Same title as the video. Game dev writer Alanah Pierce offers her POV on the recent layoffs from Epic Games.
This is one of the few industries that consistently and continuously posts record profits while also firing everyone who put in the work to make the success possible.
Too many devs think they’re above unionizing. It’s going to be very difficult to pull off. They won’t be interested until it’s too late.
Bottom line is that tech is chock full of greedy fucking people who only care about what they’re getting paid this year.
I don’t think the gaming industry could lead on this issue though. It’s tech companies like FAANG that really lead the market and that’s where people refuse to organize.
I couldn’t agree more. I’m a software engineer at a FAANG company, and the split is very apparent. There are either people that would love to see a union (but know their employer would happily fire 100k+ people for even trying it), alongside people that believe unions are the devil. There was a shift in the last 12 months due to the mass layoffs and the nature of how someone with a decade or more of loyal work can be locked out and fired immediately without so much as a “goodbye”, but there is still a huge number of people that view tech as a “survival of the fittest” thing. I work with some people that even love the idea of URA and the “weakest” people in the team losing their jobs.
Game dev is an interesting thing, though. For decades now, even smaller companies (at the time) like Rare were built from the mentality that you cannot just work 50 hours a week to make a good game, or that once a release is complete, you move on to your next gig. That culture has existed throughout corporate, not just in tech, which is why I’m surprised that there hasn’t been a true effort towards unionising industry-wide. Hell, I would’ve thought that the Activision issues from a while ago would have spurred something too.