Best Of

that's the stockholm syndrome thing. for the employer who follows psychopathic model of business it's good if labor is competing with each other over stupid shit. Doesn't matter what it is, the effect is that employer gains leverage. 

The more desperate employees get the more wages will drive down, and then those "rock stars" who squeezed through the tough times become further entrenched in their egotistic beliefs and cycle is worse for the next generation who now come into workforce under the leadership of extra toxic individuals who let themselves get majorly shafted and never took any personal responsibility for their environment, Instead they did the easy thing of building ego castle rather than the hard thing - making an actual change in the environment.

It's pretty much the same thing everywhere I've ever worked. The old guard is so far up their own ass that anybody actually competent and motivated coming in gets out as soon as they can to do their own thing. So then it's just the toxic sludge left behind which will turn the desperate people who don't have means to escape into the same thing. Of course, there are some heroes but it's rare, not normal.

If we wanted to talk about rock stars in the games industry, I'd shine a spotlight on that animator who worked on the witcher series. He built a pretty cool fighting game in his spare time and it did well enough that now he runs his own studio. He just made a game that he wanted to play, built it around his core competencies, and now he has his own business that he actually built by virtue of his skills - not bootlicking, brown nosing, favor swapping, all that corporate tool nonsense - and he probably won't ever have to work as an employee begging for jobs again. Isn't that what being a rock star is supposed to be? Doing things your own way, not following the beaten path, and certainly not being a corporate stooge that can't even express their own opinions for fear of pissing off some hyper-sensitive person that might have leverage over them.

I'm not too keen on hero worship though, I think it's pretty stupid actually because it works to disempower ordinary people who also have to eat food the same as the rockstars, but if somebody has to be called a rockstar, that's it. 

The whole employer/employee power struggle is so anti-human it's depressing to think about. If you are competing against a person then that means they are your enemy, as the normal human way to relate to friends is to cooperate and share, but in the corporate world you have to pretend to be friends even though you work against other to lower each other wages, and what you get in return if you are winning is... allowed to continue making some asshole richer.  Maybe. 

For regular people who have studio experience and know what's involved in making games and have connections I think it's a much better prospect to identify the leaders that they know and form new organizations with more equitable payout structure. Obviously corporate work is not secure, in fact it seems less secure than just making games on your own and selling them, assuming you aren't a complete boob. Anybody with artistic skill has a huge advantage as most indie games look like ass. 

I think the key difficulty is lack of leadership though. It seems game dev attracts a lot of emotionally immature people and then if you live your whole adult life in a backstabbing corporate world, where do you ever see actual human leadership? As always the only thing really holding most people back is lack of confidence. It's like when you watch a nature documentary and its like one big cat harassing 1,000 wildebeest. Those stupid wildebeest, they could kill every last lion in a day if they'd just try.