huge proportion of the population has no food and there is a difference between a flatscreen 30" and second hand Chinese 16" TV from the 80s but they mkfhr both appear as 'having a TV' in the statistics, so I would be careful to draw conclusions from this.
I remember reading in Poor Economics by Duflo and Banerjee that poor people having a TV is not uncommon at all. They take the example of a Moroccan family in a rural area. They explain that because that's the only thing there is to do, owning a TV makes a massive difference to your everyday life.
If by animators you mean people who create the frames between key frames designed by the character designers then I'm pretty sure this work is often outsourced to chinese and south korean studios that pay a penny to their employees.
I think the only exception to that was Kyoto Animation (KyoAni) Studio which made fame for treating their employees very well. Unfortunately they were targeted by an arson attack in 2019.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 377 ms ] threadIt's because:
(a) we don't compensate jobs based on their difficulty or the financial success of the product, but on how hard it is to find people to do them when we need them.
If there were 100 qualified surgeons for every patient needing an operation, and would stampede each other for a chance to work and get paid, we'd pay them $25/hour too.
(b) we allow businesses to profit wildly while not paying enough (by exploiting (a)), because we have the taboo that not meddling with the market is the best course of action. A more englightened society that didn't pay too much attention to economy pundits working for rich people, might find a way for better revenue sharing with employees...
However, enforcement is another story. While Japan's prefectural minimum wages range from ¥714 to ¥932 per hour (6.71+$) for all workers, that’s often ignored.
This isn't even the case. Last season in my country fruits were rotting in the fields cause nobody was there to pick them up. Did farmers increase salaries in order to get more fruit pickers? No.
Here, I suspect the obvious in the anime industry, like in many entertainment sectors including VFX: salary fixing between studios to keep pays low.
> If there were 100 qualified surgeons for every patient needing an operation, and would stampede each other for a chance to work and get paid, we'd pay them $25/hour too.
Given how opaque the healthcare industry is when it comes to cost for non elective surgeries, I doubt costs would go down even if you multiplied the number of surgeons by 1000. Case points: there are loads of restaurants yet the hospital will steal bill a meal 20 times what it would cost in the nearby restaurant.
Is the fruit worth picking if salaries need to be increased to get workers? In a lot of cases the answer is no.
A lot of work only makes sense at a particular salary. If market salaries are above that, the work just isn't done.
At that point it’s not a question of making money, but minimizing losses.
There is no money in agriculture. The only reason why most farms aren't bankrupt is because of subsidies.
Where farm subsides play a role is dampening the boom bust cycle.
https://www.agriculture.com/news/business/us-heads-for-highe....
15% is absolutely "I will go bankrupt if I don't have this" territory.
Net result fewer workers, a shift in which farms are profitable, and a ripple effect up the supply chain, but most bankruptcy would be from farms that do so sooner. Aka they would have been bankrupt in a 10 years and now it happens in 5.
*Effective price being the sales price plus total subsidies.
This of course is too complex to model is completely ignored. A lot like ignoring the atmosphere when designing air planes.
Good on them.
I guess it was only a matter of time before economists stopped misunderstanding physics and started misunderstanding computer science. I mean there's not much prestige left in physics since the end of the cold war. Are we going to see a Turing prize in economics like the Nobel prize?
But, clearly you’re simply using terms without understanding what they mean.
Food distribution is a complete disaster. Lots of middlemen between farmers and consumers inflate prices
Whenever the milk price is low, we get farmer's protests that they don't get enough for their milk. Turns out they get 9 cents per liter for which I pay more than a euro. You could double their pay, include it in the price, and I wouldn't care.
There are often a lot more factors at play in these sort of things. Some rational, some maybe not so much.
Your example with milk is a very good illustration - something that raises the farmers costs by a few cents is much more important than what it might seem based on the fact that the difference is small compared t owhat the retail buyer pays.
All the leverage that farmers have can't get them more than 9 cents/liter. That's it, there's no hope for them to earn 18 cents/liter - sure, the wholesalers probably could, but why would they gift money to other businesses without any need to do so? So if your milk production process gets 1 cent/liter more expensive (but your competitors, possibly far away, are still willing to keep the same price), you can't get 10 cents/liter, it simply wrecks your profit margin - if your profit margin was 11% (1 cent/liter profit out of 9 cents/liter revenue), you might as well go out of business since you won't be earning anything.
All sorts of narrow specialized skill jobs (e.g. rebuilding electric motors) have gone this way in the west.
Mango farms are a pretty good example. Old farmers have grown their trees very tall and let the fruit grow as big as possible. It is very difficult for pickers to harvest the fruit. If you train the pickers to prune the trees and ensure a consistent size you can often plant more trees, have each tree bear more but smaller fruit with superior yield.
Because of the decreased height fruit pickers can harvest more fruit per shift and the risk of fruit falling to the ground and only being used in food processinng is minimized. Overall it's a net gain for poor farmers and fruit pickers in Africa and consumers benefit from a greater availability mangos.
These techniques are very common in developed countries though.
and at least that option might help fertilize their fields for next season.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_supply
Probably because raising the wages would cost them more than the loss of the harvest since the price per tonne of fruit was already decided by long term contracts and there were no financial penalties for spoilage / mis-harvests in these contracts.
Ever since food became a global commodity, the conditions in food manufacturing became a ruthless race to the bottom - with the worst offender being meatpacking. The John Oliver segment last weekend was horrifying to watch, even from an European viewpoint (where we also have a history of exploitation and animal cruelty, but nowhere even close to that).
The worst paid are always the most powerless.
Of course having rare skills that are in high demand also gives you power, but it's one of many kinds of power that can give you more control over your own salary.
It is the case, but leaves some assumptions on the table. Namely that you understand that price exists to be a deterrent, and when price rises too high you will decide that you don't need something anymore.
The fruits rotted in the fields because they weren't worth picking. There was no need to pay anyone to do a job that wasn't deemed worthwhile to do in the first place.
That may be true, but why weren't they worth picking? In agriculture, large buyers often enforce artificially low prices (monopsony). Even if farmers were willing to pay pickers more, there's no point if the buyers refuse to pay a fair price that accounts for increased wages.
The exact same reason. As the price rises in the grocery store, you and I stop buying those fruits. When we stop buying them, there is no need to produce even more of what is already not being purchased.
Sad that this is one of the plot points of The Grapes Of Wrath and is still happening today.
That industry is arguably booming too, making more than it ever has in the past and growing wildly year over year.
And yet game programmers make some of the lowest salaries among all devs, last I checked. Especially at entry level.
To me, that entire industry seems geared towards grabbing fresh faced grads who are loaded up on dreams of making games, putting them in infinite crunch, and discarding them later when they are burned out.
([1] "And don't try to bypass it by building in another country and then come to sell your wares here")
There is a reason this is not what laws look like.
