It was a hot labor summer in terms of video game worker organizing, with workers at big AAA studios like Bethesda and Blizzard joining the movement and becoming Communications Workers of America members.

I want to step back and reflect on how we got here and where this momentum is taking us. Several of you were involved when the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) held a community roundtable discussion at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in 2018 about organizing the video game industry. I’m wondering if you can talk about that moment, what brought you to attend that panel, your experience, and what you walked away with.

The community roundtable discussion at GDC 2018 was a critical tipping point for the labor movement in the video games industry. For years, there had been fits and starts of activism, rising disenchantment with our industry, and declining working conditions, but GDC 2018 is when all of that catalyzed into a proper movement.

The growth of our movement was not inevitable. It didn’t come passively, but through the sweat and tears of dozens of dedicated video game workers pouring countless hours into building that momentum. I remember being in a small private Facebook group with other developers from around the world, where we were all complaining about conditions in the industry and wishing that something could be done about it. And thankfully, myself and others decided, “You know what? Enough is enough. Let’s actually do something.”

We saw the upcoming community roundtable at GDC 2018 as an organizing opportunity, so I made a Discord to coordinate. The Discord exploded in growth overnight, with dozens of workers from across the industry joining to prepare to raise hell at the conference and send a message that workers in our industry wouldn’t take it anymore.

The discussion itself was packed with people, with a line out the door. We bonded and built community through our shared pain and vision. I walked away from the roundtable with my beliefs validated: our pain was real, our conditions were subpar, our bosses were to blame, and there was a real appetite among workers for change. These essential truths have carried me and others through the tough times that followed as we experimented in building worker power in our industry.

While I was not physically present for the panel, I got involved early with what became the starting momentum and planning for a worker-led, pro-union presence at GDC. We had suspicions about who was hosting it and how unions and organizing would be framed.

I remember being surprised and excited by how many people got involved and realizing that there were so many of us. We only had a few weeks to coordinate, and after some initial meetings we decided we wanted to make zines about why video game workers should organize. We had a couple informal crews working on two zines, including a group of us in Montreal, and in a week or so we wrote, designed, and printed them. There were also other groups working on a logo and buttons.

As people left for GDC, we stuffed their suitcases with zines and then checked Discord and our socials constantly to see how it was received.

I was at the GDC panel — I remember the zines!

I was there for professional reasons. A friend told me about the panel and I went to support her. Right away, I realized that this was a big deal, and suddenly all this bottled-up energy I had found a release valve. Every seat in the room was full, and everyone was wearing black-and-white “Game Workers Unite” buttons. The room was completely at capacity.

The panel description in the GDC program was “Union Now: The Pros and Cons of Organizing,” and of the two hundred or so people in the room, only the moderator expressed an anti-union perspective. The energy was punchy, and most of the time was given to very raw testimonials of people finding an outlet to express their frustrations with the workplace for the first time.

I think everyone walked away charged and thinking, “We have to do something.” I was a year out of school and in a job I loved, but in the months after that, my whole perspective changed. The experience of seeing video game workers standing up for ourselves helped me to see how we were being exploited.

We’ve been building the movement ever since. Recently, it has been bearing fruit with some very visible wins, but we started off small and laid the groundwork for where we are now. While people may not be familiar with it, the effort to organize Vodeo Games had such an outsize impact on the union movement in video games. Carolyn, what was going on at Vodeo at the time, and how did you get involved in organizing? What sticks with you all these years later?

I started at Vodeo Games around 2020. It was a fully remote, indie studio with people working all over Canada and the United States. To this day, a lot of us have never met in person, but we remain tight-knit.

Things started going downhill at the company with project cancellations and talk about potential layoffs. Some of us were already considering organizing and had been checking in with our coworkers, but the prospect of layoffs really lit the fire. Once we started reaching out to our coworkers over Zoom and having those initial conversations, organizing happened really quickly. Most of our coworkers recognized that we needed to support each other to have a say at the company and to make sure that the things we liked were codified and couldn’t be taken away. We were certified within a few months and managed to win voluntary recognition of our union, which included freelancers and full-time employees in both the United States and Canada.

