Refresh the thread. He hired the fired foreigners when he was still director.^CX^

In my eyes it’s simple. His brother is not just an exec at rockstar, he’s the company president. They’re worth hundreds of millions of dollars and both have been in positions to shape company policy especially around labor conditions within their subsidiary.

I can all but promise that a union busting culture is not new. The influence they’ve had as upper executives cannot be minimal, as these guys have been the ones making the golden goose.

Odds are both houser brothers are sitting on loads of take two stock. Their performance bonuses have probably been more money than anyone on here will ever make in their lives, their kids’ lives, or their grandkids’ lives collectively with few if any exceptions. The crunch time issues of the past are absolutely a symptom of the disease: fyigm. Why pay anybody or treat anybody fairly when you can just keep your money?

I’m not saying others are not also to blame, but anyone who is in a top leadership post at an organization usually has a massive amount of discretion especially for those under them.

Stupid question: if you think it’s a good idea but don’t know when the price will go up, you just buy stock and wait. But if you think it’s a bad idea and don’t know when the price will go down, is there any long-term alternative to shorting that doesn’t require betting on the date?

I mean you said his, which is factually incorrect as it isn’t his.

Read the room bro and learn to take constructive criticism. It’s not a personal attack.

It honestly depends how he hired them. If he offered them living wages, plus Visa fees, lawyers, and healthcare, he was a “good employer” when he hired them. The fact the union discord server is older than 5 years leads me to believe the visa dependent were offered less. So he exploited them knowing they can be deported as soon as the studio was done with them.

If he wasn’t part of the hiring decisions, I take back what I said. But creative directors do influence who gets assigned roles in a studio, and what tasks get sent to the visa’d. There’s nothing indicating he wasn’t aware the studio hired visa workers when he worked there. Accents and vernaculars differ. I doubt he was oblivious that roles he assigned to foreigners were not hired to be exploited.

He was never the owner. It’s a 45 billion dollar company, his net worth is said to be like 250 mill. He was paid a very high salary since he was one of the original employees of that subsidiary, and given some stock in the parent company as bonuses, so he’s set for life and richer than most of us will ever be, but he never had any real say in the parent company’s decisions. Take-Two is known for being absolute scum. They don’t just own Rockstar Games, they also own the companies behind the Civilization series (which has Paradox-like DLC scumming) and the Borderlands series (remember when BL3 was Epic exclusive on PC?).

Technically if you’d started at, say, Microsoft as a software engineer or other similar role when he started at Rockstar, and stayed there until 2020, you could honestly be richer. Same for Google, some of their earliest employees became billionaires from the stock options. The Houser brothers made Rockstar famous, but they were never ownership class.

So the union discord existed when he was there and he didn’t fire anyone involved. 5 years after he leaves someone else fires the people involved so… Fuck the guy who hired people and did nothing to prevent the discord server years ago?

If he wasn’t part of the hiring decisions, I take back what I said.

So you have no idea if what you’re saying is even true?

But even as a creative director, he was this oblivious to visa extortion contracted labourers?

Uh I’m pretty sure as creative director, he didn’t see anyone holding a gun to anyone’s head forcing them to sign a shit contract.

Why exactly do you think they were being extorted before any of this? If someone worked for a company for several years, I’m assuming they actually liked working there. Before someone at Take-two saw that there were a bunch of people at their subsidiary who’d unionized, some of whom were foreigners on visas and some locals. Why is the problem for you not that a bunch of people were fired for unionizing, but the fact that some of them weren’t born on the island they were working on?

Did I say he was union busting? Read the English. He started Rockstar.

So maybe he is a little more qualified to criticize Rockstar management for being “fully rounded”.

Was Rockstar unionized while he was there? No.

Stupid question: if you think it’s a good idea but don’t know when the price will go up, you just buy stock and wait. But if you think it’s a bad idea and don’t know when the price will go down, is there any long-term alternative to shorting that doesn’t require betting on the date?

That’s a good question I dont have an answer to. Maybe there are ways to short where you can just hold, but I dont know how. Maybe there’s a way to borrow lots of RAM and GPUs, sell them, then buy them back when the price drops and sell them for cheap back to whom you borrowed. But I dont know who would make that deal.

Everyone’s talking about the mad cow part, but this is also a really excellent point:

“Some of these people trying to define the future of humanity, creativity, or whatever it is using AI, are not the most humane or creative people. So they’re sort of saying, ‘We’re better at being human than you are.’ It’s obviously not true.”

“So it’s sort of like when we fed cows with cows and got mad cow disease.” is an amazing analogy for the current state of LLMs.

But even his brother is not top leadership at the organization. Any direct orders from their superiors at Take-two still take precedence over what Sam Houser says. In fact it’s currently suspected that the order to fire came from Take-Two.

They’re rich beyond the average person’s imagination, but not “early Google employee” rich, let alone “started multi-billion dollar company” rich. They started as regular employees that, after making the first few golden geese, got given stock options so they wouldn’t leave.

Turns out the big 100 hour crunch for RDR2 was just Dan Houser, Lazlow and 2 other senior writers and for about 3 weeks. Apparently the crunch used to be a bigger issue earlier on, but got improved after GTA V.

Senior Code Content Developer Phil Beveridge concurred that “work practices have definitely improved. Crunch on Red Dead Redemption 2 has definitely been a lot better than it was on GTA V, where I was pulling a month of 70+ hour weeks (while being told by my boss at the time to go home…).”

As I understand, the issue at R* wasn’t ever really anyone’s boss saying “you gotta work 70 hour weeks”, it was more “the senior staff works 100 hour weeks and maybe if I only do 40, I’ll not be seen as a team player”. Which is still toxic, but if they’ve taken steps to reduce it, perhaps things aren’t as bad as they seem.

The games industry is so bad because of the deadlines. The whole public announcement of “we’ll release game on date X” is a huge problem, as is the fact that games make most of the money just after release, so you gotta have a new game out every few years if you want to keep the lights on - a problem R* no longer has since they’ve brought in billions, so I’m sure Take-Two has loosened the leash a bit on that front at least.

Hell, I’m a regular software engineer and I’ve worked 60-70 hour weeks. Not because I was forced to, but because the deadline was near if not passed already, the customer was getting unhappy and I knew it’d look great for my next salary review. I suspect if I was working on a public project, essentially a work of art, that millions of people will get to see and I saw my boss work 100 hours a week, I’d also be motivated to work 60 or 70 for a while. So I can kinda understand how some R* employees say there was no forced crunch time and others say they felt like they were expected to crunch.

Honestly, the Houser brothers have just always struck me as creatives who are super passionate about their work. That’s the type of person that can work ridiculous hours without even realizing it and it could bend one’s expectations of what others should do, but it doesn’t seem to me like they’ve ever expected everyone else to work as much as they do, nor has either of them (or even the brothers combined) become a billionaire off over 20 years in senior leadership at a company that literally prints money for its parent company.

I am not so sure why you are strawmanning my arguments. If he was aware of visa extortion practices during his tenure, is he a good director or a bad one?

Stop strawmanning?
Are you saying he wasn’t involved in role assignment of visa extortion as a director?