Hollywood is already one step ahead of you [1]. No reason game studios wouldn’t follow suit, given a law like that to incentivize them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
In part, this is because so many people were burned in the past that it's now standard for contracts to include provisions specifying which profits the talents/investors are getting a % of. There's also many A-list talent that simply refuse to work for a studio which uses Hollywood accounting. And finally, the public-trading status of so many studios today basically renders Hollywood accounting impossible at a legal and financial level.
But the primary killer of the Hollywood accounting system is the big switch to streaming, in which royalties/etc are paid upfront (at a time-value discount) rather than over time, which essentially eliminates all of the opportunity to include "costs" (like usurious interest or marketing expenses) that had been used to generate paper losses on otherwise successful films.
And more importantly, unlike Hollywood talent, game developers and anime animators as a group have never been entitled to a share of the profits of the products they helped create.
If not, then it seems like someone else is taking all the risk but the employees are reaping all the rewards.
It would be great for me personally if my employer was forced to share his profits with me during the good times. But the reality is that during the hard times - when there's a global pandemic for example - he's the one who has to remortgage his house and max out his credit cards to make payroll, whereas I'm just a guy who can walk away with a month's notice.
They got 40 years of sending labor to developing countries, dismantled our infrastructure to privatize it, ALREADY got a 1.9T tax break (from Trump, even though almost all economists were AGAINST it) now they might have to SCROUNGE DEEP as...as people flock to the information services they largely own?
Boo hoo for them! Oh no! They might lose a house, something the millions of people who are going to be evicted as soon as the moratoriums end will also get to experience! They'll be left without their SUMMER home! What a terrible loss! We'd better give them another tax loophole!
I know programmers are insulated and have a very warped view of the world, but let's not forget we're (generally) labor, and let's not lick the boot that's on all of labor's collective necks TOO hard, neh?
look in the mirror.
most businesses aren't giant megacorps owned by folks with yachts.
and, hell, the megacorps? large chunks of them are owned by folks without yachts, too.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL/holders?p=AAPL
this sort of hyperbolic rage only makes understanding and improving things harder.
I know there are a lot of wantrepeneurs here, but let's not pretend we're all not mostly still...workers.
At the moment, the risk/reward equation is unbalanced. For owners, it goes from outsized risk at startup to outsized reward at success; for employees, it goes from outsized risk at startup to moderate risk at success
If a startup fails:
Founder loses two years, his life savings, and gets paid nothing.
Employee loses two years, keeps his life savings, and gets paid salary for that time.
Completely different risk propositions.
What, you mean, like, bailouts? Because we do bailouts. Only difference is that, while the taxpayers pay, they see no return.
Artificially supporting failing businesses has negative consequences upon society, supporting a struggling individual has positive benefits to society.
That's because corporate limited liability shields stakeholders from losses beyond their sunk costs.
As an employee, you probably are close to last in line behind most of the other creditors, and may have to just write off that last (missed) paycheck. But that paycheck you are never going to get is the full extent of your liability for the company's losses, even theoretically.
Not that it encompasses all the risks you're exposed to (time not working, looking for a new job, etc.) But those are the same regardless.
you're simply making things up. stop it.
you can look up the hierarchy of creditors, and see where employee compensation lands. they're fourth priority, after domestic support obligations (probably not relevant to a business), administrative expenses (gotta pay the courts and court-appointed bankruptcy trustee), and claims from involuntary bankruptcy.
employee benefits are in the fifth priority. there are four more priority levels (6 through 10), and then all of the unsecured creditors.
Sure, technically employees are near the top, but that doesn't help if all the cash and assets are long gone.
On the one hand we want to incentivize risk-taking and entrepreneurship. On the other, we recognize that it takes a village to launch a successful company, and we want to share the wealth.
On the one hand we recognize that all work is not equally valuable. On the other, we we value people beyond their work.
Abstract discussion of this is always disappointing and policy based on abstract discussion is always disastrous. I really wish we could be more precise in our language, because then we would at least recognize the tremendous difficulty at hand.
Maybe an easier incentive would be to give tax breaks to cooperatives?
There's no reason that an employee who just happens to work at a firm that becomes successful should get profits from that, while a similar employee doing the same work who just happens to work at a failing company should get nothing. How could you justify that?
Putting business profit taxes in a big pot and spending them on everyone evens this out.
Fundamentally all you're really saying is you want corporate taxes to be higher. Which is arguable given the well-understood negative consequences of that which hurt everyone (e.g. taxes dissuade business formation, which means no jobs at all).
That sounds like every startup job pitch.
It never really pays off later for game programmers.
A $2M exit sounds great until you factor in the extra taxes and 5 to 10 years to realize that. Many software developers could make a substantial amount of that, without the risk, simply by aggressively working career changes.
One of the biggest barriers to me is getting over my need to make code that I think is clean. And every time I try to read about best practices in game code I come across the same mentality: Who cares, write code quick and dirty, as long as it works it's fine.
And that's fine, it's just intimidating for me to write code like that. Too much perfectionism or something. Maybe too much "What if I do it wrong and introduce a bug so entangled in everything that I can't unravel it".
I wish there were even some bare minimum best practices suggestions for game code.
This is definitely speculation on my part but maybe he didn't become a coder focused on his craft because of the finances afforded to him from Braid, maybe he created Braid a quality game because he was a coder focused on his craft?
If Google cared at all about the targets that game developers cared about, my Gmail wouldn't take 10 seconds to load and run at 2FPS once the page is there.
I've read some of the best code I've ever seen, written by programmers in the games space. Code with very few tests, heavy intertwined behavior, wide-reaching global effects, and lots and lots of state.
Ultimately, treat the code as an artifact of the project: make it as clean as you need to get the game done, but any extra scaffolding you add will only come back to bite you later once you want to change how something is wired. From that end, all the usual suspects apply: make code easy to delete, make it have clearly-defined boundaries, and depend on other code as little as possible. Push yourself to use copy/paste more than you think you should, you'll be surprised how easy it is to delete wild experiments if you don't have to untangle the web of dependencies.
You're correct that optimized code is generally harder to maintain. Optimization often requires punching through abstraction layers or calcifying certain constraints or assumptions in the code.
FYI, about a dozen years ago I comfortably used GMail on a 450 MHz PowerPC with 512 MiB of RAM. The javascript ran without a JIT, completely interpreted. It all ran just fine. Now here I am, on a multi-GHz multi-core box with gigabytes of RAM and a JIT, and I have to keep GMail in HTML-only mode. I simply can't run the javascript and still operate my computer. Mail is piling up because I can no longer select lots of email for deletion; it isn't practical to click every single item.
I've never been in the gaming industry, but what I've heard from some developers is that writing very dirty throwaway code is the norm, since most of it is thrown away anyway when the game is done. Which leads to the buggy mess we get even from many triple A games, and a never ending cycle of re-writing the same things for each game, even within the same studio.
