Game Industry Labor Issues

Sounds like the workers in the game industry need to unionize.

A part of the reason you hear these stories of the games industry is that it's a desirable job for many people. Games companies can get away with more than some other software companies because enough people want to work on games despite worse employment conditions than they might find with the same skill set elsewhere. There's a supply and demand issue. There's also a certain amount of self imposed crunch by people who are genuinely passionate about the game they're working

Games are always going to be that way. There is too much glamor associated with the industry. Whenever someone graduates from a bad games company into a "boring" business job, there are 10 more new grads begging to take his place. A union cannot change the underlying market fundamentals. Desperation guarantees an atmosphere of exploitation; the only thing that would change is that the union directors would get their cut of the proceeds from the exploitative labor practices they'd

I try to work in the game industry when possible.Unions on the game industry would never work, reason why game industry is so abusive is two fold:1. A lot of young people believe working with games is only fun, providing endless bodies to be hired and replace the previous young that realized how much it suck that they quit.2. Games market follow a very strong winner takes all model, a few games have all profits, literally thousands games are released yearly that nobody ever heard of or

Game companies have notoriously been sweatshops for devs, so not surprising I guess.

The video game industry has the same problem a lot of creative jobs have: the work force is large. Companies can afford to treat employees like shit because there are so many fresh grads who want to be game devs lined up to take the place of anyone who complains. Compare that to writers/graphic designers who are often undercut by their peers who are willing to work "for exposure". Hopefully unionizing helps these guys out, but I think as long as there is such a big pool of people

The main problem with the game industry - I believe - is that for a lot of people it's a dream job, which means the supply for people to work in the industry far outweights that of the demand - meaning, if you're not doing crunch time, there's ten others waiting in line to take over. This is I think the problem in a lot of big employers with dubious worker practices - think Amazon, Uber, etc. They get away with it because the people are easily replaced. They can just fire any Amaz

No game developer is living on starvation wages, it is just a question of how much they get. If a game company can provide for its people and offer enough incentives that its workers aren't fleeing to better jobs it deserves to exist.So why aren't the people leaving then? Maybe they love the game they are working on and prefer bad conditions over working on something else? Maybe they have non-standard backgrounds and would be forced to wash plates if not for this company? It isn

I think that if unions actually do make inroads into the software development world, the gaming industry will likely be the last to unionize. The reason that the gaming industry is worse off for developers is not because the game development shops are inherently greedy. They have horrible conditions for those workers because they can. So many people want to develop games rather than do any other kind of software development, and so the game dev shops know that most/all inhumane treatment wi

The main issue as I see it in the game dev space (can't speak to other parts of the gaming industry) is that faaaar too many people naively go into it because they like playing video games, got into programming because they were on the computer anyway, and then hop into the industry bright-eyed and bushy tailed. That's just a recipe for mistreatment. Whereas in web-dev, for example, no one is excited at the prospect of developing a new CRUD app for some megacorp, so we get paid handsom