Leah Isobel is tapping into the future of play during the annual Game Development Conference, which takes over the Moscone Center this week. This second installment takes a look at labor organizing within the world of video game production. Check out part one, on games with a social message, here.
On Wednesday evening at GDC, I attended a conversation between Jason Schreier, a Bloomberg journalist who has covered labor issues in gaming for nearly a decade, and Tom Smith, a senior director of organizing for the Communications Workers of America union.
Their discussion was focused on the growth of the labor movement in video games that has taken place since 2018, when a GDC panel discussion titled “Unions Now: The Pros and Cons of Organizing” catalyzed the founding of pro-union group Game Workers Unite. The group’s membership quickly swelled from a handful of members to over 300, and their advocacy efforts shifted the conversation around unionization in the industry from “if” to “how.”
In the years since, a contraction in the gaming market has been driven by the interrelated forces of the pandemic, the rise and subsequent calcification of mobile gaming, and risky bets on technology like NFTs and cryptocurrency. The industry’s downturn was a sudden cap on nearly a decade of monetary expansion—and game workers have been feeling its effects.
According to data from the investment advisory firm Epyllion, the industry experienced record layoffs for three back-to-back years: 2022, 2023, and 2024. Over 30,000 workers have lost their jobs since 2022.
Meanwhile, the video game labor force has moved to organize, winning some notable battles. In 2022, Raven Software’s quality assurance team won their union vote after a months-long organizing effort—which included a two-week wildcat strike—even amid allegations of union-busting levied at their parent company, gaming giant Activision Blizzard. When Activision Blizzard was acquired by Microsoft the following year, Microsoft accepted a labor neutrality agreement with the CWA that affirmed workers’ rights to organize without interference.
Chapters of GWU still remain in Toronto and Montreal, and have become part of the Game Workers Coalition alongside groups from three continents, including CWA’s Campaign to Organize Digital Employees.
And yet, as Smith said in his discussion with Schreier, the majority of the industry’s largest companies are still set against organized labor.
Help us save local journalism!
Every tax-deductible donation helps us grow to cover the issues that mean the most to our community. Become a 48 Hills Hero and support the only daily progressive news source in the Bay Area.
“The polling data seems to say that if every publisher other than Microsoft would say, ‘We’ll agree to neutrality,’ I think in many of those places, the majority would very quickly show that they’re in favor of unionization,” he explained.
“But we have a situation in which every single publisher in this industry except for Microsoft has taken the public position that ‘We will use broken US labor law… to maintain dictatorships at our employment places,’” he continued.
As such, while Microsoft’s agreement with the CWA represents a landmark for video games organizing, gains for workers at other companies will still have to be fought for.
“This is a challenge to the audience in some kind of way,” Smith said, addressing the GDC crowd. “All of us here have responsibility. If we want to see standards improved in the industry, we’ve gotta put our skin in the game.”
It seems like workers are heeding his call. Just a few hours earlier, the CWA announced the formation of the United Video Games Workers, an industry-wide, dues-collecting direct-join organization open to any developer. In a single day, the group’s membership reached triple digits.
According to Smith, the goal of the new group is to provide workers with an organizing network and a channel for activism. “This formation is there for people to engage with each other. We have to be building fights that make broad demands on all of these studios about how folks should be treated,” he said. “I think workers will use this to run campaigns around the issues that are important to themselves.”
Schreier was skeptical of the usefulness of this vision, saying that messaging and campaigns may not be able to change anything in and of themselves.
Smith responded, “I think we have to challenge that kind of skepticism.”
How to battling labor cynicism had come up earlier in the day when I spoke with Ty Underwood, a game design professor, developer, and labor organizer who cofounded the Seattle chapter of Game Workers Unite and now organizes with Seattle Industrial Workers of the World.
“A lot of people deny their own imagination in how to solve a problem, because that requires collective action,” they said. “That’s kind of unthinkable for a lot of people.”
In addition to their organizing work, Underwood is a cofounder of Comradery, an online funding platform similar to Patreon or Substack. But while creators don’t actually have a say in the decisions that such top-down companies like the latter two make, Comradery is run cooperatively.
Underwood views the platform as a way to bring workers into the organizing sphere, including developers whose work may not fall neatly within the commercial market. “There is a huge class of workers in this industry who are marginalized, excluded from employment, that operate on things like internet donations. This is experimental, very important work,” they said.
“People who work in spaces [like] that would not be excluded by a labor movement, but would be benefiting directly much less. Comradery was an idea of, ‘What if we could reclaim the means of distribution?’… Someone who joins Comradery is involved in the democratic process. That process looks a lot like a union.”
Underwood described themself as a “worker co-op purist,” and that came through in our conversation. Thinking even bigger than Comradery, they envision a broader network of indie co-op studios that pools finances while maintaining creative freedom and worker control.
“The dream for me is to aggressively network and aggressively organize in the same way [as a union], and work enmeshed with the union effort and other political efforts to take dollars from capital and redirect it to material support,” they said. They pointed to co-op networks like Cooperation Jackson and non-extractive funding models like Seed Commons as inspirations for their conception of an accessible, developer-first future for the industry.
Underwood’s vision struck me as creative and interesting, but also complex and potentially difficult to implement.
As we talked, they acknowledged these concerns. “It takes a ridiculous amount of startup capital to [create a co-op], it takes a lot of institutional knowledge, and it’s really hard to sell games. It has to be a superstructure that requires more people to come in for it to keep working,” they said.
“We cannot circle the wagons, we have to find an incentive structure to bring more people in. There’s not one total thing that’s gonna fix everything. But there is a commonality of philosophies and approaches that impact different types of people and communities,” said Underwood.
In other words, it’s time to get creative. Underwood’s idea for a co-op network has yet to be implemented, but they said they’ve received a lot of interest from developers. Similarly, they expressed optimism about the UWV’s potential.
“Honestly, I don’t know if that’ll work or not, [but] I’m excited about it,” they said. “I think we have to keep planning these different pushes in different areas and different times. The more footholds we get, the more we climb that wall.”
A few hours after I spoke with Underwood, I attended a panel discussion with several CWA organizers. They shared their stories with labor precarity and unionization to a packed room, offering advice to younger developers seeking more equitable working conditions.
When the panel concluded, the organizers led attendees to an impromptu rally in Yerba Buena Gardens, carrying a banner that read “UNIONIZE!” and leading chants of “5-6-7-8! Video games are worker-made!” Cars passing by on Howard Street honked in support, while other GDC attendees and passers-by cheered and offered thumbs-up.
It remains to be seen what the UWV might accomplish for workers, and how the industry at large will respond to the labor challenges it faces. But I got the sense this week that people are excited to tackle these problems, and hopeful about their ability to create change.
“The industry isn’t over,” Underwood said during our conversation. “It’s in a very heightened state of contradiction. I think that is an opportunity for organizing.”
