[sigstoat]

> In that case, I'm unsure of how unionizing would help much, as publishers could simply invest in games from non-union shops, and happily abandon the studios that are unionized.

and game development work is probably the most trivial software development to move to foreign jurisdictions. unless the union promoters would like video game tariffs.

[ivl]

This may seem snide, but it's extremely rare for a union not to be protectionist. Mostly on account of how unions join together with unions for adjunct industries.

That said, I'm not convinced game development would be easily outsourced. Games are some of the most highly optimized pieces of software out there, as it's in their interest to squeeze every bit of performance out of consumer hardware. You can think of their target as an intersecting line between the game being playable on consumer hardware vs. the graphics quality users expect that would lead to the game selling. Optimization has a big payoff to increase the possible market to buy a given game.

[Apocryphon]

On the other hand, it remains to be seen how much gamers would then like those games.