Alongside the support from CWA, we set up a meeting with the boss to explain why a union was important to us and what we were organizing for, and we made a pitch for voluntary recognition. Within weeks it was signed, our union was recognized, and we jumped into bargaining.

Unfortunately, for reasons beyond our control, the company was on a bad trajectory, and the studio shut down before bargaining could finish. But the knowledge got shared around to our peers in the video game industry, and we were able to contribute to the broader wave of organizing.

Robin, Tender Claws was another early organizing campaign in the video game industry. Can you talk about that experience and what information sharing was like across the company?

Our union story was a really unique case, as they all are, but there’s so much Vodeo DNA in our union effort. Before we went public, we met with Carolyn and others from Vodeo, and it was so encouraging to hear from someone who had done it before, who could help us prepare for how the bosses might react. We used that as a foundation for our own contract, and I can still see a lot of it in what we eventually ratified.

Tender Claws was a company populated largely by early career, queer workers. There was always an incredible sense of community and a sense that, as coworkers, we can take care of one another. There was also a tradition of informal collective action, like making a salary spreadsheet so that we had all the information anytime we went into salary negotiations, and sometimes we’d coordinate to collectively refuse unpaid overtime. That stuff worked and proved that we could win together.

It was like: we like the job and trust the good intentions of our bosses, but something is missing. It’s not enough. What we felt we had to do was to get everyone on board to take it to the next level and get a collective contract. Bosses can’t read their workers’ minds and have their own decisions to make, but as workers we need to make sure that they understand what we want. So we all came in one day, including remote workers, and each read a section of an announcement we had written up. We had a voluntary recognition agreement signed within a couple of days.

With these early wins, we started to feel the momentum. Em, you and your coworkers reached out around the same time Tender Claws won recognition and eventually moved into bargaining. What made you think you could organize Sega of America?

In our case, it really began with a single person who was very vocal whenever we had a company-wide meeting where workers were invited to speak. I joined Sega in 2018 and was quickly adopted into a group of coworkers who had a ritual of going to lunch and griping about work.

This one woman in particular was very informed about the huge disparity in pay rates within the company and about industry standards, specifically around quality assurance (QA) work. She would take any opportunity at company-wide meetings to ask the boss things like, “Are you doing anything about gendered pay disparities at the company?” and every time the boss would avoid answering.

It wasn’t until much later, in 2021, that one of my coworkers reached out to ask how I felt about unions. I learned that the same woman who had been voicing workplace concerns was also at the heart of the organizing effort. She’d reached out to Emma Kinema and had managed to keep things very quiet. We knew that the consequences of a leak were dire — for example, there was a story about Nintendo, where a worker who had mentioned unionizing had been fired weeks later for supposedly separate reasons. But once we had a significant number of people on board, things started snowballing.

We were worried about losing our jobs, but there were people willing to put their careers on the line if it meant getting our union started. That kind of dedication was, and still is, inspiring. Video games is a passion industry, and we all work at Sega because we want to be there. This was a strength for our organizing and a source of camaraderie.

Tender Claws was a huge inspiration too — we used some of their language in drafting our materials, and Robin came to our rallies. They didn’t just provide emotional inspiration but also legal consultation, information sharing, advice, and backup. At that point, there were still a lot of unknowns about how to organize a larger studio. Tender Claws won their union around this time and that lit a fire for all the organizing happening in Southern California at that time, including for us and at Blizzard.

Another source of solidarity is that we saw a good deal of support from die-hard Sega fans. It’s pretty well-known that Sega fans either desperately love or hate our games, and are loud about their opinions — luckily for us, they were loud in support of our unionization efforts too. That was an incredibly emotional experience, seeing the massive support from fans across Twitter, Tumblr, and Bluesky. . . . Those voices are the bolster and foundation for people trying to unionize other companies.

