Video Games on Strike: From One Conference Panel, a Wave of Unions Has Risen

Video game developers long toiled in the shadows. But that all changed at the 2018 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, when designers at studios ranging from the biggest developers to the smallest indie houses packed a panel called “Union Now?” to hear colleagues pour their hearts out about the abusive conditions that pervaded their corner of the entertainment industry.

The panelists detailed a litany of challenges, from 80+ hour work weeks — known in the industry as “crunch” — to workplace harassment, poor wages and abrupt waves of layoffs, according to multiple reports.

While the panel’s moderator, then-executive director of the International Game Developers Association Jen Maclean, was skeptical about how much unions could help, workers in the standing room-only crowd let loose. Some expressed feeling intimidated about speaking out over misconduct, others feared being laid off shortly after a game’s completion. Each anecdote was met with murmurs and finger snaps of agreement.

That GDC panel proved to be a turning point in video games. It triggered a wave of union organizing that began with a grassroots group called Game Workers United, and snowballed into employees at major companies like Bethesda — developers of the “Fallout” games that Amazon MGM turned into a hit TV series — forming unions under the Communication Workers of America (CWA).

And last month SAG-AFTRA announced its second video game strike in the last eight years, with voice actors and motion capture performers pulling their labor from companies like Activision, Formosa, Disney and WB Games.

The actors’ guild has staged picket lines outside the Warner Bros. backlot and at the offices of Disney Character Voices in Burbank, demanding protections against artificial intelligence. They want the same “consent, compensation and control” over their likenesses and performances that the guild fought for TV and film actors to receive.

Another picket line was held outside of Warner Bros. on Wednesday.

“I used to be one of a handful of people shouting into an empty room, and now there are thousands of people fighting for worker benefits and severance pay and so many other benefits, because it’s so clear with the direction of the video game industry that we all need to organize,” Robin LoBuglio, a game worker who attended the GDC 2018 panel and helped unionize the virtual reality game company Tender Claws, told TheWrap.

SAG-AFTRA’s latest labor battle comes at a crucial time. Video game workers include a mix of developers, voice actors and motion-capture performers — the kind that brought movies like “Avatar” and “Lord of the Rings” to life — who are the heart of characters and stories that have become Hollywood’s newest IP gold mine.

Following the box office success of “Sonic the Hedgehog,” “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” and “Five Nights at Freddy’s,” and hit streaming shows like “Arcane: League of Legends” and “Fallout,” the value of a popular video game is greater than ever.

Now the people making games that Hollywood is using to fill content pipelines want to be treated in a way that reflects the value they bring to them — and that includes game studios agreeing to the ethical use of AI.

“We have made AI deals with the studios, the streamers, the major record labels, television animation, and AI companies like Narrativ and Replica,” said Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA national executive director. “The whole industry is coalescing around the principles we’re fighting for. The video game companies are the ones who are isolated.”

The video game strike comes at a time when thousands of workers in that industry have seen their careers come to an abrupt halt. At least 21,000 employees at video game companies have been laid off since the start of 2023, including workers at Microsoft, Riot Games, and Electronic Arts.

Total consumer spending on video games reached a record $57.2 billion last year, but video game companies found their profit margins squeezed over the past two years. They made major investments and acquisitions believing that the sector’s rapid pandemic lockdowns-fueled growth would continue, only to find that heavy spending was weighing down financial performance.

Motion capture performers would be particularly vulnerable to being exploited by AI. Video game companies could potentially use the technology to replicate motion capture work done for a single project and reuse it for other games without the performer’s knowledge or compensation, Sarah Elmaleh, chair of the negotiating committee for SAG-AFTRA’s Interactive Media Agreement, told TheWrap.

At the start of the strike, a spokesperson for the companies that sign on to the guild’s Interactive Media Agreement said that the most recent offer sent to the guild “is directly responsive to SAG-AFTRA’s concerns and extends meaningful AI protections that include requiring consent and fair compensation to all performers.”

SAG-AFTRA says the companies only offered protections for motion capture performers if they were playing a character that shared their likeness, which would only cover a small percentage of performances.

“They will say that they offered these AI protections, but the devil is in the details,” said Elmaleh. “All you have to do is scratch the surface, and it is clear that any motion capture performer playing, say, an alien in a video game, wouldn’t be eligible for these AI protections because of these wide carve outs.”

SAG-AFTRA, which has been in contact with the CWA over the past several weeks, does not rule out partnering with the union as the guild’s strike continues.

Crunch time

Even before the most-recent layoffs, interest in unionization had been on the rise as years of frustrations over game development working conditions became public. While budgets for major games have spiraled into the hundreds of millions, workers complained about frequent crunch, with work weeks that could reach as much as 100 hours without additional compensation.

Amidst the rise of the #MeToo movement in Hollywood, employees at companies like Riot Games , Ubisoft , and Activision Blizzard lodged accusations of sexual misconduct and harassment. Two years ago, the family of an Activision finance manager who committed suicide during a company retreat blamed her death on sexual harassment .

