Non-compete clauses will be a thing of the past soon enough. Are you excited for the future of indie games now?
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 CRIME Shirt $21.68 |
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Non-compete clauses will be a thing of the past soon enough. Are you excited for the future of indie games now?
Non-compete clauses will be a thing of the past soon enough. Are you excited for the future of indie games now?
|
CRIME Shirt $21.68 |
|
I'm confused.
The headline is confusing. Basically devs for AAA companies are allowed to leave and start their own indie gigs now, this used to potentially violate non-compete clauses.
Ooh okay. That makes sense, thanks anon.
Why not just write this, holy shit journalists are fricking incompetent.
they want you to click and spend time on their garbage article
People have been doing that since the 80s, I wasn't even aware that it was verboten now.
>. Basically devs for AAA companies are allowed to leave and start their own indie gigs now
They could always do that.
Yeah but AAA studios aren't allowed to threaten employees over it anymore
I remember there was a guy who worked on Fire Emblem moving over to do another similar game on Playstation and getting completely fricked over.
You're thinking of Kaga, the actual creator of FE. This isn't the same though, Nintendo sued him because he left and made a pure carbon copy of FE, that was just copyright infringement. All that the OP means is that companies can't force employees to arbitrarily wait years or however long they specify before joining a competing company.
>indie games from AAA devs
???
Non-compete clause for non-suits is usually less than 3 months, and even suits usually don't have to wait more than 18 months.
So were the 3 months of waiting before starting your indie company REALLY that big of a filter for indie studios?
>usually 3 months
I've worked in software for a decade and all my non-competes have been at least a year, with most of them being 2-3 years
you're absolutely wrong
It fricked over the ark devs really hard when the game first went into early access, forced them to sell to snail games so ya, it happens
because they would claim any work you did as violating the non-compete
so if you at some point told someone you might want to ever make a game, they could sue you for breaching it
obviously it wouldn't hold up but the threat of litigation was strong enough to discourage people from even trying
>A Non-Compete Agreement typically lasts six months to two years, but varies depending on your state's laws.
And that's just for the typical ones. I have heard of people in software who sometimes have up to 5 years of non-compete clauses if they are working for a big company.
>Non-compete clause for non-suits is usually less than 3 months
I work as a software developer. The last 3 companies I have worked for all of them had non competes for a year. The non competes are usually limited to directly competing products, but the one I just signed is entire industry.
Is that not just a fancy way to keep you on the job and abuse you as a worker because you can't leave and agreed to be cucked by them or what.... not eat? Who would agree to this?!
Nta, but it really is in these specialized industries that you invest so much time into learning. That's probably why non-compete has been blanket banned for the most part now.
>Is that not just a fancy way to keep you on the job and abuse you as a worker because you can't leave and agreed to be cucked by them or what.... not eat?
Yes, that is correct.
>Who would agree to this?!
Initially, only a few high-risk companies had non-compete agreements and paid more to make up for it. Later, bad companies started doing the same thing, and soon, it became hard to find a company that didn't use non-competes. Today, if a company doesn't have a non-compete, it's usually a good sign about them, but those are few and far between. People practically don't have a choice. It's similar to the stuff you see in video game EULAs, cell phone contracts, rewards cards, and mobile apps. They're all doing shady stuff and there is nothing you can do about it because all the companies do it.
For me personally, it's not a big deal. Skills like game development might be specific to that industry, but skills in image processing can be used in different fields. For example, if I lose my job at a medical device company, I can work for a camera company instead.
either you agree to it or you don't get hired. There are always more people willing to do that job if you pass on it.
So basically AAA devs can make shit on the side now right?
This means all the indians and chinese who are outsourced by the AAA games industry can now make their own games instead of slaving for the american and euro studios forever because they signed away their right to compete in the same industry
Oh good, more pixelated indie roguelike slop for the steam shovelware pile
It would mostly affect AAA devs, so think more walking sims and boomer shooters.
...So there's nothing illegal about working for both EA and Activision at the same time? Even on competing products?
How would one solve a situation where person gets into leadership position on both teams and then starts to favor one over another, or bringing in insider information about their product and planned release dates and prices?
One of the reasons non-compete clauses were invented in the first place was to stop situations like that.
Non-compete clauses are after you stop working with them, and prevent you from going off and doing your own thing. This also goes into effect if you were laid off. And they don't prevent corporate espionage anyway, it still happens all the time.
>there are going to be so many new indie games!
>from AAA companies
Pack it up boys. Indies were extremely hit or miss as it was but now they will entirely be misses.
*from ex-AAA devs making their own studios
>You are not allowed to work if you stop working for us
Did Americans REALLY???
Non-compete clauses are already banned in California. This is a nothingburger as far as vidya is concerned.
Will this give us more good games or will it only lead to more slop?
Absolutely! Here's a simple summary of the article and why the news is significant:
What's happening:
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has passed a new rule that gets rid of most non-compete agreements.
Non-compete agreements are contracts that prevent employees from taking certain jobs after leaving a company (usually jobs with competitors).
Why this matters for game developers
Game developers often sign non-compete agreements which can limit their options to move to better jobs or start their own studios.
