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Microsoft United States Games

Fallout and Doom QA Testers Form Biggest Union In the US Games Industry (vice.com) 102

Posted by BeauHD from the successful-organizing dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Quality assurance workers at Microsoft's ZeniMax Studios, the people who make the Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and Doom, games, just voted to form a union, making it the first games studio to unionize under Microsoft and the largest group of union-represented Quality Assurance testers at any U.S. game studio. ZeniMax Workers United and the Communication Workers of America didn't share the exact vote count but said that the 300 QA testers overwhelmingly voted in favor of their union. Workers decided to join the union by signing union authorization cards or by voting via an online portal. As the company had previously promised, Microsoft has recognized the union.

"Before us is an opportunity to make big changes and bring equity to the video game industry. We want to put an end to sudden periods of crunch, unfair pay, and lack of growth opportunities within the company. Our union will push for truly competitive pay, better communication between management and workers, a clear path for those that want to progress their career, and more," Victoria Banos, a senior QA audio tester at Hunt Valley, said in a statement. "It's difficult to express in words just how much winning our union matters to us. We've been working so hard to get here that it would be impossible not to be excited. We know this is not the end of our hard work, but reaching this milestone gives us faith that when workers stand together, we can accomplish anything we set our minds to," Dylan Burton, a senior QA tester in Dallas said in a statement.
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Fallout and Doom QA Testers Form Biggest Union In the US Games Industry More

Fallout and Doom QA Testers Form Biggest Union In the US Games Industry

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  • on one hand I am all for fair pay and recognizing hard work, on the other hand these people probably make more than I do as an engineer, for playing video games that needs 90 gigs of patches on launch day

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by kyoko21 ( 198413 )

      I mean the same could be said about many other folks that work in industries that many may consider "low class." What about the folks that work at water treatment facilities, waste management, street cleaning, roadway constructions and maintenance, HVAC, plumbing, or even crop pickers?

      It's all seem low skill until we ourselves are asked to do the same thing but can barely survive 10 minutes under the sun picking tomatoes.

      Remember that one time when Stephen Colbert tried working as a tomato picker...?

      https:/ [youtube.com]

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

        yea but when I buy a tomato, it doesnt require a patch to replace most of the tomato

        • yea but when I buy a tomato, it doesnt require a patch to replace most of the tomato

          Fortunately for consumers and workers both testing tomatoes is easier than testing video games.

      • folks that work in industries that many may consider "low class."

        That's not true anymore. Unions are moving upscale. More and more they are helping the pretty well-off become even more well-off.

        America's unions are gentrifying [economist.com]

        • Many of the original unions were around very high paying jobs. Manufacturing jobs, taxi drivers -- lots of jobs that today we think of as low-skill were, at the time unions formed, high skill jobs. The unions moved down the wage scale, and are now reestablishing among the upper end jobs because, surprise, management will take advantage of skill any time it can.

      • is everyone knows what it's like to be served by a waitress who sucks or a bad cook, but everything thinks those jobs are "low skill".

        There's no such thing as a low skill job.

        • everyone knows what it's like to be served by a waitress who sucks or a bad cook, but everything thinks those jobs are "low skill".

          Being a cook is a skilled job. Even lots of people who try never get good at it. Being waitstaff is not a skilled job, it is just a hard job, because assholes make it hard. Any schmoe who can read and write can be a waitron. The difference between a good one and a shit one is not skill, it's giving a fuck. Without exception the bad ones are not paying attention to their job — 90% of the time they are spending their work time jaw jacking instead of even trying to do the work.

          There's no such thing as a low skill job.

          Complete bullshit. There's

          • even something like fruit picking requires years of effort to be able to do it. It's physical effort though. If an Athlete trains you're OK with that, right? But a fruit picker who's body is built up to do that work doesn't have a skill?

            As for waitresses, dear God go be a waitress sometime (you'll look cute in a skirt for sure). Keeping track of orders, learning shorthand, learning all the little tricks to make the experience better for the tips you need to live. You're not just delivering food, you're

            • Nobody said it wasn't a skill.

              The claim is that it's not that complicated, and it isn't. It's not even fucking close to being a high skill job. And everyone needs to schmooze, suggesting that wait staff are special in that regard is nonsense.

              I also literally outright said that nobody should be treated poorly just because they are doing a low skill job, which would obviously include being paid starvation wages.

              Slashdot is getting more and more tedious as people continually respond to things that nobody said

            • Fruit pickers don't develop that body through work, it's genetics. If you're five foot tall, thin build, you'll be picking fruit like a pro within a day or two. If you're a 250 pound American you should probably do construction instead

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by dryeo ( 100693 )

                I picked fruit many years ago, being only 5ft6 was a disadvantage as well as being lightly built. Try running up and down a ladder with 40 pounds of fruit hanging off you, and being short meant that much more need for the ladder.

        • There's no such thing as a low skill job.

          My first job was sweeping up trash at the movie theater. Even for being my first job, I don't think I could describe it as anything but low-skill.

