That's an excellent point, considering that Microsoft is participating with the government via PRISM. Sorry, but I don't want a camera attached to an online device pointed at me when I know that the company which makes it has given the feds direct access to my data.

I wonder what game publishers would do if businesses like Gamestop voiced a threat to simply not retail their games to the public at all if they banned used sales. I don't like Gamestop, but I'd love to see a line drawn in the sand. Because ultimately the publishers still do need brick-and-mortar/online retail to get…

The real reason why this is taking so long is because, unlike with other Maxis titles (like Sims 3), they are making a native port of Sim City for OS X rather than using the crappy Transgaming/Cider bullshit that almost always leads to incredibly buggy and slow implementations. I wouldn't beat them over the head about…

I bought a Vita recently, and I've gotta say, despite the underwhelming rollout of original content (compared to the 3DS, which I also really want, but will wait at least several months from now to purchase), I'm having a ball with it. Currently loving the hell out of Persona 4 Golden.

Are you sure this isn't an outtake from Gummo?

Umm, first of all, Hollywood didn't move to Canada and Australia. Secondly, some movies get shot in Canada, Australia, and elsewhere, because various governments around the world offer financial incentives for using their countries as settings for films, not because the technical and creative talent in Hollywood are…

I understand that risk every time I sign a contract (and every freelancer should). If it was too much to deal with, I'd stop signing them.

The proposed change is that contractors in the games industry withhold labor if they think that their conditions are wack. I think the larger proposed change is that workers who currently rely on contracts maybe attempt to organize (maybe as a whole, by specific field, or whatever) in the same way that technical…

The whole point is that you know all of that going in, that's part of being a freelancer.

Maybe because they're building up to a more grand sort of retribution? That would be my guess. I mean, this is some Shakespearean shit going on here, and I get the impression that there's a ton more story left. I'm sure they get their comeuppance at some point.

Don't get down on yourself about the original presentation of your article. I think it would have been "misread" (something which I feel was largely on-purpose, not attributable to how you framed your argument) by a lot of people because they're more interested in confirming their anti-union, pro-status quo biases,…

People sure do love bending over backwards to defend the precariousness of modern employment opportunities, don't they?

This is kind of absurd. Are games that already come out on Steam through publishers also "getting around Greenlight"? It seems to me that Adult Swim saw the game on Greenlight, said "Hey, this is a cool game, let us help you get it published," and the developers said "Okay." How would it be any different from Adult…

"Eventually, games need to generate more sales, otherwise we see the end of these smaller games on console platforms."

He's testing a video game which the studio presumably wants to be properly balanced and free of bugs because they're hoping it will be the biggest game of the year and generate probably hundreds of millions of dollars for them. Seriously, this insistence that it's just about "sitting around playing games for $11/hr"…

So wouldn't there be value, then, in the unionization (and professionalization that goes along with that) of QA testers, not to mention other areas within the games industry? The deeper implication of contract status is that it is more "casual" than full-employee status. A person who has no shot of gaining full-time,…

Which is probably why games ship with horrible bugs that need to be patched upwards of months post-release. Because they're just hiring a bunch of bros who want to be paid to play games.

Who even needs to respond to Kuchera's points? He's making an incredibly simplistic, positivistic argument, which takes the current state of things (exploitation in the games industry) as an immutable fact. By requiring that all bitter contractors simply cope with it, he's basically defending exploitation. There's no…

That Kuchera piece is a really shitty bit of "reasoning." His entire point seems to be that, because the gaming industry is exploitative now, it must be exploitative forever. That this is just "the nature of the business" or whatever. By that logic, Hollywood talent could never have unionized, and you'd still have…

Don't read the comments. Don't read the comments.