As games get bigger and become more cinematic (and more expensive), there will be studios that grow and grow and then make big layoffs in a lull.
The coders, designers, and need an overarching union together from which they are contracted to work on projects. In fact, the writers and designers could probably work with the existing unions in Hollywood.
The huge studios would function just like in Hollywood. And yeah they would want to pump out those blockbusters, but nothing would stop indie developers from developing. I would allow for consistent and fair discussions for the unions and studios as to how pay will be done. It will also put in safeties for crunch and other abuses.
I’m not saying Hollywood is some perfect working model. I’m just saying it makes way more sense as a model for how modern AAA games are made.
Heck yeah, game industry workers are long over due for unionization. CDPR developers just had a headline in the news about unionizing after this latest wave of layoffs.
absolutely. Blizzard just had major layoffs to their Esports league, Epic had more than 800 layoffs, Naughty Dog laid off 25 or more developers and Ubisoft let go of 6 more employees after axing 60 earlier this year. and ofc the 9% of layoffs coming from CDPR this year.
The gaming industry absolutely needs union protections to protect their jobs, especially since a job should be steady income, not a volatile workload like developing seems to be in gaming right now. another benefit might be to making big execs actually have reason to listen to workers when it comes to cases of sexual harassment like what we’ve seen at Zenimax and Blizzard