Simple, contrived example: if I create an open-world game with open-world design, I can complete quests in any order. Maybe I can start doing a quest, and then decide to stop doing it halfway through, or maybe I can switch quests halfway through.
The test case matrix for this is now: every quest x every other quest. If some quest spawns a timer that will do something in 3 minutes, and something else forgets to stop it when I switch quests, that's a bug. Maybe the timer spawns some NPC, and it should stop when I switch quests. Or maybe the timer will reset some world state, and should fire immediately once I switch quests. But maybe not always -- if I complete the quest but the game internally 'switches quests' to the next one in the cycle, I don't want to despawn the NPC.
Is this code? Not really engine code, it's more like data, or scripting? It's not really the code that's reusable between games, and between engines; it's custom-built for the game's flow itself. That's where, in my experience, a good majority of "AAA bugginess" happens.
Every engineer knows interacting mutable state tends to make code buggier. Well, a game simulating a virtual world is essentially a huge ball of deeply interacting mutable state by design.
The real hell comes when you think you're working on one and it's actually the other; you either burn time on an overcomplicated solution or invent a maintenance nightmare.
Just like any other development, you need to make guesses about what will change and what will stay the same and your efficiency depends on the accuracy of those guesses.
I say "possibly-misguided" because there are some people for whom that is their one and only dream, and if that is their choice, hey, great. Go for it. I just want people to go into it with open eyes. However, I think the bulk of such people are simply misinformed about A: the nature of game programming and B: the nature of non-game programming. For the most part, they're a lot more similar than a lot of young people realize. You don't go into games programming and get to "design games"; you're going to consume tickets and do a lot of repetitive scut work. Frankly your odds of finding a good job where you're self-directed and not entirely doing scut work is better outside of the game industry.
So... do your part... spread the word that the games industry is mostly bad jobs and the non-games industry actually has a lot of good stuff in it, so that by giving young people a better understanding of the real situation they can make better choice, and help starve the games industry of its continuous supply of fresh-faced naive grads to exploit.
But I had some great professors in university that steered me away from the game industry. I'm quite happy working as a web dev now and I can do games as a hobby.
The main reason is that there isn't enough competition. Video Game Companies are pretty much in a monopoly. No one is making a game like GTA. No one else is making a football game (You need the license), No one else is making doom. No one else is making Counter Strike.
Games became brands. The only thing that drives you out of business is your own greed of recycling your franchises/ideas.
Oh and also many of those companies do not need that many of the "expensive" devs because many of those video game companies are using middlewares like unity or unreal engine.
With more competitions better video game companies would hire better engineer at better salaries. that will lift everyone else.
As evidence of what I'm talking about I also cite the absolutely huge number of "indie" developers, the vast majority of them not being the ones you've heard of, because most of them aren't famous and face sales figures in the hundreds, if not dozens. Many of them are actively taking a negative salary (that is, burning somebody's savings) to work in the game industry.
People make weird career choices for the perception of prestige or being able to call themselves part of a team. I got a friend who is an Agricultural Mechanic who works for some local owned companies. A few years ago John Deere built a facility nearby and you'd be surprised how many mechanics, who by all accounts liked their jobs, moved to work for John Deere for less pay, less benefits.
Video games aren't that much different. People will harm their own career goals thinking they can work for a brand name when an unknown company might have a better fit. I'm sure they have valid reasons for making the decisions they do, but from the outside looking in, it just looks like fanboyisms.
Monopoly doesn’t just mean “this company is bigger than I’d like.”
I'm sorry, but this is completely wrong.
First, there is immense amounts of competition in video games; the industry is bigger than ever but there are so many companies and even small fry indie shops can make it big with talent and a bit of luck.
Second, there are tons of GTA/Doom/CSGO/sports games clones, licensing notwithstanding, that fail for various reasons that usually boil down to "bad game." Brand popularity matters, sure, but many studios blasted their way to huge sales and fame through having a damn good game, like Minecraft, Terraria, and Rocket League, to name a few.
There's so little barrier to entry in the gaming industry at the moment. If you make a good game, you will generally get tons of sales.
I wouldn't necessarily say "make good game get sales", just because there are a fair amount of devs who don't get marketing right, but the point stands.
Successful games tend to get purchased by larger companies, but there are a lot of large game companies. Valve, Epic, EA, Nintendo, Sony, Rockstar, Activision Blizzard, Ubisoft, Bioware, etc. And that's not even getting into mobile/Facebook games, which are easy to speak derisively about, but are still major players in the game space.
Game companies are about the most-diverse and least-monopolistic of all media we consume.
According to Stack Overflow [1] the median age of a developer is 33 years old, whereas the median age of a game developer is 31 years old [2]. That's not likely to be a big enough difference to substantiate your position.
[1] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#developer-pro... [2] https://igda.org/resources-archive/diversity-in-the-game-ind...
If there is such evidence, by all means produce it.
You can have a bunch of people who jump in at 23, get super exploited, and burn out in two years balance against one single person over the median age, so long as that stream of younger people is serial. The median is unchanged, but a lot more people leave the industry feeling exploited and abused by it than remain.
I am not disputing that the game industry has a lot of churn. I'm disputing that the game industry has substantially more churn among younger people than older people and that the churn is significantly different from the rest of the software development industry.
It's not so much that young people are uniquely exploited and leave after a couple of years, it's that the number of software developers doubles every 5 years so that there is a huge imbalance of young people in the industry in general.
There's also a ton of societal pressure to "follow your dreams" or "pursue your passion", and people conflate their passion and enjoyment of playing video games for what it would be like to make the games.
First off, people need to differentiate the enjoyment of something with the making of it. Not the perfect example, but I like to eat meat, yet I know I would hate to be a butcher.
Second, if you really enjoy something it's often better to keep it as a hobby. Most people find all the joy gets sucked out of their passion when it also involves the business of selling, supporting customers, and managing costs.
That's actually a way better analogy than you think.
But it's not just that. Every job has a mixture of tangible and intangible rewards. Game development scores relatively poorly on the tangibles: less pay, fewer benefits, less free time. But for many people, it scores incredibly highly on the intangibles:
- Spending your day writing code that makes insurance rate calculations comply with the latest changes to Iowa tax law versus making an orc explode if you hit it with an axe just right.
- Working in an office that lets you wear chinos on casual Friday versus wearing whatever you like, coming in when you like, and being surrounded by culture and people that resonate with you.
- Working with accountants and lawyers versus artists and sound designers.
- Working on a product used begrudgingly by employees of some giant accounting contractor versus make a game you love to play.
- Sitting next to folks doing the bare minimum just to get a paycheck versus the comradery of being on a team that really believes in what they're doing.
- Writing code that's difficult because it encodes Byzantine legal regulations versus code that's difficult because it uses the latest graphics algorithms to push hardware as much as possible.
