The Verge: One of the big talking points at last year’s Game Developers Conference was unionization, and it’s a subject that’s only become more important in the wake of events like the closure of Telltale Games. According to GDC’s latest annual survey, which includes responses from close to 4,000 developers, nearly half — 47 percent — of those who were polled support unionization, with only 16 percent saying they’re against the idea.
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The mistreatment of game developers walks a weird line between the treatment of tech employees and the treatment of entertainment employees. In the tech development world, there exists a culture delivered from the bosses down and perpetuated by company benefits and bribes like in office gyms and three free meals daily. They want their employees to work more than the typical 40 hour work week. Employees who don’t stay after hours are seen as not being as dedicated even though they might’ve been working for 8 straight hours while their coworker has put three hours in at the gym and is staying three hours later to counter that. I do not know so much about the culture of benefits at a game development company but I suspect it is not close to that of the major tech companies given the millions those companies rake in. There is also the stigma against entertainment and the arts, something which is regularly consumed by the entire world yet still seen as a fake career path and a lower level skill. I wonder how this balances with the tech side and how this plays in to game developers’ fears/pessimism regarding unionization.
I believe that the main reason why "unionization" even became a thing in the first place was that workers realized that their hard work was in a place where it could be exploited by the workers. The workers realized that they had to come up with guidelines that would ensure that they, as resources, are not exploited.
Unionization, since then has gained a lot of strength, to a point that almost every industry has a part of its workforce dedicated to handling and forming unions. And such, the game developer industry is no different.
This article does a good job in presenting the complete scenario to the people: the views of people about unionization in the industry; the reasons why it is needed and the reasons why the employers might be hesitant in seeking this idea.
The fact that everyone is worried about the over work is integral to this discussion only because it concise the points of the employers and the employees: employees dont want to work over time if they are not compensated for it and the employers cannot guarantee if there would be overtime only because they dont know what course their industry is taking.
This article does raise an important question about unionization and its importance in the game developer industry.
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