Video game workers—whatever their job, employer, or status—have clearly had enough. This month alone, the labor movement has made some of its biggest advancements ever in organizing the techies, artists, and creatives who keep the largest, most culturally significant sector of the global entertainment industry running and thriving.
First, on July 19, came “wall-to-wall” union approval at Fallout-maker Bethesda Game Studios, which meant that everyone from engineers to artists could establish a comprehensive unit with the Communications Workers of America. They quickly earned recognition from parent company Microsoft, marking the first wall-to-wall effort to succeed at any of the Big Tech firm’s gaming studios.
On July 24, even more company workers got into the game. From Blizzard Entertainment hundreds of World of Warcraft specialists and dozens of Texas-based quality-assurance testers respectively organized guilds under the CWA, following Bethesda’s lead. By Friday, gaming performers and voice actors represented by the Screen Actors Guild began a strike, affecting operations across 10 major gaming studios including Epic Games, EA, and Microsoft’s own Activision.
This SAG-AFTRA strike is not as thorough or strict as last year’s Hollywood strike. The guidelines exempt ongoing work on games that were already in development prior to September 2023, like Grand Theft Auto VI, and game makers can still sign interim agreements with actors during the strike if they so wish. Even so, this marks a transformative moment for the video game industry, especially for all the workers who pour their exacting time and energy into all the franchises you love.
Gaming employees at every level—whether they test games for bugs, provide the screams and line readings that make the stories so vivid, or design the characters you inhabit in those virtual universes—have had to bring their passion to a highly profitable and popular sector that has long exploited their creativity and devalued their work. But now, with the specter of generative artificial intelligence hovering over their career paths, basic duties, and sheer chances of breaking into this competitive industry, the creators and coders lucky to still have jobs with major studios are proving their worth and value—and ensuring that their workplaces will no longer treat them as disposable.
The momentum toward all these subsequent actions had been building for years. In 2022 quality-assurance teams for two separate Activision Blizzard properties voted respectively to organize the company’s first unions under CWA, while quality-assurance testers at Microsoft’s ZeniMax Online Studios worked to build the first union for a Microsoft gaming firm.
That year also marked the kickoff of voice and motion performers’ negotiations for a new contract with gaming studios under SAG-AFTRA, with the previous agreement having expired on Nov. 7, 2022 (somewhat inauspiciously, just a few weeks before the surprise launch of ChatGPT). That union is still trying to finalize a new deal, thanks in large part to disagreement over terms of appropriate use regarding A.I. tools like powered voice-cloning and motion-capture tech. This became the most contentious aspect of the negotiations and led 98 percent of SAG-AFTRA’s Interactive Media caucus to approve a strike-authorization vote in September.
Since their mainstream emergence in 2022, A.I. apps have been a point of concern for game workers like visual artists, software engineers, and voice-over standbys. But the gaming industry was a labor nightmare even before that. The sector saw incredible highs over the past couple of decades, growing and profiting so amply that its annual revenues increased by nearly $100 billion from 2012 to 2022 alone, according to the British market research firm Pelham Smithers.
You know who didn’t see the bulk of that cash or overall prosperity? Yup: the workers. Sudden, devastating layoffs had already been a grim constant for staffers by the 2010s. Workers would get hired in bulk to complete a game on a tight deadline, then let go after said game was launched or after an investor meeting in which shareholders demanded that gaming execs inflate profits and returns by slashing expenses (i.e., employees—but never, ever the salaries of the overpaid executives).
Often, their time was defined by grinding exploitation: measly pay, endless and high-pressure working hours, sexual harassment and workplace abuse, physical overexertion for voice acting and motion—and, of course, the looming threat of layoffs. Video games brought fame and fortune to executives, stakeholders, competitive players, streamers, and intellectual property mavens. Everyone except for the people who made them and loved the creative process enough that they persevered through all the struggles.
There’s also the consolidation, which has severely ramped up over the past few years. Tech giants from countries all over the world—Sony, Nintendo, Tencent, Embracer, Take-Two, and of course, Microsoft—have snapped up studios large and small. With every deal, there was the specter of future cuts, trimming the workforces or even shutting down entire studios altogether. The cycles of M&A and subsequent cuts and closures have escalated so profoundly over the past few years (in large part a hangover of the pandemic-era gaming boom) that Wikipedia has a stand-alone article covering the nearly 21,000 jobs that the gaming sector shed from just the beginning of 2023 up through now.
One persistent main character of that sad saga: Activision Blizzard, the largest gaming conglomerate in the world, itself the product of a 2008 megamerger between the California-based Activision and the French holding company Vivendi Games, which owned Blizzard Entertainment. Despite its wide-ranging portfolio of iconic games across every platform (e.g., Call of Duty, Candy Crush, Overwatch), the company has a habit of laying off high numbers of employees even after reporting high profits: in 2011, 2012, 2017, 2019, and 2021. In early 2024, the company sold itself to Microsoft, which spurred the already-skeptical Federal Trade Commission to point out that this seemed to backtrack on the respective companies’ promise to keep their operations relatively independent of each other. That didn’t stop Microsoft from closing gaming studios and cutting more related jobs in May, including at the union-organizing ZeniMax.
Incidentally, Microsoft also happens to have a lot of investment in ChatGPT creator OpenAI. Activision had also started integrating products like ChatGPT and the controversial image-generator Midjourney into its game-development workflow as the acquisition process with Microsoft was ongoing. As tech commentator Brian Merchant has reported, such A.I. tools are already being used at Activision and other studios as a way to reduce the need for human labor in creative processes like visual art.
Why insist on humans over A.I. in the game-making process? Because real live people, unlike pretrained bots, are able to craft, edit, adjust, and spontaneously shift gears in ways that these apps, however impressive, still just can’t. A.I. text, image, video, and audio generators still aren’t able to make small, exacting edits to their output like humans easily can. A.I. may have a lot of training, but it doesn’t have the quality-control experience necessary to evaluate whether a desired prompt or idea can hold water to begin with.
A.I. apps are also generally unreliable: prone to hallucinations, hacks, bugs, and errors in recognizing or generating certain qualities, like text in an image or hands that look like, well, actual hands. A gaming workspace that displaces many of the technical wizards and artists with the experience to snuff out and preempt such glitches is not one that will be more productive, or any better at producing blockbuster games.
It won’t be limited to this; if you’re watching the Olympics on Peacock, you’ll likely hear recaps from an artificial voice modeled after veteran broadcaster Al Michaels. Voice acting has been at the forefront of A.I. anxiety in just about every medium—audiobooks, radio, music—so it’s no wonder gaming voice actors are nervous as well. Don’t forget, these folks have a lot of fortitude; their most recent strike, which kicked off in 2016, lasted almost a year over issues related to compensation, hiring transparency, and safety measures. With stakes as existential as they are now, expect the SAG-AFTRA actors to really hold out for what they want.
Yes, these jobs can be miserable and exploitative. But they never had to be that way. Humans love making video games for human reasons: They like to create, they like to imagine and put ideas into being, they like to work with others, they like to establish a relationship with players and fans, and they like a realm in which they can apply their imaginations in myriad ways. This is why the labor organizers are fighting not just against A.I. but for better jobs, with some of their efforts even ensuring that bosses can’t merely fire workers as they please only to fill their roles with other hires immediately after.
The games you’ve enjoyed in your life have involved a host of people who came up with brilliant ideas and worked themselves thin executing them for your benefit. They deserve your support, and they don’t deserve to be left for scraps or shut out of the creative realm because of executive greed. The gaming world is better off with unions and the striking negotiators, not least because you’ll miss them dearly if they have to leave for good.
