Things might be moving on the North American front, too.
In case this wasn’t seen in the other business thread. The Activision Blizzard situation caught the attention of the AFL-CIO:
Yep, unionizing is the obvious answer. Game devs work longer hours for less money than elsewhere in IT. That should change.
One of our execs joked about lack of union representation once. Someone didn’t like a change, didn’t get a chance to make their voice heard… and our exec makes this joke about everyone getting into a union so they can have a voice… not a single person laughed. 100s of people in person and on the phone, not even a chuckle. They laugh and say it was a joke guys… still no sympathy laughs.
It’s not all sun and roses here but there’s a reason unions are not a laughing matters. They can get some serious pull. I feel like this call though happens after every one of these big events, and there is no real change. These execs, they don’t fear it.
That XSEED story about a company taking a persons name out of the credits of a game because of their arbitrary “company policy”?
Wouldn’t happen if y’all had a union.
Rockstar has the same awful policy, and it’s part of the incentive for team members to kill themselves with crunch.
What is preventing people from forming unions? Is it simply the street cred of becoming a “GAME DEVELOEPR!!1” that overrides common sense?
Exceedingly few studios would recognize a union if developers attempted to form one, and would be more likely to just remove the employees attempting to unionize and replace them with new hires from the endless stream of bright-eyed college graduates looking for jobs in the glamorous world of game development.
Unions are dying and have practically zero presence in the tech world. These people frankly also have skills in one of the most sought after and well paid business sectors in the world. They need to start leaving these devs. Only if they start losing qualified people will they change there ways.
That may be true of tech in general, but game development is notoriously poorly paid (at least by comparison) and young geeks so excited to work in it that they’re extremely easily replaced.
Game development bleeds senior talent all the time. And has for decades.
Hasn’t made a difference. Once you build your process around “there is an effectively infinite supply of 22 year olds who will give everything they have to make games”, you just assume attrition.
There are really two kinds of unions. The first is a group of skilled individuals who band together to make sure their rarefied skills are properly compensated and to control who is performing these skilled tasks in the workplace (ex: pipefitters). The second is a group of individuals with commonplace skills who band together to make sure that management does not abuse their easily-replaced status by underpaying them or having unsafe working conditions (ex: Teamsters). There’s also public unions, but they aren’t relevant here.
Any union that tries to integrate both types one and two has an inherent schism, and I suspect that any union that tries to incorporate both the low and high skill ends of game development will have problems trying to reconcile the competing interests of these groups. People with highly marketable skills will not want to be bound by the same rules and policies that govern the low-end labor.
Take a look at Meet You in Hell for an example of this in the early steel industry.
Which is why those people have to decide if it’s worth it just to be making a game.
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A good example of unions that bridge that gap are the film and TV unions. They protect the lower-ranking workers from the hordes of starry-eyed 22-year-olds who would work for free, with minimum salaries, overtime rules, etc. They protect the higher-paid, further-up-the-totem-pole workers with making sure credits are fair (producers giving themselves written by credit has always been a big deal), and codifying how royalties work. (And the overtime rules help them too.) And higher skilled people can always negotiate above and beyond what the minimums are, of course. They’re not really bound by any rules and policies if they can negotiate better.
There is definitely tension between the higher-up and lower-down parts of these unions. Sometimes a lot. (Martin Scorsese and half of the on-set production assistants are both in the DGA, who is that union negotiating for?) But they stick together because:
A. The entry-level people all think they’re going to be high-level people someday, and the high-level people remember they were all entry-level once.
B. Each half knows they need the other half’s power.
C. Inertia.
But getting a union started from nothing is tough. And my using Martin Scorsese as my example of a high-status director reveals me to be 95 years old.
The Communications Workers of America are starting a new project to unionize tech professionals including game developers. More of an industry-wide organization, and not discipline-specific, like movies and TV workers are organized (which the video game world often looks to). One of the founders of Game Workers Unite is involved.
Interesting. Good luck!