- Being at a company no one's heard of making software know one knows versus being at a brand your friends all know working on products they're excited about. (Anecdote: When I flew to Orlando to interview at EA, I ended up mentioning it to a guy sitting next to me at the airport. He looked at me like an absolute celebrity. "Dude, you're gonna be working on Madden?" I still remember that moment.)
So, yeah, the hours and the pay suck. But when you're in your twenties you tend to have a lot of time and not a lot of bills. Working on something that resonates with your peers, your culture, and your passions is really valuable.
I wish big companies exploited that less, sure. But you see low pay and crunch even at small non-exploitive companies which implies to me that much of this is simply people rationally trading off tangible rewards for intangible ones that are more meaningful to them.
I find it really weird how much software engineers criticize taking a pay cut to make games while simultaneously romanticizing leaving tech completely to become a farmer, writer, chef, social worker, etc. (all of which, for the record, have miserable hours and shit pay). Game devs are essentially doing the same thing but at least they get to use their tech skills in the process.
I'm glad I'm not at EA anymore because my values and priorities changed. But I don't regret my time there and it got me my current job at Google. If I'd spent that time chasing some other low-paying dream like writing fiction, it's much less likely I would have been able to make that transition.
> Working in an office that lets you wear chinos on casual Friday versus wearing whatever you like, coming in when you like, and being surrounded by culture and people that resonate with you.
Most dev jobs are the second thing. Most dev shops don't have a dress code. Many have adopted flex time. And further, with covid, a lot are fully remote now. Modern development is nothing like Office Space.
> Working with accountants and lawyers versus artists and sound designers.
You seem to think accountants and lawyers are boring, uninteresting, etc. That's just silly. Just because someone's job is boring, doesn't mean they are. A lot of my co-workers have hobbies in art, music, blowing shit up, etc. Just because they spend their day job combing over the tax code doesn't mean they aren't every bit as fun and interesting as someone who's day job is art.
> Sitting next to folks doing the bare minimum just to get a paycheck versus the comradery of being on a team that really believes in what they're doing.
I find it hard to believe game dev doesn't have the "I'm just here for a paycheck folk" Probably not for long, but again, surprised if that's the case. In anycase, comradery and teamwork exists in a lot of dev shops. Just because you aren't making an orc's head explode doesn't mean you can't get excited about increasing stability, performance, or getting a product that saves a bunch of time and money for the company. There's a lot to celebrate beyond "That looks pretty".
> Writing code that's difficult because it encodes Byzantine legal regulations versus code that's difficult because it uses the latest graphics algorithms to push hardware as much as possible.
Both are puzzles to solve, so why diss the one you don't understand? Further, what makes you think regular dev DOESN'T look to push hardware harder and faster than it previously went? Performance work is universal for development.
This isn't to say there aren't boring dev jobs that pay well. Certainly a large number of jobs are "Make REST API over the database". But even those can have opportunities for growth, learning, and finding coworkers you love to work with.
I think you have a really warped sense of what the average software job is really like.
What about embedded systems designers? What about machine/traffic control systems? What about cutting edge stuff like tik tok's recommendation algorithm (which disregarding the politics, has to be marvelled at for its ability to pair users with content they like)?
There is more out there than just Big 4 corporate paper shuffling to make the suits in head office more money..
Also, I'd argue the number one tangible you're missing vs something like, say web dev, is flexibility. Pre-covid, none of my friends in the gaming industry had any flexibility to work in a remote fashion and was very studio based. Whereas remote working has been becoming increasingly popular in the web dev world, and I've been working remotely for years now which was a huge QoL improvement.
I do romanticize about leaving the tech industry in a kinda similar-ish fashion to what you were stating in that example, but really it's more about romanticizing an early / soft retirement for myself, which is only made possible because I took a higher paying path than game development. But yeah, I do have friends in the industry that love it despite the hours and lower pay, because the people they work with are great and they're very passionate about their projects, whereas yeah, I'm not exactly passionate about some of my projects and am doing it purely for financial and career advancement reasons so it contributes to sometimes really extended burnout periods and decreases in my mental health.
So yeah, to each their own with this. I love gaming and have made some of my own games as a hobby, but I just couldn't justify it as the core of my career despite loving it. Kind of a shame in some regards I would say, but it is what it is.
If you're AAA, the obvious problem is one of agency - just like being "guy #4968 who worked on Michael Bay's Transformers 5", you … basically have no influence on anything meaningful about the work - you generally have no voting rights to affect the gameplay, or the storytelling or the balance, or just about anything you'd care about as a gamer looking in from the outside. You're just a machine that produces assets (the vast bulk of coders working on those games tend to be scripting together content, whether it's shaders or level scripting).
But if you're not AAA, and it's your job, there's an equally bitter compromise: you have to make a living. There is a significant overlap between the venn diagram of "doing truly excellent work" and "making a decent ROI", but there's a reasonably significant area where they don't overlap. More importantly - I think the most meaningful questions lie smack dab in that area that doesn't overlap, because that's always the part that gets axed in the interests of expedience.
In order to even approach most of the interesting questions in gamedev (whether they're questions of gameplay design, storytelling, balance, etc, etc), you have to essentially start with a full, finished game, and iterate on what's flawed about that title to try and push it from mediocrity into excellence. Many devs do this by making spiritual successors to games they love; some do it by making their own game, and then iterating from there. RAD/Prototyping can "short circuit" an answer to some questions, but we're at a point in the industry where most of that low-hanging fruit has been harvested, and if you really want to make any progress, then the point at which you've finished a 1.0 of a game isn't the "finish line", but rather, is just when you're really getting started. Even if you're making a "spiritual successor" that tries to make something better by tweaking the recipe, that's still your first experiment - now it's time to drive the car you just built around, and learn what works and what doesn't.
But this absolutely trainwrecks right into the typical economic model for a "we're actually making a living off this" gamedev - except in rare cases with new revenue models, that point right there is precisely the point at which you've got to tie off that existing game, call it done, and move on to a new one. If you quit right there, you don't really learn anything - you just make a series of mediocre games (or occasionally, a lucky good one), but you never really understand why they're good or bad, because you're too busy churning out new ones every couple of years to experiment with reworks.
Almost all of the truly great games we've got going right now are cases where there's been such incestuous cross-pollination that multiple studios have essentially done this to each other (major genre titles like FPSes, fighting games, etc), or are small indie developers who've just knuckled down on one "crazy idea" and churned on it for like 10-15 years (minecraft, dwarf fortress, etc). There are other examples like the Civ series, where the devs have essentially made "the same" game 6 times in a row, letting them iterate massively on the formula.
Furthermore, the brutality of having to make a living off of it really hurts friendships - game development is an absolutely savage industry, financially, and chances are perhaps 90% that you're just not going to stay above water as a business. It takes some extraordinary friends to hang together in the face of that. If you're at all human, people will get scared and lash out at each other for not putting their backs i...
