[ewmiller]

What if you could work on things you love AND be compensated more fairly for it, through something like... collective bargaining?

There are other creative careers, like acting, that have union representation for exactly this reason. If there were no actors' union, film companies could abuse an endless supply of wide-eyed hopefuls trying to get famous. Collective bargaining makes sure they can earn a real wage while they work on their dream career.

In any case, I'd expect someone named "socialist coder" to be less willing to hand over their power as a worker to their company ;)

[johnnyanmac]

Are we pretending most non A-list actors make 6 figures entry level? unions help to prevent abuse, but it won't solve the "undrepaid" argument.

in this regard, crunch time with a max work per day, with actual overtime compensation and post crunch vacation sounds about as fair as the situation can be (you know, short of avoiding crunch). whether the final amount made is enough is a compensation issue, not an abuse issue. I doubt unions formed would eliminate crunch as a whole.

[socialist_coder]

I never once took any position for or against collective bargaining in the game industry. I would say I have not looked into this enough to fairly have an opinion on the matter.

Plus, I do think my own experience has been with the "good" game companies who didn't work you down to nothing. I really don't think a union vote would have had a chance at all at the places I worked.

It does seem like the industry as a whole has gotten worse since I founded my own game company in 2010. Or, maybe the companies I worked at really were the "best" ones for worker quality of life.

As for my own politics, I'm not so much pro-union as I am pro-worker cooperative. Unions today do a lot of things for their own benefit at the expense of the rest of society. I see it locally with the teachers union in my school district. It's awful, they are bankrupting the school district and their demands are completely out of touch with reality. So I don't think just having a union is the silver bullet here. Unions pit workers against management. In a hugely creative and cooperative venture like making a video game, that is a pretty big negative.

I would love to see more employee owned businesses. Unfortunately video games are hugely capital intensive and very risky. You need to be able to throw away tens of millions of dollars. Very unlike manufacturing where at least if your product fails, you still have a valuable factory. If your video game flops, you literally have $0 in assets to show for it.

So, we need to come up with different ways of financing capital and organizing labor so that everyone's best interests are at heart. Very difficult problem to solve and capitalism isn't very interested in solving it. But, I guess it does work for the film industry so what's to say it wouldn't work for game development?

Also I want to say, I only wanted to share my view here because I felt like my perspective was missing from this discussion. It's not all unholy crunch time and rock bottom wages. I personally had a great experience in the game industry from 2000 - 2010. With that said, I don't disagree at all with the premise that most game companies take unfair advantage of their employees.

Lastly, I want to add that at my own startup, we practice what we preach. In the 10 years we've been going, the amount of days we've asked our developers to "crunch" is in the single digits.