To see the effort rippling outward now is so beautiful. We now have a contract! And we are seeing more and more units light up on the map.

I’m interested to hear from the recent campaign at World of Warcraft (WoW). Josiah, did any of this context feed into how you organized WoW?

I didn’t know much about the early efforts in the industry; I entered the industry officially in 2022. However, like many others, I had been an industry hopeful for many years. At the time, I started working a union job and over the years, between that job and also schooling, I came into the industry ready for unions. I kept track of what I could and knew there were serious issues that had to be addressed.

It also helped that just before I was eventually hired, I got the chance to talk to CWA organizers at the GDC. We talked about the state of the industry and how unions could improve it. So when the chance was given to help our studio unionize, I immediately took it.

With the support of CWA and with getting a neutrality agreement, we could take a much more direct approach to union efforts at our studio. We could bring it up in casual conversation. Booths were waiting in our courtyard to talk about forming a union. It didn’t need to be a secret but rather something people could weigh their thoughts about without fearing that management would come down on us.

Quality assurance testers were out front in the union effort at WoW, at the larger studios some of the bigger units were QA, and now WoW is wall-to-wall. What dynamics moved QA folks first? And why did WoW fight for recognition that “QA is dev”?

Why wouldn’t they be? QA’s roles are essential to how well our games come out. They give us valuable feedback and are completely within our workflow. A project doesn’t start without us knowing who our QA contacts are and working with them directly.

I would pose this question: What’s different for QA than someone that does narrative design, art, or even engineering? We all make sure the game comes out the best it can for our players. Our roles have different functions but the same result.

Quality assurance testers are the natural vanguard of the labor movement in the video game industry, at least in North America. However, they are treated like second-class citizens with lower pay, poor job stability, and stagnant career opportunities. The discontent around these conditions provides the fuel for organizing.

As a former QA tester myself, I can attest to these conditions, and I have known far too many people making near minimum wage with years of experience under their belt. There is no excuse for that kind of treatment, and it makes sense that QA workers would be the first to organize in a major way in AAA video game development — as we have seen with other QA testers and CWA members at ZeniMax, Sega, and Activision. When we organized the World of Warcraft team, it was essential to us that QA testers organized in the same unit as the rest of the development team as a way to mend the two-tier rift that stands between QA and their fellow developers.

Although QA is seen and treated as a weak and insignificant segment of workers, I believe QA has some of the greatest structural power in the entire video game development pipeline. If QA walks out on the job right before a major product launch, the entire project shuts down and it affects all other disciplines.

QA and localization folks work thankless jobs. We are the custodians of the video games that we make — the janitors, the cleanup crew. We find bugs and voice issues to the development teams and up the ladder, with little to no recognition. But at the end of the day, we make the video game better.

We’re not thanked because people expect a clean product. A video game should be playable and feel finished. If it launches buggy or with glitches, people will talk about the bad QA. They notice when a game is bad. When a game is good, no one sees the problems we fixed. We are always necessary, but we are not treated well.

The vast majority of Sega’s unit was QA testers. Without QA, this company and our video games would not survive, so we have power in that regard when you realize how easy our struggle makes it to talk to others and eventually organize. We have the most reason to unionize out of everybody.

Let’s talk about layoffs and the impact they are having on people’s careers and lives, and how that also intersects with the move to unionize. What are the limitations of what can be done when layoffs happen, and how can a seat at the table be used when lives are turned completely upside down?

In an industry in full crisis, a union is not a magic wand, but a tool to navigate whatever you are going through. We can negotiate better severance procedures and collectively bargain for recall rights, which are simple contract clauses that say that if you are let go for economic reasons, and the company subsequently posts a job you’re qualified for, they won’t post publicly until they offer you your job back first.

