And it will end there.
Video games are more like movies than they are like other kinds of software, and the labor to produce them should resemble the movie business - not the software business.
That means a bunch of union members get hired for the production itself, for the duration of the production - not "indefinitely" for the distributor like they are now - and when the game is done, the production company for that individual game and all its labor is disbanded, and then everyone finds another production - possibly from a completely different distributor - to work on.
Except they'll all know this upfront and they'll be unionized, which mitigates the downside (ex: they'll get their health insurance from the union, not from Sony or EA or whoever.)
Fields that have cachet like show business and gaming will always be the last to have workplace issues of all sorts.
I know back when I was in the industry I would have killed for a organization like what was available in film.
On the topic of unions in the entertainment industry, is there a union for computer graphics engineers in the entertainment industry? I couldn't find one, but I'm genuinely curious.
If you're on the Art side you have the movie/animation space(even more of a meatgrider).
If you're on the design side, the options are pretty slim.
If you're on QA, it isn't the straightest path to other QA domains(with much of gamedev being manual testing).
Having gamedev on the resume usually isn't seen as a large plus, aside from shops that are already filled with ex-gamedev people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016%E2%80%9317_video_game_voi... <-- there's no equivalent in the startup/web industry.
This is precisely the environment where unions emerged. If individual workers had a lot of leverage, there would never be a need for unions.
For a game developer, the options are horrible companies, unionization, or a development job in any other field.
Every discussion of game unions I see here tends to have a lot of people talking about how they are quite happy with their financial compensation at their non-game job, and how they don’t want to unionize because what if it was a shitty union?!?
Also, Hollywood is kind of one of the major bastions of strong unions in the US. There’s a lot of entertainment unions in show business.
(My favorite example: compare the conditions of folks at union 3d animation gigs with the condition of folks in the non-unionized VFX world; better pay and more stable jobs for pretty much the exact same skills.)
Not as much as you’d think. PolyTaku and r/games want the games industry to unionize. People actually in the industry not so much.
IE, to keep out immigrants, newbies, and people without degrees.
But over the last 10 years or so, there has been a huge influx of new people into the tech industry, and we are starting to outnumber those from traditional backgrounds who would have tried to prevent us from getting a job in the industry.
A bootcamper isn't going to join a union that would have outlawed their ability to get a job. An immigrant isn't going to join a union that would have them deported.
Instead, we will defect and sabotage those efforts, every step of the way. And there really are quite a lot of us in the tech industry, from non-traditional backgrounds these days. And we are smart enough to fight efforts that would have us fired, or that would pull up the ladder behind us.
- Non-compete agreements
- Forced arbitration
- Wage fixing (such as Google, Apple, etc. used to do)
- IP ownership agreements (even when not using company equipment or time)
- H1B visa abuse
- And many more
Maybe it's also a marketing problem, don't call it a union, call it a guild or association.
Anyone who spent a couple of years in a corporation will know that meritocracy does not dictate career advancement or compensation. I think the tide has turned in the past years and the 'veterans' are starting to feel the ageism and the new fantastic coders aren't as thirsty drinking the kool-aid.
And although still considerable, the U.S. doesn't have the same competitive advantage in software anymore. The market is now global - e.g. in 2018 38.5% of StackOverflow traffic for top 30 countries came from Asia-Pacific, while only 32.9% from North America.
I will absolutely and unequivocally reject them, in almost any form. I would not be here today if software jobs were broadly unionized, and I will not allow myself to become that hypocritical.
The pay is pretty good, use it to buy insurance and investments. If your part of the industry is seasonal or project-oriented, line up other work in advance.