Usually, the annual Game Developers Conference is a place for studios to hob-nob and show off their newest games and software to peers and press. But the conference’s biggest announcement didn’t come from a studio. Instead, it came from the workers themselves. They’re forming the first games industry-wide union.
The United Videogame [sic] Workers Union announced its existence on Wednesday, March 19, 2025: an industry-wide union for workers across the US and Canada. That means anyone in the industry—artists, programmers, sound editors, writers, level designers, QA testers, both full-time and freelance—can join. Its membership had already doubled by the end of its first day.
Clearly, video game industry workers are thrilled about the union. So are the journalists who cover the industry—the UVW instantly got tons of press. But what about fans? How should they feel?
There’s really good reason for fans to be excited, too.
The need for an organized workforce is essentially self-evident if you’ve been keeping up with gaming news over the last two years. Thanks to a confluence of reasons—the pandemic gaming bubble bursting, large-scale mergers and buyouts, bloated CEO pays—there have been a whopping 25,000 layoffs in the game industry since 2023.
Even wildly successful games still result in axing entire teams, as just happened with Marvel Rivals. It feels like nearly every week, we hear about a huge company like Microsoft shutting down a subsidiary like Tango Gameworks, regardless of whether their games are successful or not.
Bungie, Blizzard, Naughty Dog, Epic Games, Insomniac … nearly every major studio has laid off workers sometime in the last two years. The major outlier appears to be Nintendo, who are not only hiring, but boast ridiculously high employee retention at their Kyoto HQ.
But here’s the trick: workers are laid off, but a lot of the time, the work they were doing still needs to get done. Levels still need to get designed, art still needs to be made. That means less people are now expected to do more, which can in turn lead to poor conditions, like overwork. So even those who still have their jobs are getting a bad deal.
Creating a union does not magically stop layoffs and overwork from happening. But it does at least empower workers and give them bargaining chips when, at the moment, they have none. “Our mission is to take back our lives, our labor, and our passion from those who treat us like replaceable cogs,” declares the United Videogame Workers Union’s mission statement.
Elsewhere, it reads, “Too often [our] passion is exploited by opportunistic parasites that turn our dreams into nightmares.”
As the United Videogame Worker Union’s mission statement reads, games are made by people. When people are overworked, stressed out, and worn down, the art they create reflects that and suffers. And here, that art is the games we’re all playing.
Former Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwada understood this perfectly, and so in 2013, halved his own salary instead of laying anyone off. “If we reduce the number of employees for better short-term financial results, employee morale will decrease, and I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people around the world,” Iwada said.
He’s exactly right. And Iwada’s strategy worked—again, Nintendo has so far not been struck by the industry-wide layoff trends.
You can see Iwada’s idea play out in real life, too. Just look at the wild difference in reception between Overwatch and Overwatch 2, the latter of which received significantly more pressure and attention from Blizzard’s then-overlords at Activision.
By contrast, when a workforce is happy, united, and able to fully focus on the game it’s making, you get Astro Bot. Astro Bot exemplifies the ideal studio dynamic that Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian’s CEO discussed in his speech at last year’s Game Awards, before he awarded Astro Bot Game of the Year.
“A studio makes a game that they wanted to play themselves,” Swen Vincke said. “They didn’t make it to increase market share. They didn’t make it to serve as a brand. They didn’t have to meet arbitrary sales targets or fear being laid off if they didn’t meet those targets… They didn’t treat their developers like numbers on a spreadsheet. They didn’t treat their players as users to exploit… They knew that if you put the game – and the team – first, the revenue will follow.”
This is exactly the kind of future that the United Videogame Workers Union is fighting for. “What does [UVW] mean for [gamers] in the long run? I think it means better games and better art,” a union-affiliated narrative designer told Yahoo! News.
Better workplaces within the games industry means better games for us to play. It’s truly as simple as that.
