Nearly Half of Game Developers Want to Unionize

As someone who&#x27;s been in the game industry a while, I can see where this is coming from. This is not about software devs, it&#x27;s a special challenge specific to game devs where the lower pay and higher overtime expectations really affect people&#x27;s lives. This is then made worse as studios keep closing down, because people will put up with more bs than usual for job stability.<p>No idea if unions are the solution, but this is definitely an issue specific to the game industry right now.

I&#x27;ve been in the game industry going on a decade now and I have zero interest in unionizing. I do not want my future in any way controlled by yet another external entity that I have little control over and promises nebulous results.<p>As an employer I want to be able to fire toxic or under-performing employees at will without jumping through a hundred hoops to make sure I am not breaking any union rules.<p>As an employee, I want to be free to negotiate my own wages based on my merit.<p>If there is one thing I would want a union to do it would be to collectively enforce some kind of profit sharing plan. The interests of the employees and the employer align -- make a great game that sells well. Anything else, no thanks.

Not to be pedantic, but this headline is not accurate. There’s nothing that makes me confident that respondents to the game dev conference survey are representative enough to say “nearly half of game developers.”<p>This is a really important point as trying to represent a bunch of people’s opinion based on a single, limited survey is not productive.

Unions would very likely increase game prices. I will happily pay more for games in exchange for better conditions for game developers.

I never understand employees who <i>don&#x27;t</i> want to unionize. It just shows what a sorry state the labor movement is in.

Since it&#x27;s game programmers, why not apply some game theory?<p>Aside from not wanting to be part of a union, people are reluctant to join a union if others do not do the same. Many people might actually join one if there was a big one, but a big one can&#x27;t grow because nobody wants to be the first guy to raise his hand.<p>So someone needs to make a website that manages this. Everyone pays a deposit, say $100 bucks, and signs onto some secure site that will keep details private. If you get more than some minimum, the money is sent to the new union. Otherwise send it back.

I don&#x27;t know what&#x27;s driving people to work in the gaming industry. If you worked on simulation software, for example, you could still do graphics programming, have a phenomenally better working environment, reasonable hours, and more pay.

Whats lost in all this is how idiotic the extra hours are to begin with. Games aren&#x27;t different than other tech. Burning out your employees is demonstrably counterproductive. There&#x27;s some usefulness in short term crunch but some large studios crunch for a full year. But games are run like entertainment companies and a lot of the decisions are not fact based.<p>Even if the only thing a union did was stop the exempt status for developers with regard to wage law we&#x27;d see a huge quality of life increase without much of a real impact on worker output.

Game testers should unionize. I&#x27;ve met some game testers who are as dense as a box of hammers. I&#x27;ve also met some game testers who are valuable, awesome people who know things and who I&#x27;d be glad to work with. Unfortunately, the game industry seems programmed to treat them all like trash. I think this is another form of bigotry obscuring real human value. If one could find the really good testers, pay them well, and retain them, it might just pay off in increased quality and productivity.

I hope that the folks at the forefront of trying to unionize the game industry are talking to existing entertainment unions. I suspect there&#x27;s a lot of similarities, especially when you get into absurdly huge projects like a sprawling open-world game or an animated feature.<p>(And by &#x27;animated&#x27; I include pretty much every effects-laden action film. IIRC there is <i>not</i> currently an effects worker union in Hollywood, while there <i>is</i> an animators union - guess which craft sucks less to be in?)

I never understood the desire to work on games. Is it because many people get their introduction to software via games (legitimate question)? I remember many of my classmates in my college days were really about entering the gaming industry, and I just never understood why.

Been that way for more than a decade(at least since I was looking to get into the industry around &#x27;00 or so).<p>Problem is there&#x27;s a thousand young devs out there trying to bang down the doors to get in. In that situation I don&#x27;t see how you have effective leverage.<p>With things as it stands today there&#x27;s a good ~50-60% churn in the industry and things seem to keep rolling on(although I wonder what improvements we&#x27;d see with better working hours and improved pay WRT other dev domains).

Here’s an alternative to unions, which many here seem to be skeptical of:<p>How about promoting software companies being run as co-ops, where all workers have more ownership and are self-managed?

Unions work well if everyone can agree on the same wage, or the same wage increases over time, etc, <i>or</i> can agree on barriers to entry.<p>Teachers unions, pilots unions, etc, generally agree on wage (usually some % increase per year of experience), and doctors which are harder to agree on wage because there is much more variation instead unionize with barriers to entry (stricter AMA requirements).<p>I wonder which would be better for game developers. Barriers to entry or agreed wages.

Don&#x27;t do it. The enemy of your enemy is not your friend. Unions are not a bucket of roses.<p>You&#x27;re exchanging one set of overlords for another. Literally sit down with anyone in their first 8-15 years of experience in a union and ask them what kind of influence they have on their industry, what sort of choices of work they get to work, who gets &quot;the jobs&quot; before you do, and about their fixed pay scale, and what are the consequences if they take non-union jobs.

The tradition means of labor taking their control of a company is through a strike, and you really can&#x27;t unionize unless 75% of all game developers are willing to strike to keep wages high.<p>You&#x27;ll find I think that most game developers would be willing to be paid pennies to be a part of the next big video game. And if that&#x27;s the market you&#x27;re trying to compete in, maybe you should be in a different market if you&#x27;re worried about wages.