With this new rule, game developers have more freedom to:
Work for other game studios that might have been off-limits before.
Start their own game companies without worrying about legal trouble.
This could lead to more innovative games created by experienced developers.
Bottom line: This is a big win for game developers! It gives them more control over their careers and could make the gaming industry even more exciting.
Really wish news was as condensed as post like this.
Speaks volumes of the times when basic summary's have to get stretched out into fricking page spanning blog post instead of trimmed down.
>in the future, there will be so much bullshit that we won't even directly access content, instead we'll have a specialized AI curator to do that for us, feeding us content based on specific tastes
whoever invents this first is going to make millions (and will immediately ruin it by trying to force specific agendas after locking in a userbase)
Fricking grim.
I actually didn't even notice this was an ChatGPT copy paste until your reply made me look at it a second time.
grim is the perfect way to describe it, it's funny to think in how many ways this is or can be grim
>future people are so lazy that even the act of finding things to enjoy is too much work, so an AI is used to get it
>future people are so overstimulated that they need AI to get them even more overstimulating content even faster
>due to the popularity of content salvaging AI, you no longer become able to salvage content through "normal" means, all the content is constructed in such a way that only AI can interpret it and provide it to you
>the concept of AI content accumulators feeding you specific ideologies and themes towards government or corporation aligned goals
>furthering the death of human creativity and purpose, even to the point where tasks that are thought of as not creative become creative in retrospect, like searching the internet for entertainment
>having to pay to access content because the only way to get it is through AI content accumulators that are all owned by megacorporations
this is dystopian on several levels, i didn't even fully recognize how horrific the idea is upon posting it. man the future is going to suck
Oy vey oy vey. Imma just gonna magical up a new contract with my employees that explicitly names these new changes and say that by agreeing to work here you choose waive all these things! SHALOM!
>you choose waive all these things!
That's nonsense that has no power in court. You could sign such an agreement and it would not hold up in court, because it's illegal. It's like signing an agreement to be someone's slave: it unenforceable regardless of you signing it, because it's illegal.
however Mr Goldsmith can just send endless lawyer after lawyer to bankrupt you until the eventual settlement declares 10 years later that what he did was illegal and he gets a slap on the wrist fine for it
meanwhile everyone else has been cowed in line and you've been homeless and unemployable because of an active lawsuit
We're just gonna see more garbage because developers will just openly steal shit from companies now since there's nothing stopping them anymore.
"No non-compete" does not mean "there is no copyright".
That said there should be not copyright, the entire idea is a scam.
literal bootlicking moron
Non-compete is the most israeliterific law in existence
PLEASE bring this to Europe. Non-competes are so fricking lame, it's bad enough giving up your entire life to earn a paycheck.
Reminder that one of the best indie developers out there, Lucas Pope (Paper's Pleas and Obra Dinn), used to be a AAA dev for Naughty Dog
what are the implications of this? DEI infested indie games? I'm going to have to start doing a lot more research on devs
More and better(produced) indie games.
means that if the likes of EA keep promoting incompetent HR creatures over good devs, those good devs can just say frick this shit and immediately pool their expertise into creating a smaller scale quality game without said HR creature being able to threaten to take away their entire life savings
>DEI infested indie games?
Yes. However without a captive audience of zombie buyers, the die shit some wide-eyed and bushy tailed gay would make will crush their spirit like a rock falling off of a cliff would.
Does this mean more games can have the Nemesis system from Shadow of Mordor now?
not at all this is not about copyright
this is about companies not being able to bully talented people into staying chained to them
so you won't get a Nemesis system, but you will get smaller teams of competent people striking out to make their own games rather than being stuck in the AAA mines
Well... shit. Well, now we wait 4-8 years for this to produce results.
not necessarily, a team of like 10 or so talented people without HR bloat can easily finish a great indie game in 2 years
That's true and goes even further. Imagine how much time and effort gets wasted by worthless suits who don't even play games themselves.
Well now they can seamlessly go into a new job together when the get laid off for not making 500% profit in the first week.
nobody is going to pay/ fund them so it's not a job
They fund the studio with early access/kickstarter/bank loans/etc...
you can't make early access/ a kickstarter without having worked on something to show off and lol at the bank loan idea
Concept art doesn't take that long to make, and it's much easier to sell an idea to people when you have a team of people who have worked on big productions (Even if those productions were slop).
AAA devs are team players with highly specialised skills. there's zero chance they're going to be able to make entire games by themselves. just look at what ex-AAA devs have come up with
How the frick did that even become a thing? how cucked are people to get a job with these shit companies?
Well for the vast majority of people, either you wagecuck or you don't get a roof over your head, and those roofs cost a lot more in certain cities and states. Also when the job market is bad (like now), you don't have a lot of options to choose your workplace.
Great news.
Chuds STAY losing!!
To be fair this is news that's actually good for everyone and is (almost) universally agreed upon by everyone. The only people who don't like it seem to be sociopathic libertarians but that goes without saying.
It's a law that will screw over certain black companies, that's for sure.
good. These clauses were dumb anyways. You already sign an NDA and aren't supposed to share tech or processes from one studio to another.