Video game workers in North America now have an industry-wide union
engadget.com
engadget.com
Good reminder that the word "union" is overloaded and doesn't always mean what you might assume.
People who join a union like this don't have union representation or union contracts with companies. They rely on individual members to take action in various forms within there own companies. In theory they could call for a strike and ask everyone who is a member to strike from their respective companies, but in practice it's more about raising awareness and making noise in hopes of driving change.
So while technically it's a union, it's not comparable to what most people think of as a union in the United States.
In some countries/industries you have to be a member of an union by the law. Just by working in industry, union is forced upon you by law, and you have to pay their fees. The only way out, is to form your own union, with all paperwork. It really sucks for self employed folks.
Screen Actors Guild
Writers Guild of America
Directors Guild of America
NFL Players Association
Now, I'll give you, SAG, WGA, and DGA don't control all film and television production and there are plenty of non-union jobs available. But most of the film and television you consume is union work.
Every player in the NFL is required to be a member of the NFLPA.
The others, though, yes.
There is a union for coaches and it's entirely voluntary. Which is why you won't see Belichick in most Madden games as his contract has to be negotiated separately.
The thing about the "hollywood" unions is that they are very supportive of the others. So when the recent writer's strike was taking place, the actors also supported them as well as the directors by not working without their writers.
If the auto union workers strike, the steel workers aren't stopping work in solidarity. If the stevedores go on strike, the truck drivers don't go on strike in solidarity.
American labor law was written when unions were much stronger. It assumes strong unions and strong employers in conflict, with the NLRB as referee. That hasn't been true in the US for decades now.
No they're not. It's optional.
Because of this, there's free management training, free skilled training, and holiday and pay minimums. Plus, free advice and legal support for workers.
- Closed shop - must be member of union to be hired.
- Union shop - must join union when hired.
- Agency shop - don't have to join union, but have to pay a fee to it.
- Open shop - don't have to join union, but can.
- Yellow-dog contract - not allowed to join union.[1]
The two extremes are mostly illegal in the US.
Closed shops and union shops just seem like an arrangement between employers and unions, not something forced upon you "by law"?
So if your shop is more efficient than the union shop, you don't get to compete on that price savings. It tilts the market towards the unions.
That doesn’t have any relevance for American unions, but people seems to think any issue they ever had with a union applies to every union.
I’d suggest you read up on “fake unions” it’s 1984 level double talk shit.
There are also fake unions in the United States in the cannabis industry. Pretty grim situation.
However those are paperwork exercises without any leverage that run into legal issues inside the US. “Anyone who signed a labor peace agreement with ProTech Local 33 has 90 days from the ruling to sign a new pact with a legitimate union or risk losing their license”
The Chinese version is stable as they are being actively propped up by the state.
The Lack of Genuine Worker Representation
The All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) is China's only legal trade union, and it is required by the Trade Union Law to "uphold the leadership of the Communist Party." Because one of the ACFTU's priorities is to organize and mobilize "vast numbers of workers to make contributions to the sound and rapid development of the economy," and to foster "harmony in labour relations" so that such development may take place, the vast majority of "trade unions" in enterprises effectively remain under the de facto control of management.
https://www.cecc.gov/publications/commission-analysis/recent...
The All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) is still the only legally recognized trade union.
That sounds like the Republican Party.
The first statement is true in a few industries, but the second statements are false in any industry in which the first statement applies. If union membership is mandated, you don't get a choice in the union you join.
And for the last bit about self-employed folks: the only industries which mandate union membership in which it is also possible to be self-employed are the Hollywood guilds, which set compensation minimums. Hollywood union members are free to negotiate higher compensation, and many do.
The worst thing about all the anti-union FUD that gets spread on HN is that they assume that tech workers would be in the same kind of union as janitors, when the most similar structure would be the Hollywood guilds.
Source? I'd guess most unions start as collective-bargaining unions because if they can't colletively bargain I'm struggling to see their point over, like, a conference or subreddit.
It's a problematic perspective. "The" union might be an impotent lost cause, but "A" union can appear suddenly, strike hard, and dissipate once the need for it has gone. This seems more like the latter.
Every employee is replaceable, banding together with others that might replace you instead of letting them play you like a fool is a power move.
> These people have disabled a critical part of your supply chain and they will restore it if you improve the working conditions for these other people.