> Being at a company no one's heard of making software know one knows versus being at a brand your friends all know working on products they're excited about.
I noticed a dramatic shift in people's reactions when my introduction conversations changed from "I'm a programmer" to "I make iPhone apps".
This is the way it's "always been" for game development. When I was in college 15 years ago, it was the same environment. It turned me off from pursuing a career in game development (among other factors). I'm sure more senior people than me have similar anecdotes.
A friend is on the Call of Duty team, and Medal of Honor before that. The way MoH turned into CoD is the owner of the studio that made MoH was unwilling to sufficiently share the profits, so basically the entire team walked out in mass, got their own publishing deal and made CoD.
But only the people who've made a runaway hit have that kind of bargaining power. The other 90% of the industry is pretty grim.
Things are a lot better on the indie/casual/mobile side, as those tend to be smaller studios with close friendships/partnerships.
For a developer, the skills learned for working in the videogame industry are highly transferable to better paying jobs outside of video games. Skills learned on the job are also equally valuable outside of industry. When a developer is ready to leave the videogame industry, they have skills that are in demand and are able to get positions equal to their experience.
For a 2D animator, keyframing and tweening are not well-payed skills outside of the anime industry. Skills learned on the job are equally not well payed. When an animator is ready to leave the anime industry, they have to start at the entry level of whatever new industry they're entering.
To find that the last few years of your life are deemed meaningless by the job market after working your ass off day and night... That is a real gut punch.
On a serious note, there's a slew of skills an animator has on their Talent Stack (https://personalexcellence.co/blog/talent-stack/). Mere fluency of Photoshop, Illustrator, being able to DRAW period, work ethic, are no mere skills at all.
Physicians at "renown" institutions actually tend to make less (on average) than the average physician. They can do it because so many physicians are willing to move to a high CoL location, work more, and take a pay cut.
The best jobs actually tend to be in rural states and areas. Pay is better and work/life balance tends to be better.
CNN article: https://money.cnn.com/2016/01/27/pf/jobs/doctors-pay/index.h...
Seriously, just do it. Do your passion and earn a decent living.
Now all those things are much easier to do and understand. There are thousands of tutorials on the internet. So making games is becoming more like writing books, putting on plays, making a low budget movie. More people can do it than there is an audience.
The best are still very valuable, in every discipline. But the supply of average people is almost limitless.
> They typically pay animation studios a set fee and reserve royalties for themselves.
> While the system protects the studios from the risk of a flop, it also cuts them out of the windfalls created by hits.
And because we've been taught that discussing how much you earn is taboo, especially with your colleagues.
I don’t think it’s a supply side problem. Another phenomenon is happening here. Animators do have the option of unionizing which mitigates these sorts of issues.
But it's also art. Painting, cobbler, pottery, blacksmith, etc have always been sought after jobs and yet are and have been the least paid throughout our history.
Every frame is literally sketched by hand entirely which makes actual skill required. Anime especially given the more realistic human proportions and extensive use of z-axis. For something like sponge bob or South Park in the US it’s much easier... but in Japan the animation is a real skill.
Take a look at this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Yglxt331WoY . This type of skill of animating is basically non existent now in any place other then japan.
Also blacksmiths were not always the least paid. Prior to the industrial revolution it was a common job.
The vast majority of anime is static backgrounds with slow pans and static characters with mouth flaps. The backgrounds and characters often get outsourced and the studio just adds facial features and mouth flaps.
If anything the people who do these scenes which I’m assuming is the same people who do the mouth flapping requires raw skill that is not easy to come by.
If there is a role for a low skill artist that exclusively does mouth flapping then yes it’s an oversupply side issue for those people, but it does not explain the low wage of the person who does the action scenes.
Unless you see coding as art, animation jobs are going to be more fulfilling and that is always exploited (people willing to do it for less because it feels better) by the market.
The number of surgeons is artificially low because of limits on the number of residency spots in this country. So I agree that prices can probably come down, somewhat. However, attorneys are not limited in the same way but can still cost a fortune, because people are willing to pay a lot for perceived value when there's a high stakes outcome. Some things just aren't worth farming out to the lowest bidder.
You need to do a residency to be properly trained to handle all kinds of situations. Your surgeon can't be in a position of "well I've never done this in a supervised setting so let me go find someone to teach me" as the lead surgeon. That's exactly the reason they do a residency.
With law, for example, you have to go to law school and pass a test, but if you do, you are in. There's a lot of law schools out there, to the point where a large percentage of people graduating don't get good jobs. The same isn't true for medical residency graduates.
>It's that there are literally X number of slots
This is fundamentally incompatible with the idea of a privatized healthcare system. It simply cannot be functional this way. I hope Americans will wake up and realize that this sort of welfare should not exist.
It's always sad when I see Americans brag about their highly efficient free market systems when they fail the basic requirements needed for a free market to actually work.
Yes it can work and yes you'd be allowed to brag but as it is you haven't figured out how to make it work yet.
https://www.ucop.edu/federal-governmental-relations/_files/f...
Get prescriptions to variously mostly safe drugs anti depressants/weight loss drugs/blood pressure medicine, dandruff shampoo.
Refill any prescription.
Those two items are probably 80% of the reason anyone I know goes to a doctor.
Now for surgeons.
It's true that you want someone with a lot of experience for surgery but there are still ways to get more highly trained surgeons. Throw out undergrad requirements for med school, if the average career for a fully trained surgeon in 16 years we've just increased the supply by ~25%.
Allow surgeons from other countries to come practice in the U.S. without completing a full residency. We could easily suck up the worlds surgeons because we pay so much more.
Open up/pay for more residency spots.
This role seems to be increasingly filled by Physicians Assistants and Nurse Practitioners.
As mentioned below, PAs and NPs already do a lot of these tasks. However, the big value-add I see in MDs as opposed to seeing NPs or PAs with problems is that they have the depth and breadth of training to have first-hand experience with the exceptions to normal circumstances.
The standard medical mantra of "if you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras" works great for normal scenarios. If there actually is a zebra situation, though, I have far more faith in professionals with extensive clinical training at identifying those situations.
> Those two items are probably 80% of the reason anyone I know goes to a doctor.
Regarding prescriptions, this may be blind faith in regulatory institutions, but I assume that there is a reason that mostly-safe drugs require a prescription. If the criteria for prescription refills or simple procedures doesn't require the full breadth/depth of clinical training, though, then NPs and PAs already exist to fill that role.
> We could easily suck up the worlds surgeons because we pay so much more.
I'd argue that this is an explicit non-goal. We don't want to attract the most surgeons/doctors, we want the surgeons/doctors we have to be trained and practiced to an extremely high bar. You're definitely right that there are lots of scenarios which don't require this extremely high bar, and that's the reason why not all medical personnel are doctors. Nurses and physician assistants play a critical role in healthcare specifically because they can tackle those 80% of cases you mentioned, but the way around this isn't to dilute the training of medical doctors, it's to delegate the work that's better performed by others to those others.
software engineers are one of the best paid people today. i highly doubt that we are hard to find.
https://www.daxx.com/blog/development-trends/software-develo...
it has been often mentioned but i don't think i have ever seen a link to the report people are quoting.
