How have the jobs changed within the gaming industry over time?

Similar to other parts of the tech sector, the game development industry is moving away from hiring people full-time and towards a gig model. It’s becoming commonplace to hire contractors and freelancers, instead of hiring full-time visual artists, sound designers, or writers for games. Or having fans submit speculative work to be used in games, paying them only a pittance.

We're also seeing executives increasingly try to pay people in exposure, particularly in the promotion of games. While most companies have dedicated marketing and community teams, there is also a trend towards trying to promote through “influencers”—often younger gamers with a sizable social media presence that will spend hours streaming their game sessions. If someone has a lot of views on their channels, the company will pitch a partnership, offering free games or flights out to flashy events—a moment in the sun. In reality, these people should be hired and paid a living wage to do this sort of promotion.

There is this very paternalistic way that all the game development companies treat their employees. We’re often told, “We’re one big family.”

And the workers are the children.

The only labor action I’m aware of in the game development industry has been the voice actors strike of 2016. During that strike, basically all unionized voice actors stopped voice acting for games. The strike lasted for almost a year. They won—but honestly, it wasn’t as big of a victory as their union, SAG-AFTRA, played it up to be.

The voice actors were fighting for royalties on their games. They will work on these huge products like Grand Theft Auto that make over a billion dollars, but only get paid a few hundred dollars per session. In response, CEOs tried to pit workers in the industry against each other. They would say, “Well, it wouldn't be fair to everyone else if we gave you royalties—the programmers and the designers and the artists aren’t getting royalties.” And it’s like, “No, you’re absolutely right, they all should get royalties!” They try to play us all against each other, but really we should all be in this together.

GWU is not just against shitty labor practices. We’re also against shady business practices, and those impact players. A good example is the recent controversy around “loot boxes.” People will design systems that require a ton of grinding and say, you could toil through this game for 100 hours in order to get all the content, or you pay us five dollars and we'll unlock the Darth Vader mask or whatever it happens to be that you want to get.

That's an exploitative business practice, and it's shitty because game workers didn’t come into this industry to make little tchotchkes to sell to people. They came into this industry because they loved the great experiences they had playing games growing up, and they wanted to contribute to that and tell their own stories. And instead they're forced into making this cheap, exploitative content.

In building an anti-capitalist framework to fight back against shitty labor practices, there is a natural alliance with players who are exploited by shitty business practices—not that they always appreciate that.