Developer For The Day Before Calls For Volunteers To Help With Their Projects
Sounds fntastic
www.well-played.com.au
-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
Developer For Game The Day Before Calls For Volunteers To Help With Their Projects
- Thread starter dex3108
- Start date
www.well-played.com.au
I've had a half-cocked eyebrow since this was first shown and I've not yet seen anything to convince me this will be out in less than a year. Wasn't it originally supposed to be out this month? I appreciate that they mentioned switching to UE5 last month but that would have meant that the game was pretty much complete by that point if they hoped to release anywhere near the current period.
Not familiar with this project or developer but at a cursory read this doesn't sound like anything special?
Full-time volunteer reads like paid short term contract work, not guaranteed to become a long-term member of the team essentially, and part-time volunteer is community moderating and translation and other duties you can agree to. Doesn't sound like anything is being hidden.
It doesn't seem like they're trying to openly exploit people for free development skills, but they'd accept that if someone offered on their own volition- the "special features" mention which is admittedly vague.
Full-time volunteer reads like paid short term contract work, not guaranteed to become a long-term member of the team essentially, and part-time volunteer is community moderating and translation and other duties you can agree to. Doesn't sound like anything is being hidden.
It doesn't seem like they're trying to openly exploit people for free development skills, but they'd accept that if someone offered on their own volition- the "special features" mention which is admittedly vague.
It sounds like they simply want to get the community involved, I don't know want to assume it's exploitation without getting clarification
The article discuss that full time salaried volunteer may be a translation issue.
I wrote the article and I have sought clarification on what exactly the volunteer program is. Until I get that I am not going to throw them over hot coals. Also not sure why you think the article was "positive". There are certainly elements of this game that look suss but no one has/can pre-order it, there has been no crowdfunding, so realistically they've only wasted people's time if the game doesn't exist.
I fail to how see how someone working for free in a pretty much full time employee position has good intentions lol
If they simply want to get the community involved they could just hire members from the community. This is just straight up wanting people to work for you without paying them.
"Paying" someone in codes to redeem the game they'd be working on for free doesn't feel like good intentions; That feels like conscious manipulation of people who don't know any better.
Good intentions would be paying people for the labor they're contributing to what will be sold as a retail product. Things like translation/localization and implementing new game features isn't "let's engage with our fun community" material. I assure you, this is exploitation.
If they're asking for labour without pay then I mean, what else would you call that?
People can do what they want, of course, but if you're doing unpaid volunteer work for a for-profit company to help them get a product to retail market...you're kind of being exploited
I guess one can await the team's reply, but it doesn't sound good from this alone.
Like the author, I don't want to think negatively immediately... but it's uncomfortably common to see translation + localization being seen as something one should do for essentially free for some reason.
Like the author, I don't want to think negatively immediately... but it's uncomfortably common to see translation + localization being seen as something one should do for essentially free for some reason.
They're asking for labor for something that they will profit off of without proper compensation. This is just exploitation 101, and it's very effective in creative works because people use passion to pressure people into taking exploitative positions.
I guess what I meant was that I view it as Fntastic trying to get the community involved. Kinda like street teams for bands back in the day. I hoped it was more an honest mistake than being exploitive. They've told me that unpaid volunteers don't work on "code writing, or development itself". However, clearly localisation is part of the process so there are some issues there but I'm trying to get further clarification.
It's giving too much credit in the first place (to put it gently) if there are plain signs that "getting the community involved" means "actively organizing and courting unpaid labor for a retail product."
Exactly. If they had good intentions, then they'd be offering some kind of monetary compensation.
I don't know who this company is, but even small studios or startups trying to do something they don't have the financial backing to achieve are usually transparent about the risks and offer some kind of compensation or reward to the people who help out, even if it's a small advance alongside a royalty share or something.
Hell, even dream chasing newbies who are all passion and no experience who are trying to put teams together, on projects that really, really, aren't likely to go anywhere, tend to have some kind of promise of compensation.
That they're offering nothing and phrasing it as an opportunity to get involved is really dodgy.
Last edited:
This is 'Tom Clancy's The Multiplication', right? I really hope it turns out great but it always looked a biiit dodgy since its announcement.
