Activision Blizzard Hires Notorious Union-Busting Firm WilmerHale
I am usually against unions in tech because the free market tends to allow a proper balance of supply and demand. However, gaming might just be the perfect sub-domain of tech to benefit from unionization.<p>The supply is massively saturated, with dreamy eyed programmers ready to give their lives to work in gaming. On the other hand, a very small group actually gets to make any of the creative decisions that every gamer has dreamt of making. The wages are below what the market pays, hours are exploitative and the companies are making massive profits. It is really difficult to compete with the AAA studios, because Indie games take years to make and working without a wage for a decade isn&#x27;t possible for many. On the other hand, medium sized and successful indie studios get acquired before they can grow to a decent enough size to serve as any real competition. There is also a lot of shady practices with monetization, where the employees do not get a say if the company should or shouldn&#x27;t indulge in said practices.<p>We&#x27;ve already seen soft-unionization of this type in a similar industry : media production. It works.<p>AAA game development in the US has been quite stale for the last decade. The big EA-Blizzard-Activision-Ubisoft have not come up with a single quality game in this time. Even Bethesda, Bioware seems to be on a decline. Rockstar,Valve and Id software seem to be doing fine, but no where close to the hit-after-hit that certain japanese studios are producing. Naughty Dog and Super giant would be the only 2 American studios creating 10&#x2F;10s consistently, but both have an order of magnitude fewer employees than standard AAA studios.<p>The industry is in dire need of shake up. I hope this goes the employee&#x27;s way this time around. It&#x27;s about time.