Game Developers Launch North America's First Industry-Wide Union Anyone Can Join
Game industry unionization efforts that exploded across Sega of America, Bethesda, and others have recently been on pause. A new initiative by the Communications Workers of America could jumpstart things again. At the Game Developers Conference 2025 happening this week, the group announced the founding of the United Videogame Workers, a new sister organization that hopes to enlist developers from all different disciplines and studios in broader labor battles across the industry.
The UVW-CWA's mission, per a press release reported by IGN, is 'to not only build community and solidarity amongst video game workers, but also to build large-scale education campaigns about labor organizing in the video game industry.' Unlike individual union shops which bargain contracts with employers, the direct-join model functions more like a voluntary trade group where paid dues and resources are pooled to help with various labor fights across the broader market. The announcement comes as SAG-AFTRA game actors enter their ninth month of striking for AI protections while publishers experiment with digital replicas.
'For two-thirds of modern industrial history, there were no legal forms of unions,' Emma Kinema, a game dev behind the 2018 Game Workers Unite campaign turned organizing operative for CODE-CWA, told Aftermath. 'They were just humans coming together to organize as best as they could in leverage against their employers for better conditions.' She pointed to statutory protections enshrined in the 1935 National Labor Relations Act as a 'peace treaty' that can cut both ways if rolled back by conservative forces in the second Trump administration.
Despite developer unions forming across some of the biggest gaming companies in the U.S. in recent years, none have yet successfully bargained their first contract. Quality assurance staff at Raven Software, which works on Call of Duty for Activision, now owned by Microsoft, are nearing the three-year anniversary of negotiating a collective bargaining agreement with the company. The group filed an unfair labor charge against Activision and Microsoft for 'bad faith bargaining' last fall. 'We are committed to negotiating in good faith,' a Microsoft spokesperson said at the time.
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