Yea, it’s just a coincidence that all the fired workers were involved in union organization. Sure.
You should post this separately!
Hmm, notorious bastard company obviously fires a bunch of employees for wanting to unionise to protect themselves from notorious bastard management, gets backlash, and then says “no, they were actually a bunch of very naughty employees! if you’re not a naughty employee, you’ve got nothing to fear” yeah fuckin right.
I’d ask if they think everyone in the world is stupid but they made billions off of GTA online and this won’t affect their reputation (or bottom line) one iota so… I mean yes, we’re all stupid.
Ah the old “It’s not what it looks like” with some added “trust me, bro. It’s confidential, I promise” defence. Classic!
We already know the affected workers were using Discord to organise. My guess is they were discussing work issues there, and Rockstar jumped on that as an excuse to fire them (as it would constitute a breach of NDA).
That was really clumsy on the side of the workers. Discord is the last App I would use to organize a union. What were they even thinking?
On the other hand that probably means they use discord for literally everything including communication within Rockstar, albeit unofficially. So yeah if their employer had any consistency in firing people over NDAs they would probably have to fire most of the staff.
Official internal chat will be either Slack or MS Teams. Using any unauthorised app to discuss matters relating to the business would be a contract violation.
Realistically, game devs do this all the time in private chats with colleagues that happen outside work, both online and in person. But of course R* either never knows about those or chooses to overlook it.
In this case, I suspect the fact they were unionising was the reason they actually took action on it. It’s not about consistency, it’s about having an excuse to fire these people.
If you are organizing a union NEVER EVER use company controlled channels to communicate about it. This is organizing 101.
At the same time, make sure that whatever you do use is private and secure. Union reps will warn you about how companies spy, and it is not paranoia.
Yeah. I’ve never worked anywhere that the staff didn’t have side channels for socializing out of work that inevitably ended up getting kinda borderline with some discussions. It’s against company policy and it is a problem but it is mostly ignored because good employees know where to draw the line and the orgs that own those third party chats tend to not be competitors.
And it leaves people open to stuff like this. “Well, you probably talked about your work schedule or compensation which we consider Office Use Only so you violated corporate policy and are eligible to be fired”
As for “Well, they should have used matrix or signal!”: Maybe. But if you’ve ever tried to convince a friend group to install another client then you know that is a much bigger struggle than convincing people to engage in collective bargaining.
But also? While it is possible rockstar/take2 just guessed, the more likely outcome is that someone narced. At which point it doesn’t actually matter if everyone was on Discord or Matrix or Signal or whatever.
I’ve formed a union within the industry. The trick is a balance between meeting with workers and security for the OC. In my campaign, we used discord as well to be a space to connect with as many people as possible outside of work. We also used signal for the OC to discuss the actual organizing. NDAs are limited only to the direct work. You can legally talk about workplace issues though. IWGB (UK equivalent to CODE-CWA) aren’t amateurs, they very likely trained the OC on all of this.
What does OC mean in this context?
The Organizing Committee. They do all the actual organizing and agitating.
Talking about issues surrounding work outside of the workplace is not an NDA violation.
In this scenario I’m assuming they were talking about project specifics, which would absolutely be covered.
I’m not sure about other industries, but in games NDAs and similar restrictive contract clauses tend to be extremely strict and often quite broad.
I know, I’ve helped successfully form a large union within the video games industry. NDAs can only cover the work itself.
allowed:
- “I was moved off a high profile project because my manager hates me”
- “The company is illegally withholding wages”
- “I was put on a PIP for barely missing my metrics”
- “The CEO said in a meeting that they want to use AI to replace QA”
not allowed:
- “Wanna hear about this cool bug I found today?”
- “Project XYZ launches on the 30th”
- “Let’s talk about the financials from that all hands meeting before the quarterly report”
“The CEO said in a meeting that they want to use AI to replace QA”
This sounds like it would be on the edge if the company is publicly traded and there’s a chance that information wasn’t communicated to investors, especially for something like video games where launch bugs could make or break initial impression and thus sales.
“Wanna hear about this cool bug I found today?”
This is probably fine if it’s unreleased and has been fixed. It’s probably not fine if it’s in a released product and hasn’t been fixed.
Trust me on this one, we used similar organizing techniques for issues like these. The line is thin, but lined with landmines.
For sure, definitely be extra careful when organizing outside of the ways sanctioned by the company. In fact, I recommend not keeping any records about anything that goes on in the company, and keep union discussions about the union itself. If you want to recruit people, talk about how you’d like the relationship between the union and company to be, not about things the company is doing that you don’t like, because there’s a huge risk of giving the company a valid reason to fire you.
I’m more talking about what’s generally protected legally and what’s not. Again, if you’re looking to form a union, don’t get anywhere near that line.
Lesson here is when you’re organizing, you have to be careful as fuck that you are not breaking any rules. They are tracking your every move.
It’s more that until you’re ready to strike you have to remain invisible.
It doesn’t matter if you do everything right, they’ll either lie or frame you.
They can’t counter what they don’t know about.
That is exactly what happened. All corporations operate like this. They know what they are doing is illegal, so they just use words to warp reality however they like. It’s the Republican strategy.
presses X to doubt
X
X
X
I wasn’t gonna play it anyway cause I don’t have PlayStation, but now I’m not playing it with bells on.
cause I don’t have PlayStation
Isn’t it also releasing on PC and Xbox?
Xbox yes, pc version comes later to boost console sales.
Rockstar PC ports are always dogshit for the first 5 years of their existence.
I’ll just wait for it to be $5 on sale when it’s finally stable.
i just bought gta 4. hopefully it runs okay
With proton it finally does.
If you mod it enough, sure. Out of the box it’s dismal.
Nah, I played it 2-3 years ago and it was totally fine. The only bug I recall was at the end with the helicopter sequence, and it was really frustrating. Basically, I had to set a framerate cap to 30 FPS to progress the game (60 might work too, but I needed a cap).
There’s one impactful decision soon after and then a cutscene that’s based on that decision, but otherwise that’s the end. So if you run into the bug and don’t want to fix it, just watch the ending on YouTube or something.
Rockstar patched out a bunch of radio music they had time-limited licenses for. I don’t think you would notice that, though there are mods to bring them back. Performance-wise it only had problems with integrated graphic cards under Windows in my expirience. Haven’t tried it on Linux.
Those bastards. Union busting and PC racism?
Xbox is failing at this point. I suspect Rockstar might have to bump the timeline of the PC version.
But I’ll still do what I did with GTA V and wait for it to hit bargain bins.
Sure bud, sure