> Less than 1 year $103,269
Sounds like it's pretty hot!
https://www.indeed.com/career/software-engineer/salaries
How would this avoid (a) and (b) though? Your society needs to somehow balance what jobs people do. There is no real way to measure how difficult a job is. You could argue that hard manual labor is a very difficult job, yet there are many people who prefer that to sitting down, learning a lot and then doing a mentally exhausting desk job. The willingness of people to do a job needs to be accounted for when you're deciding whether a job is difficult or not, but this very much depends on the person. How would you account for this without looking at how difficult it is to replace a person doing a specific job?
Society is also structured in such a way that for the most part every job will have folks clamoring for it. When you are born without capital, you have to take what you can get.
Unfortunately I think it's going to keep getting worse as wealth inequality increases.
Imagine walking into a monopoly game where each piece is already bought and owned. Try to win at that. Instead, I could imagine you wind up working for someone, and feed them a majority of the profit while you get scraps.
I don't have good solutions for how to fix this, other than perhaps universal basic income would alleviate things.
Entities like this can't get funding though, since it endangers the contemporary business model and leaves little in the way of profit for banksters since by nature company stock is traded only internally, exchanged between employee and the company to prevent external interlopers from gaining a foothold. Governments would also see a great deal of their power dissolved as a product of the internal democratic processes dealing with social issues.
It comes with issues, but with multiplicity, I think the stratification would be greatly remedied. The stratification comes from non-owners participating in the business, they don't have voting rights and they're subject to lower compensation, generally. That's what we're subject to now, generally, in any case. With more companies following this modality, I believe that would be alleviated to a degree where if one was insistent they could always find an opportunity to become a worker-owner.
And what are "wild" profits? Because most companies are making far less than 8% of revenue as profits.
But I don't think that is necessarily true nor that things would follow suit if we think like that.
I mean, we employ much more people today than in the industrial revolution. Yet, people are paid significantly more, child labor has been abolished, all that working 8-9h a day instead of 14-18 which was common. We are not in a cooperative environment, when it comes to salaries. Companies are legally obligated to show gains to their investors, and if they can cut salaries and keep the profits they will do so. We are in a competitive game against employer, where the balance is found when both parties compromise. But make no mistake, as soon as the working force stop fight for better working conditions, it will not stay the same, only degrade.
Don't read that in a personal way. We are in no way personally against the employer, but the employer as an authority figure. The balance is not found through cooperation but rather through clash of professional interests.
No, it would be good, because it would mean that they were more efficiently utilizing their current workforce, probably through technological advancement that should ultimately benefit the entire industry. Technology is almost entirely driven through higher labor costs and dictating better conditions for employees. The benefits of technology improvements are also not zero-sum (equal to their costs to develop or maintain), and are redistributed through those higher salaries and through taxes.
If you end up unemployed at that wage level because your skill level has not made the new cut, there are other things you can do. Wanting to program but not being able to find somebody who wants you to program at the minimum wage is no more tragic than wanting to program but not being able to pay your rent doing it.
You have to be careful there because the overwhelming surplus of cheaply acquired goods/services goes to the people who received the goods and services and not the person selling the goods and services.
Businesses only capture it when they have a competitive advantage (either because they have no competition or b/c the cost savings can't be matched by a competitor).
Grocery clerks are lowly paid. But grocery is a competitive, low margin business. So those low wages mostly mean cheap food.
David Graeber made this observation, and suggested some sort of class tribalism.
Btw, to use cleaning as a specific example, taxation of domestic services is broken in almost every (western?) country and skews how people spend their time and money. Most professionals would happily trade an hour of work for an hour of cleaning services, however, by the time you put income tax (and VAT in my case) on top, your hours need to be about 2.5x times as valuable as your counterparty.
Law is a very status-conscious industry (even more than software) and so most of that oversupply of law graduates are not "in the club". They get paid relatively low wages and have to fight with each other for peanuts.
Some much smaller fraction of law graduates from top schools or who otherwise have the right connections get paid extremely high salaries because they are only competing with each other.
You do get supply demand corrections over time though. If you know you'll be making minimum wage if you didn't go to a top law school a lot of people would stop doing so.
Or another way to look at this is that lawyers get paid based on their reputation. Firms with a high reputation only have the ability to hire so many new lawyers. Those positions are indeed highly sought after, because that's how you get paid well, by getting in with a firm that already has a reputation. You're going to have a hard time starting out on your own, building up a reputation. Hell, sometimes you need to have built enough of a reputation just to get a position with a firm that has a high reputation.
While people/companies are looking for the best person/firm they can afford to represent them... cleaners are still just cleaners.
It’s basically a psychological refusal of our vulnerability in the world
Edit: What I mean to say is, the good lawyers make the same good money, the vast majority of lawyers do not.
[1] https://www.nalp.org/salarydistrib
It's also not even about being a "good" lawyer. It is completely determined by your law school and GPA. The big firms won't even look at your resume if you're not from a top 10 school.
But generally yes. School first, then class rank.
He was good at that area of law, one which everyone encounters at least once in life. He did not do the work million-dollar lawyers do and he did make millions.
The difference is vast when it comes to the lawyers who I know who are making incredible amounts of money and those who are just... somewhat independent small business folks.
That's not the case for starting lawyering, you have to: Go to law school, pass the bar, have a set of specialized skills than cleaning doesn't require.
This combination of skill and long (and costly...) processs is what keeps lawyer salaries higher.
What makes you think that? It's pretty trivial to cram for the coding and design questions, and be a mediocre engineer on a good career trajectory.
we live in a society that is heavily litigated because we have governments at all levels churning out laws and regulations to their benefit and those of their supporters.
There are some fields that exist to protect you from physical and financial harm and those will always exist and be desirable until we can eliminate the causes.
Watching Gantz, you wait for that moment at the end where something happens and realize you've wasted 10 hours of your life.
Accused of a crime? You may realize you've wasted your life in jail because you hired a bad lawyer.
I thought parent's argument is that you get thrown into jail because you didn't hire any lawyer. It's not that you got a bad lawyer, it's that you must hire one to defend yourself in the first place. Thus there is an always growing need for lawyers, bad or good.
Perhaps this isn't true? It's possible that salaries for lawyers are not going down, but that salaries for law graduates are going down (because not all law grads become lawyers).
Also, I thought salaries outside the major firms have cratered? (Or maybe were never all that high to begin with but law school has become crazy expensive and the lower ranked schools are churning out more and more people? IDK.)
My local bartender has a JD and passed the bar. He bartends because it pays better.