Recent layoffs are unprecedented in scale, but cyclical layoffs have always been part of the industry. There are all sorts of reasons that layoffs are terrible, but they’re even worse when you feel like you have no say. If you can actually negotiate what layoffs will look like, you can wrestle some control back.

We also fought for recall rights. Half of us were contractors with basically no rights. Something we wanted to make sure we had was some level of job security. Recall rights, and bargaining for better severance packages, stop us from feeling helpless in those situations.

Look at how the United Auto Workers has negotiated over factory closures. They have enough industry-wide strength to say, “No, not this time.”

Right now, the labor movement in video games is young, and our strength is the foothold we have in big companies. If we can keep up the pace of building a fairer industry over the next decade, we can fight back on an industrial scale and change the shape of these cyclical layoffs.

Industry penetration is what can give us the magic wand people often think a union provides. I remember the pit-in-the-stomach feeling that I had when we heard about layoffs at Sega of America. We were at the bargaining table, sitting across from HR and the chief operating officer, and we were served a proposal that included language about Sega reserving the right to close one of our offices and lay off more than half our unit. For reasons management would not disclose, it closed an office and fired a majority of our unit during bargaining. There was no way for us to stop it, but we could soften the blow.

That layoff hampered the production of multiple titles to this day. And while I believe we had the right of refusal, the caveat was that they were not planning to reopen positions. It truly was traumatic and demoralizing, and it slowed our union efforts to a halt for a while. While we finished the contract and got it ratified, we ultimately felt deflated.

Two months ago, there was another wave of layoffs, and we were able to at least get some reprieve. Layoffs do have the potential to slow efforts to organize, but I want to say to others: Don’t lose momentum. Keep as much momentum as you can and don’t get demoralized.

Under capitalism, we can’t bargain to make good managers or good human beings out of our managers, but we imagine building a world where we can. Looking ahead, what is this movement going to look like six years from now?

You can’t look to the future without understanding the past. Six years ago, we had only the tiniest fledgling movement, but despite the mountain ahead of us, we started climbing, knowing that someday we’d see progress one way or another. In the past six years, we’ve woven something wonderful from seemingly thin air. I remember being laughed out of rooms for even suggesting the idea of organizing the video game industry. But now, those same critics say, “Of course, it was inevitable that workers would organize unions in video games.”

Through organizing, we turned the impossible into reality by sheer human effort. So if you want to know what our movement will look like years from now I’d encourage everyone to dream up what might seem impossible for our movement today — and know that that too will be accomplished in time.

It’s hard to imagine. Six years ago, we did not imagine getting this far. If you’d asked me, I would not have said, “World of Warcraft will be unionized by then.”

One of the surprising things about the movement has been that the people organizing the next company are not the folks who experienced that first GDC panel in 2018 — it’s new people. I am really excited to meet the new generation of organizers. The big thing is, from now on, it will not be a weird thing to suggest a union. I hope in six years at whatever company it’s going to be, workers will say, “Do you want to start a union like all those other companies did?”

I’m very pleasantly surprised by how things have taken off, and I’m looking forward to more of that. In the early days, we looked back to the steel and auto industries that have become the iconic unionized industries where unions were once considered impossible. That was really comforting. Video games is just another industry with its quirks but the same kind of fundamental power balance. As more unions get to that stage, it will set higher standards for the industry as a whole. Even at nonunion studios, things will become standardized.

I’m also looking forward to more international solidarity across countries, since the larger studios are spread across multiple countries.

All these visions for the future have made me think that it is going to take a massive restructuring of how we do business as a country. But the more unions we nurse into existence, the closer we can get to ideal solidarity.

As a country, our work culture is very focused on the individual. Capitalism is a cancer; it is delusional to believe that it is a sustainable economic framework where the individual is the focus and subject of space. If we can level the playing field, we can get to a point where the focus is everyone inside a collective, and the focus of working toward the interest of others becomes a paradigm shift in our culture. By nurturing unions, we get closer to prosocial behavior and a community-minded approach to how to navigate not just the workplace but our personal lives as well.