PieFedVideo Game Workers Launch Industry-Wide Union with Communications Workers of America
cwa-union.org/news/releases/video-game-workers-…
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/27419929
0 Comments
Comments from other communities
I'm looking forward to strikes delaying games. Unironically looking forward to it.
Same. Because if the unions can kill poisonous work demands like ‘crunch time’ and thus cause delays for polish and bug fixes by devs who aren’t sleeping at their desk from exhaustion, we all win
I read this as 'cause delays for the Polish' and was like, "What did the Polish do?"
kingthrillgoreThe problem is that they can't.
Crunch is a product of poor project management and underfunded projects. Neither of which are things a union can really fight against.
So what triggers crunch? Oversimplifying, but the investor/publisher says "Yeah, we are cutting you off. Go gold in 2 months".
Depending on the ubiquity of the union at a given company, the only thing they can really do is say "Yeah. We aren't working more than 40 hours in a given week".
That... isn't going to make the publisher or investors provide more money. It will just mean that what goes gold is even more broken and even less complete. And that just means the studio will get shut down even faster and it will be even harder for union outlets to get funding in the future.
Game dev is so fundamentally broken and the funding market is so dire that I very much consider it to already be in "it can't get much worse...".
But stuff like this and the countless sex pest "revelations" are very much a case where People need to learn what unions can and can't do.
I would strongly encourage listening to the Remap Radio podcast when they talk about this. They are very much leftists and actually have firsthand experience (at Vice) of what unions can and can't do for their members. And that often is more about making the good times better and trying to make the bad times less bad. And game dev is very much in the bad times and has been for years.
I want less pretty games from smaller teams with smaller budgets and i'm not even kidding.
If this gets us there, rock on.
Good for them! I’ve always wondered when working Americans would decide unions are a good thing.
I can’t wait for the capital-G Gamers response to this..
..no matter how bad of a take I can think up, they always manage to out-do themselves and genuinely surprise me!
As for the workers, good for them - being on the strikes!
Drew
JohnThis should be good for games being finished on launch.
Do IT next.
Please please please
GoldholzI mean we could start that global union
Sister unions for Developers and the other for system admins
Cosmic ClericGreat to hear! Way overdue. That industry really needs some of those protections.
From the article ...
The launch will be formally announced at the 2025 Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, Calif., the world’s largest industry event for video game professionals, where workers will be joined by other CWA members to launch this powerful new organization.