If you want to learn how to solve any engineering problem or how to create an illustration you can choose from ample amount of tutorials that are free or very cheap and teach specifics. If that's not enough, you can ask veterans for guidance and most will happily help you out and even give you specific detailed answers to your problems. People also would be hired based on their performance and no one will ask for diploma if you show performance.
On the other hand, if you ask a lawyer they will be extremely vague and would never solve your problem or guide yo without a pay even if the solution is something practical like "Go to the Home Office, find the whatever manager and ask for the hr-103/B form".
They also would limit practicing through memberships to professional organisations, limiting the practice only to formally trained lawyers.
Governments meddle with the economy all the time, there was a short period of laissez faire being the dominant thought in the Western World in 18th and 19th century, but after WWI. Nowadays governments command 30-60% of GDP.
So it would seem this article is truly about the animators responsible for the animation between keyframes. Unfortunately I can't find the article on the making of anime I had once read, but basically, the key frame artists are drawn by those truly responsible for the art style you see. The animation work between frames truly is grunt work (this is the truth, I'm sorry if you find this offensive) that is accomplishable by many.
And lets not pretend that shows with good animation are automatically a success. You need a good story, good pacing (direction), and in most cases you need to choose the story from a pile of hundreds of possibilities.
And, as is often forgotten when the whole "revenue sharing with employees" is brought up, the employee is staking no capital and can leave at any time. If the anime fails, surely you don't suggest "revenue sharing" that loss with the employees.
The vast majority of anime does fail, or only serves as an advertisement for the source. Just look at any given season of anime, the majority of anime is not well received.
The highest profit margin I can find is Toei Animation, which in 2020 made 11.4 billion yen in profit on 54.8 billion yen in sales[1], giving them a 20% profit margin. If every animation studio had that high of a profit margin and 100% of profits went to workers, industry wages would rise 20%. Though if that were the case, the company's profits would be zero and one bad year would end them.
1. https://web.archive.org/web/20200930164251/http://corp.toei-...
The only weird corporate structure I found was Studio Ghibli. Their museum's store (but not the museum itself) is run by Mammayuto Co., Ltd.[1] This company loses 60 million yen a year but has only 1 million yen in liabilities. I'm guessing it's a way for Studio Ghibli to avoid taxes of some kind.
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ja&u=https:/...
People would complain about cleaners getting more money than their white collar jobs, but that's classism embeded in part because of the current situation. As soon as people realise job X makes good money, suddenly the stigmas go away.
Mentally demanding is worse that physically demanding for our bodies. All we do is create things to keep us from thinking, GAI being the end goal.
Sure I was very tired afterwards, but at least it was a nice kind of tired. The mental tiredness/stress from coding is much worse in my opinion. If I could earn the same doing a physical job, I would probably switch now.
I do want to acknowledge that some of these physical jobs will destroy your body long term.
I did some 3d animation in the past, and once in awhile do some 2d animation. I've never met anyone else who does traditional 2d animation in person, in comparison with the zillions of programmers out there in the wild.
Most people want a steady paycheck at the end of the month and (a feeling of) security. This seems to cost money indeed.
At least in Europe, when you are a freelancer, you earn considerably more for doing the same job. Why? Because of the earlier mentioned point.
You would think most people would start freelancing because of this, but it's not true. Most prefer the safety.
That may solve an observer's concern about profit/exploitation, but it leaves the worker with strictly fewer options.
People not getting what they want is just as bad whether or not anyone else is benefitting at the same time.
Good artists and animators are very hard to find. It is about culture more than anything. Japan is the problem.
How is that either legal or possible to survive on such wages?
There is this magical internet they can create their own IP and charge whatever they want. Nobody is obligated to buy it, just as they aren’t obligated to go into crap contracts.
They can change isn’t moment they want, but they won’t. So yes, they are idiots financially.
I wish the article had been clearer about this. I'm sure animators in Japan work really hard and aren't paid much, but while the article made it clear how I should feel about the situation, it left me uninformed on the details, which would seem the more important part of a news article.
This isn't just limited to collectivist societies, either. Being 'sponsored' by family is pretty common for artists and writers all over the world.
Median household income in Japan is about 30K USD, which is lower than the US but a lot more than $12K.
My favorite sub-genre concerns adjuncts: https://jakeseliger.com/2016/02/25/universities-treat-adjunc.... All of them can be summarized as, "When supply exceeds demand, prices fall."
/sarcasm
Was it also supply and demand when a bunch of silicon valley corporations decided to keep salaries low with secret agreements?
And to answer your question, no. It was a crime, and law enforcement put a stop to it.
The particularly nasty bit of collusion was between Apple and a few other companies (Google, Adobe, Pixar). This collusion only happened because of Steve Jobs's vindictive personality combined with interlocking directorates[2]: Jobs was on the board of Pixar, and Google & Adobe executives were on Apple's board. Despite Jobs's best efforts, the collusion fell apart after only 4 years because the companies kept poaching from each other. It was over a year later that the DoJ filed its first complaint.
Despite what most people think, it's really hard for companies to cartelize. There is a massive incentive for any one member of the cartel to pretend to collude while secretly not colluding. Typically, such arrangements fall apart unless there is a governing body that can sniff out and punish defectors.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlocking_directorate
For the vast majority of people who need to work to be able to afford rent/food/etc, they _must_ sell their labor somewhere, and that choice is additionally restricted by the skills and experience they have (you can switch careers, but an animator can't just pack up and become a programmer immediately - significant time/money is invested to gain the skills and/or experience and/or credentials needed for another job).
In aggregate, the labor market generally follows "higher skill (i.e. lower supply) job = higher wage", but zoom in on any smaller part and that is not guaranteed.
It boggles my mind that an anime as popular as One Punch Man got awarded to a bottom-of-the-barrel anime studio for S2. I mean, you can see the stark contrast between seasons 1 and 2. Season 2 has very sparse action scenes, and heavily utilizes off-screen talking (i.e. the camera is panning some static background while a conversation is taking place so the animators don't have to animate). That leads me to believe the money/profits generated by the success of a season is getting eaten by ip owners and middlemen, and that the studio itself is fighting for the scraps. If so, that incentive structure needs to change if you want to increase the quality of the anime. Can anyone who knows more about the anime business model in Japan chime in? Is this a case of IP owners holding an iron grip on the rights and profits and being stingy with anime studios?
At any rate, I'm surprised more American-based anime studios aren't springing up to poach Japan's top animation talent with top pay.
The incentive is that if the anime is low quality, people won't watch anymore.
But your other comment[1] seems to suggest that executives love money and want to make more, so they would definitely be affected by that decision.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26275488
>It's not like executives are ever punished for poorly running a company.
Their bonuses are linked to company performance, and they can be fired just like any other job.
So they get fired, then what? They get hired by another company for more money because now they have experience. That's what I mean about not being punished.