...where both groups of people are part of the same union despite having very different jobs. If you can achieve solidarity across sectors, you can strike much more effectively than by merely refusing to work.
When my studio was closed and 36 of us fired without notice 7 months ago, I poked around at union options and was shocked to find they were only inside individual studios, not even across whole companies, much less across the industry.
The games industry is 100 years behind film and music in standardizing contracts, roles, and rights (including IP rights for failed projects). This initiative gives us a chance to fix it!
In the UK, you can be join the national union even if you are the only one in your workplace. Typically union recognition within a particular workplace comes later after sufficient numbers join.
The film and TV production situation is nothing to aspire toward... especially if you are a contractor. It never lead to more stable work for the crews, and became a feast or famine type seasonal working arrangement for many.
Unions are better than none, as at least your crew actually gets paid by some rat-fink production manager that often disappeared on wrap.
Best of luck, and some of the best talent I've met was shafted by a AAA studio at least once in their career (often for some really bizarre reasons.) =3
In other words your comment is hyperbolic and does not apply to the topic at hand.
Stress & constant overtime crunch culture will absolutely be a detriment on the health and wellbeing of workers in any industry.
Again, labor laws saved lives in the past, they can save and/or benefit lives today.
>In other words your comment is hyperbolic and does not apply to the topic at hand.
Welcome to the topic at hand.
They can, but game dev is not a critical national industry that politicians are gonna fight for with laws to protect labor. Otherwise we could have had unionized clothes making union but what saw instead was the entire textile industry shipped oversees. Game dev will follow a similar fate.
You can unionize if you want, but unless you're guarantee to have a blockbuster IP on your hands capable of raking in billions, you won't be able to compete with game devs from lower CoL countries.
In a globalized free market with no tariffs, high CoL labor can't compete with low CoL labor making commodity goods, which a a lot of games are nowadays. Unions won't fix this, but accelerate offshoring at the expense of the local industry.
I mean, those devs might unionize as well. Certainly would've helped both the ZA/UM and CD Projekt Red devs, for different reasons.
The word "might" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. If unionization in Asia was so easy we would have seen it happen a long time ago, but what we saw instead was suicide nets on buildings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpB9Aeq8lUA
Granted, I have no doubt that the work culture is much tougher than in North America. But even the Chinese government has recognized 996 and taken steps to address it.
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/east-asia/china-neijuan-invo...
Also, Foxconn manufacturing isn't exactly the same thing as NetEase video game development, even if they both exist within the same labor environment.
Foxconn workers killing themselves by jumping off their office budling is a caricature to you? How out of touch can you be?
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012...
https://www.foxbusiness.com/features/apple-foxconn-factory-c...
The US (and more generally Western) gaming industry is getting obliterated by Asian studios. I doubt a union (pre-supposing this is a union, which it is not) would help US studios be more competitive.
A union doesn't help you if your company, or entire industry, goes bankrupt.
Treating employees in the industry fair might not change this, but should be beneficial to them regardless, unless it would make the misalignment of the product offer even worse which is entirely possible.
>it just targets a small subset willing to spend the most money.
people with money aren't worried about getting laid off. Quite the contrary.
Asia isn't really booming either. At least if you compare to western studios. Japan had decades of a stangant economy and are coming out of a recession. Any kind of growth is a gold mine for them. China is a minefield as well economically.
> I doubt a union (pre-supposing this is a union, which it is not) would help US studios be more competitive.
It's not about competition, it's about protecting your livliehood so you don't get sacked to make an earnings call look a smidgen better.
The salaries here are far lower than in the USA which probably helps a bit, that's not good for the workers though of course.
All that said: A hit based industry is not one that provides stability. I cant think of how slapping a union on top of an unstable foundation is going to solve anything. I've heard a couple people who crossed over from the film industry say it's just going to turn most roles into contracts (just like the film industry), and will quickly filter out the unskilled and less driven people.
There isn't really a solution to this. Market pressure keep the prices of games down. Funding gets a better bang for buck by investing in up and coming countries (e.g. Poland). Most qualified[1] games don't even break a million. Hitting [just!] $150,000 in revenue is when Steam starts seriously promoting your game[2]. $150K is not even enough to live in a coastal city (after dev. costs), never mind hiring people.
[1] The dev had the intent to market _and_ sell a legitimate product, which is the minority of games on steam.
