Video game unions are such an interesting case because the worker is very skilled and the skills are highly transferable. This isn't a situation where you only know how to mill steel and there is only 1 steel mill around. You can stay and fight to unionize or you could just go get a better job right now. The fact that people stay speaks to how passionate they are about the industry, but also how willing they are to settle for less.
In theory, yes, it’s true, the skills should be transferrable, but in practice it’s often hard for those skills to be recognised by employers outside the games industry.
The right words don’t appear on the resume. Software that the recruiter has never heard of and none of ones they have, job titles that don’t match those in other sectors and roles that seem to straddle more than one, different working practices, different challenges, different expectations, different measures of reputation and success. No recognised professional qualifications or certifications.
Engineers and artists who work on games are generally well-respected outside of gaming. The big roadblock are recruiters who, for the time being are being replicated by AI, but hopefully soon, the AI will learn to recognize talent in a similar environment much better than today's recruiters.
I'm actually surprised that unions in games exist at all. If you've ever hired for a studio, the number of talented people out there who dream of working in games for peanuts is astounding. You have practically infinite supply of dirt cheap talent that knows their craft and will happily scab to finally earn any sort of living doing what they love.
That is the theory of how labor markets should work.
However whatever the cause, in practice even the BEST video game developer jobs out there are still low paid, full of crunches and low on autonomy. The union drive is imagining that the whole sector can be uplifted.
The industry is not in a state where you can just go and get a better job right now. We’ve had three years of relentless layoffs and studio closures, worse than at any other time in history. There’s nowhere to go and US employers in games are disappearing by the day.
Not at all, this is exactly what the unions are saying. EA is firing US employees despite being profitable. When they need to rehire again they’ll do it in countries where the wages are lower.
There are a few employers who have effectively guaranteed revenue in perpetuity through what's known as "forever games".
EA's sports division prints money. Valve prints money. Call of Duty prints money. Valorant/League print money. Fortnite prints money. Roblox prints money. Their products have been around for 10-20+ years and will seemingly never die.
The other bit to notice about EA in particular is that its share price has been flat for the last 7 years, they've continuously failed to figure out how to change that, which is a problem. Selling and layoffs are a lever to get out of that hole, although it remains to be seen how great of a move it turns out to be.
