Yeah they still make good money.

I think calling WC3 the last good game is immoderately scornful though.

I regret the time I spent playing WoW, but it was category defining and a cultural phenomenon.

StarCraft 2 was excellent, perhaps to this day the best RTS ever made.

Diablo 3 was highly regarded.

the expectation combined with more studios doing stuff, the fact that video-games don't have 100 years (so it's a maturing art form, somehow) and also investment money... i believe there's much more chances of quality declining on companies by the hook of investors or at least less innovation (which seems to drive a bunch of 'unicorns' on this field)? graphics kinda topped by now, there's no more magic on realism/fancy graphics! maybe at some point role-play/storytelling will get more complex/infinite with AI but it's not clear how or if it'll, as we have player driven multi-player video-games for quite a while, like Albion or some much older: https://www.havenandhearth.com/portal/ ... maybe man vs. the machine in a sensible way and not those engines stomping pro-players on Dota

I don't think "raw, unfettered capitalism" and unions are orthogonal.

Actually, quite the opposite - in a free market, labor is free to organize in any way they want. If they have enough leverage over the employer, they'll succeed.

The anti-free market part is the regulatory quagmire that the US has in place for organized labor.

I think that's the thing that most people take umbrage with.

I don't know for sure, but I've heard from knowledgeable folks that it is more effective in Europe.

I remember it being called "Cedarpunk" on account of its rendering issues.

I'd never ship then, consciously or not.

StarCraft: Ghost?

Comparing US safety nets to those of “any other country on Earth” is just patently absurd and disingenuous. EU has mandated - mandated - 4 week paid leave. In the US you are by law obligated to exactly 0 days of paid leave.

I get that this is HN and most people here haven’t worked the bottom-of-the-barrel retail jobs that this applies to, but there is very little difference in take home pay in this income regime after accounting for necessary expenses such as healthcare, transportation, and food; in some cases EU take home is even higher. https://boundlesshq.com/blog/us-vs-europe-employment-costs-s...

Like, sure, if you want to larp as a low income oligarch the US is the best place to do that. Otherwise, you’re going to be regularly crying after 10 hour shifts because you’re in the red each month after necessary expenses. Most people would like tech talent fall into the latter category out of schadenfreude or profit motive.

Tech needs to unionize.

Is that actually true though?

Maybe Americans get higher incomes because US companies structurally sell to larger markets than Australian companies, so - at least for those roles with scale / leverage - the role is more productive & the absolute value that the employee can extract is high, even if the proportion of the overall value extracted by the worker is similar to or lower than the proportion extracted by an Australian worker.

Maybe if Americans had stronger unions, perhaps American workers could benefit from both higher incomes - due to the increased scale & opportunities of the US market - & increased protections relative to Australian workers.

Another thing that is quite different between the US & Australia is that in the US, the public is generally a lot more trusting of business over government. US business interests have a long history of influencing US public opinion- there's examples of stuff like business interest groups creating educational materials & getting them into schools, so kids learn early about the wonders of capitalism & free markets. It's unsurprising that you might not find unions so popular in such an environment. A book that details quite a lot of that history is Kerryn Higgs' book Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet [1].

[1] https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/3683/Collision-CourseEndle...