[2] howtomarketagame.com
You mean like the entire television and film industry? Any production over a certain (small) size is completely unionized. It's so massively successful the American cultural exports dominate in almost every corner of the world.
I'm not sure where the idea that unions can't work for the games industry comes from since it's almost identical to the film and TV industry. Unions exist so workers don't get exploited and to provide stability.
What about Nintendo? They famously have very limited layoffs. They see value in providing stability and maintaing culture and institutional memory.
If anything, it's short-term profit-seeking that destroys industries. You see this in the world of original content production for streamers. They cut the size of writers rooms. They tried to no longer have writers on set. There's a push for "mini writing rooms". Why? Because it cuts costs on a very short term basis.
In doing so, Netflix (etc) are intentionally throwing away the model that created billion dollar properties like Friends, Seinfeld, ER, MASH, Cheers, etc that, to this day, generate massive profits. Seinfeld was known for getting over a million viewers when it was running in syndication.
Long-term it creates problems. Future products and showrunners are writers who need to get experience on set. Shortsighted cost-reudction is literally killing the future of the industry.
As for the price of video games, there are several aspects to this:
1. AAA publishers like to complain that games still cost $60 after years. That's true but also the distribution is significantly higher than it was 20 years ago. You're selling way more games;
2. The marginal cost of producing a game via download is essentially zero; and
3. Games eventaully get much cheaper on Steam. That's a good thing. Early experiments with this showed that selling a game cheap on Steam could generate significantly more revenue than the original release. And because the marginal cost is zero, it's all profit.
But not forcing suits to concede. Premature to assume voice actors will win in the end. On the continuum of "indispensible", "rainmaker" talent to easily replacable, screen talent has leverage to unionize because their faces sell tickets/subscriptions. My understanding is voice actors are bluntly not valued as much, hence the long strike, they don't have comparable leverage, especially with AI on horizon. Least valuable / most fungible are production, which is why the situation is increasingly shit for even existing unionized talent in entertainment and extra worse for non unionized sectors like vfx, or most of video games - they're replacable by neverending supply of talent willing to work for less, not just in US but abroad.
I don't know who will win, but it's not like these choices are not without consequence. These moves definitely slow down their plans.
And as you expect it hurts indies the most. People spending years on a decent product and they are locked to selling at $10 because the market is so used to deep sales. At some point the next generation will scoff at the idea of paying for any game.
Nintendo isn't an American company, and Japanese have different cultural values (with tradeoffs)
> If anything, it's short-term profit-seeking that destroys industries
Im not so confident about that. For most games, you launch it once, and you get the vast majority of the revenue within one year of release. Then the next game has to be better (and cost more) than the last. I think it has less to do with short term profits (games take years to develop).
> AAA publishers like to complain that games still cost $60 after years. That's true but also the distribution is significantly higher than it was 20 years ago. You're selling way more games;
> The marginal cost of producing a game via download is essentially zero;
You lose 30% of that to the storefront, 30% on marketing, 10% on server, 5% on engine. (fun fact: the profit margin of games were higher in the 90s) [1]
> Games eventaully get much cheaper on Steam. That's a good thing. Early experiments with this showed that selling a game cheap on Steam could generate significantly more revenue than the original release. And because the marginal cost is zero, it's all profit.
No it isn't. Not when people's expectations continue to rise.
[0] https://www.gamedevmap.com
[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/19_NC1ZskeN47LHaYJziotbA0sqL...
But that's not the situation right now. It's companies making record revenue but choosing to do mass layoffs to make numbers look good. That's what unions fix. These companies aren't going broke from retaining existing talent. Those west coast studios are making hundreds of billions to compensate, so I'm not worried about them neither.
>I've heard a couple people who crossed over from the film industry say it's just going to turn most roles into contracts (just like the film industry), and will quickly filter out the unskilled and less driven people.
sure, they can, have, and will try to. Issue is that games are much harder to plan than film (or perhaps the executives simply can't plan as well). So a lot of those principles that "worked" in film go out the door. In addition, with service games on the rise you can't just rush something out to make day 1 revenue and tear everything down.
While there are some success, there are also some failures--all across the cost scale. WB games were making $XXX,XXX,XXX games, and just had to shut down 3 studios and cancel a game.
Lots of other examples (Anthem, Concord, Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin to name a few)
That record revenue is used to fund the next game, which is almost always more expensive than the last.
https://cwa-union.org/news/releases/video-game-workers-launc...