          What you may be missing is calling a job "low skill" does not mean the job is not useful or important. It just means there is no complex training requirements or experience needed to do the job "well enough".

          • I doubt you did nothing but sweep trash. You were an usher. You were expected to interact with the public, move people along without starting fights, know where all the theatres were and where films were shown. I'm sure if I kept going I could think of a half dozen other things needed to maintain the moviegoing experience.

            So could you, but you were trained not to. You were trained to think of yourself as worthless so they could pay you less.

            • So could you, but you were trained not to. You were trained to think of yourself as worthless so they could pay you less.

              I think you missed the 2nd sentence of what I wrote.
              What you may be missing is calling a job "low skill" does not mean the job is not useful or important. It just means there is no complex training requirements or experience needed to do the job "well enough".

      • It's all seem low skill until we ourselves are asked to do the same thing but can barely survive 10 minutes under the sun picking tomatoes.
        Remember that one time when Stephen Colbert tried working as a tomato picker...?

        Colbert is soft because he lives a cushy life. Stamina follows repeated long-duration work, it doesn't just come to you from Jebus. That doesn't mean there is skill involved. There is a teeny tiny bit of domain knowledge involving identifying ripe fruit, and a whole lot of hard work.

    • Re:I dont know how I feel (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Darinbob ( 1142669 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2023 @07:23PM (#63178174)

      I don't think they make more than an engineer, gaming QA isn't a high paying job overall which is one reason they want to have a union.

    • Re:I dont know how I feel (Score:4, Insightful)

      by youngone ( 975102 ) on Tuesday January 03, 2023 @07:30PM (#63178188)
      Why would you blame poor quality on a union which has only just been formed, instead of management which is where the blame should lie?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

        im not blaming it on the union, and now that there is one good luck firing the QA testers that suck

        • im not blaming it on the union, and now that there is one good luck firing the QA testers that suck

          On the bright side, firing developers that suck will make QA jobs easier.

        • Why is the only solution to fire them?
          If that's the only solution then management have already failed.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

            start with the leaf and then pull the root. have you never worked in cooperate before?

          • When the only tool you know how to handle is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

          • Why is the only solution to fire them?

            If that's the only solution then management have already failed.

            It is sometimes the only solution. If they are abusive at work and management doesn't fire them, then management is failing.

            Also, you may have little respect for the skills an intellect needed for the job, but it doesn't mean there are no skills or intellect needed for the job and not everyone can learn it (there are many skills that I cannot grasp or learn).

            Assuming that a manager can fix every problem is an odd view to have.

            • Whose in charge then? Assuming the only solution is to fire someone who is struggling is an odd view to have.
      • is make sure there's enough people on staff to do the job. Unions make *better* products. We all forgot that in the race to cheap Chinese (and before that Japanese) goods.

        Christ, it's like I'm the only fogey here old enough to remember that China used to mean "crap". Or that Japanese radios weren't quality. I miss well built consumer goods. Heck they weren't even that much more expensive after the tech had been around. Everybody looks at old tech's prices and ignores that it was *new* tech back then.
        • Unions make *better* products.
          The British Auto industry from the 1970's called and they'd like some of what you're smoking.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by mattb47 ( 85083 )

            The US auto industry from about 1973 - 1989 or so also was heavily unionized, and generally produced abysmal products, far inferior to their Japanese or European alternatives. Some of that was because of poor management, and some was because of corrupt unions preventing modernizations, preventing firing of sub-par workers, etc.

        • I don't think that you can make that claim. I'd like to see how you justify it.

          For instance, for most of my adult life, the UAW in the U.S. was pretty powerful, but it's fair to say that during most of that time, except for a perhaps couple of trucks, American vehicles were simply not in the same class as vehicles from Japan, Germany, and even Korea. And I mean fit and finish even more than design quality (which lagged too).

          I had brand new Chryslers built in union plant on shore that had 1/4" gaps between p

      • Why would you blame poor quality on a union which has only just been formed, instead of management which is where the blame should lie?

        He's not. He's blaming what the union will achieve (in this particular circumstance): better conditions, better pay, resulting in no improvement in quality all for higher cost to the customer.

        Engineers and early stage programming should be unionised. Unionising the tail end of development is a recipe for disaster, as people who contribute little have an overwhelming amount of power to influence (reads: blackmail) the studio.

        You see this in industry too. I remember 3 mega gas plants being built over 5 years,

        • No he's not. Read his comment again.
          He's claiming these people do a poor job and somehow that's the brand new union's fault.
          That little anecdote you ended your comment with is also a management problem.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        instead of management

        Exactly.

        QA is basically treated like crap at big companies. First, it's 60 hours a week 6 days a week. Yes, 10 hours a day monday through saturday. Every day, you must find a quota of bugs. And those quota of bugs are limited to a set portion of a level you're assigned.

        It's not conducive to finding bugs, but it allows you to do "QA from the start" even though no one could actually QA the thing until the very end.