It was in that atmosphere that grassroots organizing work at Game Workers United began. LoBuglio recalled how in the months following GDC 2018, her peers nominated her to lead the Los Angeles chapter of the nascent organization.

“It was hard to know where to get started,” she said. “Any movement like this is going to be driven by the people who are the most upset, but we needed to guide that passion into effective action. A lot of the early conversations we had were just training people about the unionization process and how to communicate effectively to co-workers who don’t know what a union can provide them.”

Cracking the CODE

Slowly, the movement began to gain steam. In 2019, workers at Riot Games staged a walkout to protest sexual misconduct and other claims of poor working conditions. That event and other labor actions organized by GWA chapters drew the attention of CWA, which was developing plans to expand unionization efforts after AT&T’s merger with Time Warner. Through that merger, AT&T took over ownership of WB Games and its multiple development studios including Netherrealm Studios (“Mortal Kombat”) and Rocksteady Studios (“Batman Arkham”).

“When that merger happened, we had a situation where a communications company that was our union’s largest employer went from being a fully unionized workforce to having thousands of jobs not covered,” said CWA’s organizing director Tom Smith. “How do we have bargaining power with AT&T if so many of its workers are non-unionized.”

In early 2020, CWA launched the Campaign to Organize Digital Employees, or CODE, to give grassroots efforts to unionize interactive media a shot in the arm with institutional labor resources. The partnership led to some key victories in its first year, including the creation of the Alphabet Workers Union, a minority union consisting of 1,200 employees at Google’s parent company that has pushed for accountability at the corporation and has helped contractors employed by Google in labor organizing.

It’s a scary time to be in gaming, but unions protect from the scarier parts.

Taylor Welling, Bethesda producer and labor organizer

But even with the help of CODE-CWA, unionizing work was still sluggish. A 2021 lawsuit filed by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing exposed years of sexual harassment at Activision Blizzard and provided fresh fuel to video game organizing. But talks among employees had to remain secret as the company, under the leadership of then-CEO Bobby Kotick, hired the law firm WilmerHale, which Amazon employed during its successful campaign to convince workers at one of its Alabama warehouses to vote against unionization.

“We felt that we needed to have quiet, one-on-one conversations until we reached a critical mass,” said Samuel Cooper, a senior producer on “World of Warcraft,” one of Blizzard’s most famous games. “It was very slow until it was very fast.”

A staffer who was leaving Blizzard brought Cooper onto the campaign to work on unionizing the “WoW” team, known internally at Blizzard as Team 2. Whether it was because of layoffs, offers for better pay elsewhere, or simply exhaustion from abuse at the company, Team 2 saw plenty of workers come and go over the years it took to get everyone onboard with unionizing. That turned the campaign into a “relay race,” as Cooper described it.

“What really saw it through was a walkout we did shortly after the lawsuit,” Cooper said. “There’s a statue at the Blizzard headquarters with the company’s core values, and one of them is ‘Every Voice Matters.’ Every single person at the company was ready for Blizzard to actually reflect those values.”

This summer, Team 2 completed the relay race. As “World of Warcraft” celebrates its 20th anniversary with the release of a new expansion, “The War Within,” CODE-CWA announced on July 25 that the game’s entire team of more than 500 workers had formally submitted their intent to unionize.

More importantly, Microsoft, which acquired Activision Blizzard last October, has voluntarily recognized the union as part of a policy of neutrality around any unionization efforts at its development studios. Without the threat of retaliation, CODE-CWA has been able to campaign more openly at Microsoft-owned studios like Bethesda, which announced last month that its entire workforce was joining CODE-CWA after less than a year of organizing.

“As a company, we had gone years and years without layoffs, but seeing so many of our sister studios suffer cuts last year made a lot of people at Bethesda realize that was a real possiblity now,” said Bethesda producer and organizer Taylor Welling. “It’s a scary time to be in gaming, but unions protect from the scarier parts.”

CODE-CWA is working behind the scenes to unionize more studios, and plans are in place to form negotiating committees at Bethesda, Blizzard, and other organized companies. The union plans to use a mix of its own veteran negotiators and employees in each bargaining unit to help train workers on the process of building labor contracts.

These newly unionized companies are months away from forming their top contract priorities, but smaller bargaining units like the one led by LoBuglio at Tender Claws provide a glimpse at what’s possible. The gains earned at that indie house include codifying flexible work schedules, the ability to request ergonomic office equipment, and most importantly, a requirement that the company offer laid off workers first right of refusal to return if their position is reestablished.

SAG-AFTRA, meanwhile, is hunkering down for what could be a lengthy battle. The last video game strike, launched in 2016 over wages and a lack of a residual structure for video game voice actors, lasted a union record 340 days before ending with a deal that secured higher wages but no residuals.

If the union is successful, games that have entered development within the past year will not be able to use SAG-AFTRA voice actors or motion-capture performers. But games that have been in development for years like Take Two/Rockstar’s “Grand Theft Auto VI” are exempt from the strike due to contract rules that were negotiated prior to the 2012 SAG-AFTRA merger and have been inherited by the union.

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