Where can I learn more about this type of union? Is there one for US IT workers?
Look to who is benefiting. Do you see any names you recognize? Anybody you love to hear?
If you want to hear, see, mocap them more make sure they are on board before your declare a side.
Edit: typo
Fwiw I have been indie for 10 years so this would not benefit me.
US games are in a tremendous slump of quality and seem to be slop factories rn. Add in unions, I don't know. I don't see this helping the slop factories become not slop factories.
This is all opinionistic, but use a bit of logic here. Ask yourself what a union is and what the incentives are.
Negotiating solo against a large organization with an available labor pool is the weakest possible position, even if the type of talent is in demand. I'd argue that people always want the power in compensation negotiations that's only obtainable by forming strong associations. It's just a matter of whether they can get it or not based on the political power of their counterparties. This type of conflict has been happening since the dawn of civilization.
Which website are you looking at?
Unless I'm mistaken, the website is https://uvw-cwa.org/ and it isn't even red, have no hammers/sickles, and mostly talks about "stronger together", which fair enough, I guess could give some knee-jerk reaction about socialism if you don't believe in working together with others.
This is red. And look at the zine cover.
Do more than judge a book by the color of its cover next time to communicattion such design language.
- it's a "Union," founded by "We the people" rather than being subjects subservient to an ordained ruler
- It has revolutionary ideals at its core
- There are fasces everywhere, an overt symbol of collective effort
- Right out of the gate, the US socialized one of the largest industries: transporting mail across the nation. Founders wrote it into the Constitution to ensure that it was untouchable
- To go along with that, the interstate highway system is a massive, communal project
- The most politically untouchable service, something politicians practically place on an altar, is a massive wealth redistribution scheme: Social Security
Beyond all this I didn't see a single thing on that site that has socialism design influences, which frankly makes it sort of un-American.
But, well yes. In many countries outside NA, unions are affiliated with left-wing parties.
Okay, and why is this exactly bad? After all, the workers behind games want to get better working environments and they use the workers' movements symbolism in representing this. Also, class solidarity.
> These are not the type of people I want to work with
And you don't have to. You can always go indie and not associate yourself with people who organise themselves for the sake of a better industry. No one's forcing you to have solidarity and no one is forced to have solidarity with you.
> and it would be bad for the stock price.
I'll be frank (and a tad polemical) but if an industry cannot maintain its value without exploiting its workers, it shouldn't exist. That's just the free market at work.
How many modern games are there on this list?
The most recent game on that list is from 2023, maybe it just takes time before a game end up on that list? Baldurs Gate 3 was beyond mainstream popular at one point, and surely will end up that list sooner or later, but maybe it's still too early?
I would probably say the OP was commenting more on Western gaming, as that's the pattern (see UbiSoft's consecutive string of failures, for example). Games like Elden Ring, Animal Crossing, and Cyberpunk came out of popular non-Western gaming.
The only Western games in that list for the last 6 years are Call of Duty games and Hogwarts Legacy, which was good, although from what I remember vilified by Western media for helping enrich JK Rowling.
I wasn't.
> And how does this relate to unions?
I was replying to the comment above, not a different comment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_The_Elder_Scrol...
This is the turning point where the industry began to change from selling products to selling services. Expansion packs existed before then, but they were sold as complete experiences, essentially mini-sequels sold at a discount because they reused the same engine. The horse armor was something different and controversial at the time.
That itself is fairly damning but what puts it over the top is that there are wayyyy more gamers nowadays than there were 16 years ago.
Modern AAA stuff is just simply pretty bad. Games made on a conveyor belt just don't work, at least beyond a point - and that point, wherever it may be, is well behind us for just about all AAA studios.
>Modern AAA stuff is just simply pretty bad
1. your conclusion doesnt match your premise. what does sales have to do with quality?
2. this whole argument is just a useless tangent. If you want to look for games not on a conveyor belt, don't look at best selling lists. Especially for networked games continually updated for decades vs. hand crafted releases
The reason the reflects on AAA games is because AAA in modern times is much more about budget than depth or quality. AAA games are dumping massive amounts of money on titles with the hope of a quick turn-around, but sales for these games are increasingly meh, because the games are increasingly meh.