        Basically you're trying to QA the entire product before the entire product

      • A lot of anti-union people out there are unaware that some PR budgets go towards convincing the masses that unions are bad. They don't even catch themselves parroting the propaganda.

    • Why do you need to have an opinion for or against it? Formation of a union should be the business of the employees involved, and nobody else.

    • for playing video games that needs 90 gigs of patches on launch day.

      You misspelt "work".

      • Indeed. I have spent time working at a game studio and while the outside observers tend to think of the job as nothing but being paid to play games, the reality is that the glamour wears off pretty quickly.

        Running the same quest over and over 100 times a day, running at the same wall for hours on end trying to find the hole in the map that causes players to fall through the world, killing the same enemy NPC to verify loot tables, and so forth are the realities of QA testing. Itâ(TM)s a mundane, tedious

    • Any company that gets a union deserves a union, treat you employees better if you don't want them to form one. Don't be a part of the race to the bottom, hating on these people for making more than you doesn't help either of you.

    • I think you're being a little unfair. Most of the awful QA is because the QA teams aren't given enough time or resources to do it right, because management sees no value in good QA.

      Also, while you can technically say that QA involves playing the game, it isn't *anything* like what you think of as "playing a video game." It is most definitely a job, not a leisure activity.

    • Pulling them down doesn't improve your quality of life but makes theirs worse.

  • Let's face it. They have very strict, often immovable deadlines for extremely complex products and this is not going to change. Ever.

    • Let's face it. They have very strict, often immovable deadlines for extremely complex products and this is not going to change. Ever.

      Immovable deadlines are a completely self inflicted injury.

    • Get better management that knows what jobs take how long instead of PHBs who throw darts at a wall calendar to find milestone dates.

      This is your solution to crunch. Get rid of the useless spongers in middle management who don't have a fucking clue and hire people who do have one.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pacinpm ( 631330 )

      Crunch is almost always management's fault. Except maybe natural disasters like pandemias or earth quakes.

      • In the gaming industry it's not the management that sets deadlines. It's the market and the time of the year. Events like CES, Black Friday or pre-Christmas sales. You miss those dates and you miss a big promotion opportunity while your competitors are making a head start, hooking up players to their own products.

  • "We sold our souls to work in the game industry, and now we're all sad, but with a union, we can suffer together." Replace "game industry" with anything else that sounds cool and has an oversupply of willing labor.

    • Welcome to offensive security.

      Or "hacking" as the cool kids call it.

      The only thing that keeps the door from being a revolving one is that it's really nontrivial and most people stop wanting in when they see the entry threshold.

  • I recall a story about a mario game that was thought to be ready at the end of crunch, and they needed to test if a player got all the stars or something if he'd get the gold trophy/best ending. This was a game on a cart, so no option to patch it after shipping. They got their QA player who could do the 60 hour game in something like 12. He does a marathon session and the gold trophy doesn't drop. Nintendo wakes the programming team, they submit a change in a few minutes, and ask the tester to go another ru

    • That sounds made up. I write games and I simply set variables to create the condition I need to be any where, or any time, in the game. I also always create a constant called GODMODE that when set to TRUE makes the player's character impervious to collision detection routines. It's very simply to implement and never requires a complete walk through of a game to test the various aspects.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

        yea this was a common practice even back in the days where your dev environment took several min to load up and you had to be jacked into an actual representation of the console hardware

        there's flags in the software representing the level and state of the player (how else does one track progress) set them and move on. An "achievement" doesn't require some magical game god that can compress the competition time by almost a 6th

  • There's an obvious joke somewhere (Score:3)

    by Babel-17 ( 1087541 ) on Wednesday January 04, 2023 @12:44AM (#63178694)

    Involving because they do quality assurance they have no leverage with management. ;)

    Say, when do we customers unionize, given the bugs we end up finding, even when waiting for a game to on sale?

    I hope we don't end up being de facto scabs, working for free microtransactions, and swag, as beta testers.

  • Unionization often means harmonization of compensation structures. Is that the goal? Are they expecting to lift the lowest paid to the same level of the highest? Or are they going to clamp down on the high ones and settle out somewhere in the middle? Were I obviously talented and experienced enough to warrant being a "highly paid" tester, I would look for greener, more lucrative, pastures. And so starts the traditional flight of the talented, and cementing of mediocrity.

  • Fallout has QA? (Score:3)

    by Chris Mattern ( 191822 ) on Wednesday January 04, 2023 @11:10AM (#63179496)

    Who knew?

    • Why I keep getting vision of that episode in Orange is the New Black when the warden tries to persuade the rest not to unionize after he gets a promotion lol

  • Bethesda/Zennimax has a horrible track record on bugs. Their games are great. Usually. Eventually. But at release time, they're often barely playable messes. (I've loved Fallout 3 and 4, and even had fun playing Fallout 76. But I also didn't play these until at least a year or two after they released.)

    After 3-6 months of patches, plus some community patches/hacks/add-ons/etc., you might have a stable game. It might take a year.

    If their AAA games might take a bit longer to produce, and have better/mor

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