[nonethewiser]

The ability to unionize has very little to do with the ideology of the workforce and everything to do with the structure of the industry. It wont work out in video games because it's not a critical industry and there are plenty of people willing to do the work.

[rafram]

That logic doesn’t make any sense to me. Game programming, art, and even marketing are highly specific niches within those broader fields. You can’t pick any random programmer off the street and get them up to speed on game development overnight (let alone your specific crazy custom engine/architecture, as often seems to be the case).

[nonethewiser]

1) Nothing critical is lost if a video game team stops working. Society doesnt need it and there are lots of alternatives.

2) There is already a major labor surplus for video games. It's famously hard to get into and low paying because of it. There is no doubt someone else is willing to step in.

[lentil_soup]

> Nothing critical is lost if a video game team stops working. Society doesnt need it and there are lots of alternatives.

A union represents workers in a company, nothing to do with society. If workers strike the company stops making money, that's their leverage

[kaoD]

And in knowledge work we're not instantly replaceable. That's why anti-union propaganda is rampant in SWE fields.

[hootz]

Strikes are to get power over the company, not over society.

[lovich]

The criticality of the industry, for whatever subjective measure you’re using there, doesn’t matter for union forming.

It’s the leverage that the nascent union has over the company owners and management, who presumably still want to make money.

That being said the video game industry does have a deluge of naive young people willing to sell their bodies and souls for their dream, so I don’t have high hopes for this group.