Even the same studios do a poor job of rehashing stuff. There are currently something like 10x as many players playing Skyrim as Starfield. It's quite pathetic.
It's hard for a game released in the past year to make it onto a top ten list full of games like GTA5 that have been consistently selling copies for over a decade.
And I see a handful of games released since 2020 on that list.
It also only deals with games that are sold. Whereas games like Genshin Impact have a massive worldwide audience and yet aren't going to show up on that list.
But also, note that many of the games--especially the ones near the top--also double- and triple-count their numbers by doing rereleases and special editions and whatnot that all get to count for the "same" game.
Next, note that already 10% of the list came out since the COVID-19 pandemic started--is that not modern enough for you?
Finally, several of these games are continually being worked on and receiving content updates. Minecraft and The Sims 4 may be over a decade old, but they both received updates within the past several months, and their players fully expect more updates in the next several months. Does that mean they aren't modern?
You had an opinion, it was neiter right nor wrong. I was a teenager and watched Juno, 300, Bay's Transformers, And Pirates of the Carribean 3. I thought it was a renaissance. It's all based on personal experience.
> things are not the same regardless of how much you want to believe that
So how is this related to a union in 2025?
Halo 3 seems to also be very popular only in the U.S., while Baldur's Gate 3 is more recognized internationally.
So it makes perfect sense that contemporary AAA devs would have no idea it even existed.
I guess I'm mostly just amused by the initial comment suggesting Halo 3 of all games as a super incredible cultural impact game. I just can't see it like that at all -- at the time it was just a capstone to what Halo 1 and 2 set up. And in modern times, Halo is so irrelevant that it's probably going to be on Sony's console.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reaXYMihM1Y
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_of_Halo_3
Halo 3 broke sales records at a time where you needed to buy physical copies.
It had a famous Superbowl ad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKDkKKt9Y7I
Perhaps I'm just missing your argument. Is your argument mostly about the immediate "pop" surrounding the launch, rather than any sort of longer term cultural impact? If so, then sure, I'll grant Halo 3 had one of and perhaps even the largest launch hype of all time from the physical release age. Still it's not like Halo 2 wasn't hugely popular at its launch too, though 3 was probably bigger. And of course the already mentioned Modern Warfare had a big launch, though by MW2 the whole culture of launch hype with midnight releases and camping out and so on was just about dead thanks to digital distribution and such. You had other games later on with crazy marketing too -- how are super bowl ads relevant? Dante's Inferno (2010) is a game I've never played but it also had a super bowl ad I've never seen until now. I'd dare say its impact is far less than Halo's, both at its launch (seems to be a God of War clone) and since.
But if you really are arguing that nothing has had a bigger long-term cultural impact since, the single counterexample of Minecraft is enough to stand against that. Speaking of God of War, there's another franchise that has probably by now out-shined the Halo series for cultural impact. (And maybe worth arguing that it probably contributed to Halo 4's dumb "Press button to beat the Didact" QTE?) I'd even put 2011's Dark Souls higher for birthing a new subgenre term, the "Soulslike", even if it took until Elden Ring for FromSoft themselves to hit the pinnacles of financial success and launch success with the formula. And so many other games.
USS Pillar of Autumn USS Long Night of Solace USS Spirit of Fire
I do not know of any series that has this level of cultural impact
Not quite. MW2 was the largest video game launch on record by pre-orders, revenue and units sold when it was released. Its release broke nearly all of Halo 3's release records. There was no digital release at launch. It also had a massive advertising campaign. There were large ads in every store with an electronics or games sections to an extent that I haven't seen since.
Closest I can get to an objective answer would be Fortnite (since you aren't really specifying the kind of cultral impact). and that's "only" 7 years old or so.
Or, they ensures you're credited regardless if you left before the game shipped (because it is a form of portfolio for your career).
And lastly, a union means you cannot be exploited hard, like a lot of wanabe game programmers and artists are wont to be.
I don't think that's quite true. Unions can definitely make a company less competitive, in addition to the usual headwinds they face.
Whether a company prospers or fails the employees working for that company will, in nearly all circumstances, have much better quality of employment while that company lasts. I'd argue that long term company health is supported by unionization but I understand that there is a massive entrenched cultural rejection of that notion.
This is too black and white. Unionization creates another power structure in a company, one that isn't particularly aligned with company health, but can be. It just depends on the people involved and how they use that power.
