Best Of

"Right now, companies like Riot go into every contract negotiation – and we use that word lightly, considering how many individual developers are in no position to push back against whatever the initial offered terms of a deal are – as a business looking to make the most efficient use of its resources.

But developers are human beings with so many more motivations. They may be chasing a dream, eager to work on a game they're passionate about, or excited about working on a popular AAA franchise. Maybe they just want a team to work with, people to rely on who rely on them. Maybe they're just happy to be there, or desperate for any kind of paying work. Whatever motivations they bring to the table, it means they will often settle for what they can get instead of what they deserve.

And that would be fine, if it were only themselves they were selling short. It's their life and their choice to prioritize what they want, after all. But it hurts their fellow developers, lowers the going rate for talent, and undermines the ability of any developer to ask for more because these companies know there's a functionally limitless pool of people out there who won't try to negotiate better terms for themselves and are only too willing to throw their personal lives into a furnace for the sake of the umpteenth installment of a franchise or the next big live service flame out."

Also,

"When game developers treat their job as a job rather than a load-bearing wall on which they have built their identity and self-worth, they're liable to demand things like better pay, limited work hours, appropriate time off, or work-life balance."

Lastly

"We are not our work.

We can enjoy it. We can take pride in it. We can do it to the best of our ability. I think most people who enter a field by choice rather than necessity do this, and making video games (like writing about them) is a hard enough field to break into (or remain in) that I suspect most of us are here because we wanted to be here.

So we can give our jobs all we have to give, and for many of us, we will do that with or without a union. But we cannot give them all that they will take, because in most jobs that is a bottomless pit that we can never begin to fill.

Having a union would just be recognition that we shouldn't have to."