With regard to crazy work hours, our platform is used by lot of VFX studios and freelancers. From our frequent interaction with them, we observed that the amount of work hours they put in are really insane.<p>Its the same story but unlike game developers they get into that grind very often too. I don&#x27;t think this scenario is unique to game developers alone and it exists in other domains - most prevalent when artistic expectation gets mingled with technology.

What would entering a union mean for the developer?<p>I&#x27;ve read that it would increase their protection (legal, and sometimes financial, I suppose?), and that it&#x27;s supposed to improve working conditions (because unionized workers will have a more solid foundation to push against as they demand those conditions).<p>How deep does this go? Is there any other benefit? Something specific to the industry, perhaps?

People who make comfortable livings sitting at desks near company cafeterias, then disparage unions, need to remember that unions brought them labor laws and weekends, and paid in blood:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ludlow_Massacre" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ludlow_Massacre</a>

So, &gt;50% of Game Developers Want to Unionize?<p>I&#x27;d like to see how this &gt;50% is distributed across various measures, especially in terms of salaries and lines of codes produced. My bet is that according to Pareto&#x27;s distribution they fall in the bottom 50% in terms of headcount whose output and compensation is ~15% of the total.

Unions can&#x27;t solve everything, but considering the most prevalent complaints game devs seem to have is getting overworked, underpaid, and fired as soon as a project is done, unions seem like a perfect fit.<p>At my last corporate job I was very vocal about the benefits that unions would have for software engineers. I still believe that.

There is a vast market of companies willing to scoop up talented software developers - many don&#x27;t require the demanding work schedules that the gaming industry takes for granted. Especially in such a highly-skilled field, I don&#x27;t see the need for unionization when switching industries can be done easily.

As always: 100% support them wanting better situations, and they have a right to pursue it. I would just not want to end up with a situation where I want to put my own self-developed game up on itch.io or otherwise and they require me to send a copy of my union approval.

This software developer union thing is not going to happen, no matter what people prefer. At least a union that has any real clout.<p>It&#x27;s not a situation like Detroit in 1954. It&#x27;s a somewhat global marketplace with easily shifted capital and labor.

Ironically, despite the famously abysmal working conditions in the game industry, they might have a hard time organizing, because there is such an enormous supply of qualified people who want those jobs.

I&#x27;ll take a shot at how it could be successful.<p>Unions can add value in industries that need vast numbers of highly specialized individuals.<p>If you think of a film or a play, both unionized industries, a production works by hiring a mess of specialists who show up ready to go. Everyone knows what they&#x27;re doing, why they&#x27;re there, etc. There&#x27;s a very good discussion (with a libertarian economist, no less) here[1] about it.<p>There is a large part of game development, especially in the &quot;blockbuster&quot; game development that seems like it fits this model quite well.<p>It might not apply to more specialized elements like game engine design, but for modern games that are designed more like movies than games, it could be highly effective.<p>[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.econtalk.org&#x2F;mitch-weiss-on-the-business-of-broadway&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.econtalk.org&#x2F;mitch-weiss-on-the-business-of-broad...</a>

I neither think there should be impediments on unions nor should union dues malndatory, nor that there should be restrictions on the number of unions active in a workplace or industry. People should be able to go it alone and suffer&#x2F;benefit from the consequences, or form a union spontaneously consisting of just a couple of fellow workers with shared demands. Let unions compete in their own marketplace to achieve both better and flexible representation of labor. And to those that will ojext that this puts a heavy burden on business by having to negotiate with multiple parties, well too bad.

As a non-game developer, I&#x27;m surprised the numbers are so low. From the sounds of it, game dev is unnecessarily brutal and lives even get destroyed.

As soon as they do, those jobs will move overseas. Unless there&#x27;s some kind of legal &#x2F; regulatory block to prevent it (e.g. tariffs)

Yes, I&#x27;m sure that 20 something dev would look forward to waiting for years to get on the game dev team due to union seniority rules. And I&#x27;m sure the junior devs on the team would feel great about not getting the choice vacation times because the senior devs would have first choice due to union rules. After all, its fairer if those people who have put the time in get the most benefits, right?

This is not at all reflected in the different game development groups on Facebook.

any industry that has unions and&#x2F;or requires unions, is an industry that is ripe for automation.

As I&#x27;ve said before-- game development is the sort of industry that everyone <i>thinks</i> they&#x27;ll want to work in, only to change their minds very quickly once they see how the sausage is made. Never mind unionizing, even just raising awareness about the work conditions in the industry - and making it clear that they&#x27;re not representative of &quot;tech&quot; more generally - would help a lot!

Unions are formed, and are profitable for the members, when the work is the same for everyone and they are easily replaceable, since in that case, the workers can be easily exploited. The best engineers would not want to join a union since they&#x27;d have no reason to. Unions can help mediocre engineers who are replaceable code monkeys (Many of us are, including myself I think). But the thing is, why would I want to associate myself with that group? I&#x27;d rather try to be one of those awesome engineers. This dynamic doesn&#x27;t exist in other well-unionized jobs. For example, all plumbers can do the same work in mostly similar way. So nobody is losing out by unionizing.