No executive ever ends up destitute and on the streets. We should strive for all workers to have the same safety net as executives.
As history shows this isn't really true.
Or at least it was, when I was a kid watching it on a CRT. I have no idea what it's like now.
Also Gundam. The whole franchise was initially a way to promote model kit :D
I also got a couple of digivices from Digimon, from the second and fourth(?) season. I remember they had story modes and contacts at the top for multiplayer gameplay, as well as a walking sensor for story advancement which you could cheat by just shaking the device for hours. My friend with whom I battled it out never had a chance because he actually tried walking the distance. That's until he noticed the gap between our digimon was getting too big despite all the walking he did, and I ended up telling him the trick. Quite a facepalm moment right there. Those were neat little devices for our ages back then.
The pokedex itself is a pokemon now. It hosts a Rotom.
Fun time to be nostalgic since tomorrow is the 25th anniversary too.
I would, perhaps naively, Assume the latter.
“That you’d better be in it for the music, because you sure as hell aren’t going to make any money from being in a metal band, certainly in this day and age.”
https://www.loudersound.com/features/peripherys-spencer-sote...
OPM went to JC for S2 because the very expensive S1 from Madhouse had already satisfied the goal of bringing tons of new fans to the franchise.
This is changing though, as anime is getting cheaper to produce and international viewers are increasing.
IIRC it was also scheduling. Madhouse was booked up for a while.
If anyone knows the 'mechanism' as to why so many disparate measures end up as Power Laws, I'd love to read more on it, as I;m sure other HNers would too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law
Doesn't matter. Even if profit sharing were implemented, the boss gets to choose the percentage of the profit that animators get. Due to supply and demand, they'll still get the short end of the stick. Definitely better than nothing, but the problem will continue to exist in another form.
- Anime production committees (https://blog.sakugabooru.com/2017/05/02/what-is-an-animes-pr...) take a large portion of the profit from a show, and studios often see very little (they're often not on the production committees).
- If the studio doesn't own the IP, they'll likely have to pay a hefty amount for it.
- There's not much actual revenue from anime: historically studios have tried to monetize via extraordinarily expensive DVDs of the episodes (such that only die-hard fans would buy them), and merchandise, but apparently the studios don't even get all of the revenue from these sources. Streaming is becoming more popular but I'm not sure how much revenue Crunchyroll/Netflix/etc. shares with the studios.
- Anime is often seen as an advertisement for the original source material (usually manga), so there's less incentive for certain parties on the production committee to monetize.
Too many predatory gatekeepers offering dream jobs to kids who don’t know any better. It’s not just anime. In music, you got acts with albums in the top ten albums of the year lists with millions of plays making like hundreds of dollars per year on Spotify, same people are on tour each year in the red financially after being on the road. The economy isn’t kind to the creators who entertain everyone.
and the animators of shows that flop still got paid something.
if you want upside risk, you have to be exposed to downside risk.
because they are worker. they get paid with the wages that they agree on. Koyoharu Gotouge probably get a big chunk of that money since she created the manga.
If something can be produced with little differentiation – bulk or standardized quality product or service, its all about cost and supply and demand. This is how competitive market economy works. Profit margins become razor thin.
It's generally closer to: "Every time it's been tried it's been either bad or disastrous, clearly we have no reason to learn from it or try again"
Which I think is fair! Hell, even the original strawman is a fair argument IMO. Fascism didn't work once, and I don't think there's much there to learn from (and we certainly shouldn't try it again).
You'll need to not only produce the production but also handle market sells... involving rights on your product... it's usually in form of contract with big distributors...
depending your shit... you'll get a certain amount of cent(s) for being used through the "distributors"...
WTH you expected? :D
People who can afford daily food and internet and computers will never be classified as living in "poverty" here.
I'm going from memory but level 1 was what you describe.
Level 2 is being able to meet your needs but all your time goes into meeting those needs.
Level 3 is having enough extra money to pay for things you don't need.
Level 4 was IIRC basically not having to work.
Most countries have a range of 1-3 or 2-3 or 3-4 or some distribution of that.
Anyway long story short, western countries mostly have 2-4 and don't know what 1 even looks like (on a lived experience level). They've seen pictures of it and there are people living in Level 1 in western countries, they just aren't as front and center. If you've lived near Level 1 you know what real poverty looks like. If you haven't you think that Level 2 is real poverty. Both need to be addressed, but I agree that Level 1 poverty is so much worse for people living there.
Like a phone is £20, but a weekly shop for a family might be £100. A TV might be £250, but rent is £500.
So you can be in the paradoxical situation of being able to afford to buy a phone or a TV one month, then next month run out of money for food or rent.
Some that I can remember:
- Someone completely mad at their phone because the video on a call was dropping (just after landing, while the plane was still taxing, in the middle of the tarmac of a very large airport).
- The airbnb-mate in a shared Airbnb crying because the outside of the entrance of the house smelled a bit of cigarettes. I mean like real telenovela ending style tears.
- Someone kicking and shouting at a ticket vending machine because it was out of service (a working one was next to that one)
- Complaining about food choice in an event buffett that had like five different cuisines.
Fortunately my needs haven't grown that much, it seems that the only first world thing I want is a Japanese toilet.
Did a really good job of defining the levels and putting them in perspective. In addition, it's a refreshingly optimistic take on the direction humanity is trending. I read the book because it was recommended by Bill Gates
Thank you for reminding me.
I totally agree, we hear so much negativity his approach to showing how humanity in general is better off today than any time in the past is encouraging.
And there are plenty of people living rough in the west.
https://i.imgur.com/ORAFhaN.png
If this is accurate, then only A-list voice actors are making any serious money because they're scarce and in high demand. I think that most of the money in anime just gets spent on creating more anime, so very few people end up making money.
While this is very high level, it is important to observe that none of this has anything to do with being really good at making hand drawn tentacle porn, or writing code for that matter.
EDIT : I have found this https://www.gpic.nl/producing_animation_in_North_Korea.pdf
"Q:How is the North's animation seen in abroad? A:Compared to North Korea's general image around the world, their animation sector has a remarkably good reputation. The nation has been receiving many orders from abroad for quite some time, including many from France and Italy. The workers usually participate in original drawings and coloring. Some of the well-known foreign animation projects the North has been involved in include "Lion King", "Les Miserables", "Pocahontas" and an Italian production of "Hercules" and "Billy the Cat" from France"
Quotes from this article:
"But even many grown-ups enjoy [animation in North Korea] because it is one of the rare television programs in the North free of political messages"
"Actually most researchers estimate that almost half of the households in the North have television sets. It's just another common misconception about the North to think that only the rich get to watch television. There are also many animated films released in theatres."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9ulkFRXkvQ
I think the only exception to that was Kyoto Animation (KyoAni) Studio which made fame for treating their employees very well. Unfortunately they were targeted by an arson attack in 2019.