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Unions have become increasingly common in the games industry over the past five years, emerging in places like Activision, ZeniMax, Sega, and more as developers try to negotiate better pay and workplace policies. It's a promising start, but so much more can be done.
Bee GamesBeat Summit 2024IGDA director Jakin Vela and actor Zeke Alton talked about the power of unionization and how it can help video game workers. Vela said that while a majority of developers support unions, there are still misunderstandings about what they do thanks to anti-union propaganda and other myths that persist.
“Among the many images of a union that have detracted from the concept is the idea that union members are trying to get rich off the backs of their employers, that union staff or directors or the top of the unions are siphoning money away from their employers. employees and the company, whether they are simply a bureaucratic black eye standing in the way of getting anything done,” Alton added. “Now all three may be true in some cases, but I don't think it detracts from the basic concept of what a union is for.”
Vela noted that with the devastating number of layoffs currently happening in the industry, more and more people are starting to talk about unionization.
“What I see unions offering to game developers is clearly a voice at the table,” he said. “But what does that actually mean? That could mean talking about workplace policies, workplace diversity issues, talking about sustainability, ending crunch culture, all of that.”
As a member of SAG-AFTRA's Interactive Media Bargaining Committee, Alton has extensive experience talking to publishers about setting living wages and protections for voice actors, especially with the rise of AI. When Vela asked what studio leaders and management can do to better support employees and their unions, he said the conversation can differ depending on the size of the company you work with.
Alton compared smaller indie studios to the old days of Disney and Warner Bros., when creatives held the power and ran the companies themselves. It's easier to start a conversation about unions with Indians because they want to work with the best available talent and aren't just looking for revenue or worried about pleasing investors. He said it's much harder to broach the subject at triple-A studios, which do have shareholders and profit margins.
“It's different at the bigger triple-A level where [company leaders] are not creators of things. They're business people,” Alton explained. “And the people with the purse strings are accountants and IP lawyers and what I call robber barons, and their job is to plunder enough money from this company for the shareholders and when it's done, they take a golden parachute and jump. That's a much harder conversation, because they're not at all interested in making anything good. They are interested in using an industry to make money. It's just competitions these days.”
This has led to a volatile time for video game workers, and they are increasingly looking to unions to better protect themselves.
“And so we have to find a way to have that conversation with management and employees and say, 'How can we work together to make this sustainable?' Not that someone will become rich in the next five years, but that this is a profession for the next 20 or 30 years [years] because it can and should be that way. That's how you make good games,” said Alton.
Both Alton and Vela agreed that training studio leadership is about it what unions actually are – collaboration partners that help create a sustainable talent pool – will go a long way. It also wouldn't hurt to educate consumers about the various issues developers face.
“I think, interestingly, more consumers are supporting game workers – we all know that consumers have a lot of opinions about our titles, about our games. But if we can also use that same kind of PR to support employee empowerment initiatives and eradicate the crisis and increase diversity, that would be pretty cool. I think this can help our sector a lot,” said Vela.