> but I understand that there is a massive entrenched cultural rejection of that notion.
I've no idea what you mean by a cultural rejection - which culture are you talking about?
this is basically a tautology so it's a useless statement. Water for a human can bring them back to life, drown them, or tear their body apart. of course context, intent, and factors matter.
But in general, unions are good for a traditional company health: happy workers -> more productivity -> better products. Us being in this turmoil where we aren't fousing on better products doesn't change that.
This is one of those things that's hard to spot from an un-unionised standpoint. You have hard-working, driven workers who sometimes suffer unfairnesses that a union would solve. So unions look good, because your workers are hard-working and driven, and it's all upside.
A decade of unionisation might look very different. For example, the UK in the 1970s briefly moved to a 3 day working week[0] because of coal miner strikes that meant there wasn't enough power in the country. Not all examples are this extreme, partly because we learned from that experience, it's worth thinking of things more objectively, outside of the current context, and analysing the pros and cons of both positions.
Eh, I grew up in the states and unions were heavily demonized there. I tend to couch my words quite defensively due to that - my apologies.
> This is too black and white. Unionization creates another power structure in a company, one that isn't particularly aligned with company health, but can be. It just depends on the people involved and how they use that power.
I agree that this isn't a guarantee, there are both bad unions and some good unions that do ill for what they perceive to be good reasons - however, generally speaking, increasing job security and tamping down on companies' instinct to turn to layoffs will usually benefit companies. My experience in the workforce is that larger companies use layoffs as a frequent tool for stock price manipulation when they're having a bad quarter to appear "lean" - and while the markets do respond positively to that it generally comes at the expense of long term company health.
This is definitely a case where both unions and companies can be in the wrong - but it seems that companies are much more often in the wrong. Long tenured employees are quite valuable and layoffs should be a tool used in the extremes to account for overgrowth and shouldn't be happening multiple times in the same decade unless a company is in severely poor health.
But.. the core problem was the schedule for development was bunk. If the schedule was right you wouldn't need crazy long hours.
Unless you're making the next GTA6 for which the customer is willing to wait forever, if you increase the schedule so that everyone works fewer hours, then you'll get outcompeted in the free market by game devs from China, Korea and Japan where long hours are not an issue and can get games much quicker to market on lower budgets, putting you out of business.
[1] https://www.crossrivertherapy.com/research/literacy-statisti...
Of course, but workers in the west also have strong economy and a lot of other better choice than working in a sweatshop. Workers in Asia do not , that's why all offshoring goes there.
Games also aren't zero sum either. Turns out consumers can buy more than 1 game a year.
And those are what's available as work these days, but has increasingly been outsourced to cheaper locations. Good riddence, but it also means lost jobs.
Yes it is if you're EA, Ubisoft, Microsoft, Sony, etc. The executives there run the game making like factories.
>Studios can try, but no one is going to make Elder Scrolls VI feel like ES6 except Bethesda's team, design, and tech.
What Bethesda quality you mean? This? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0R_WcU-hsY
The original Bethesda staff that worked on your favorite franchises doesn't work there anymore, they all retired or moved on to greener pastures and the studio, just like EA, Ubisoft, etc is full of clueless underpaid and overworked juniors that don't have the skills or eye for detail the original staff had. Here the Chinese and Koreans will eat you alive.
>Games also aren't zero sum either.
No, but the hours in a days is a zero sum. People have the same free time after school/work to play games, this doesn't grow with the market. So they have to carefully pick what games they'll spend their time and money on. And if it's between some Western slop or an Asian game that's better and cheaper, they'll pick the latter. The more competitive the gaming market is by international players, the more western game studios will be squeezed out.
But then so has most of the industry, which has experienced growth year-on-year.
A profit does not prevent layoffs and no individual can 10X themselves to safety. There is a huge power and incentive disparity between the people with the power to initiate layoffs and the people who get laid off. There's a way to shrink the gap, but it means accepting you have more in common with your colleagues than your shareholders, then communicating it collectively.
ehh, I give it a week /s
But yes, i'm surprised people still fall into this notion that the last 3 years of layoffs falls into anything close to a just world. it's been clear that these tech cuts are not merit based for a while.
>Layoffs happen because these games bomb over and over and over and money runs out.
Not these days. How many layoffs have EA/Activision done now? 4 waves each?. Sony's been doing well but still laying off all the NA studios.