At Gaming Conference, game-workers preserve unionization hopes alive

48 Hills tech reporter Leah Isobel was on the 2026 GDC Festival of Gaming (previously Game Developers’ Conference), March 9-13 on the Moscone Center. Read her protection from final 12 months’s convention right here, and keep tuned for extra protection this week.

At final 12 months’s Game Developers’ Conference, the Communications Workers of America introduced the formation of the United Videogame Workers-CWA Local 9433. The UVW is a direct-join group that, based on organizers, is supposed to supply a channel into activism and organizing for employees in a fragmented trade. The day of the group’s launch, its membership swelled to triple digits, and CWA members led an impromptu march from a panel dialogue in Moscone’s West Hall to the bandshell in Yerba Buena Gardens, accompanied by cheers from passersby. 

That rally indicated to me that game-workers have been excited to tackle the challenges dealing with their trade; regardless of back-to-back years of report layoffs, there was a hope that, maybe, the worst was over.

But the 12 months that adopted was not fairly so encouraging. While fewer employees have been laid off in 2025 than 2024, estimates nonetheless place the variety of employees who misplaced their jobs final 12 months at round 9,000. And there have been different worrying developments. In the UK, Rockstar Games—the builders of the staggeringly fashionable Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption video games—fired 31 workers in alleged retaliation for attempting to unionize.

Electronic Arts was acquired by the Saudi Arabian government in a $55 billion leveraged buyout partially engineered by Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners. (News broke simply this week that EA is laying off an unknown number of the workers responsible for Battlefield 6, the biggest-selling recreation of 2025.) Tariffs led to higher prices for the current generation of video game consoles, whereas the pc elements required to fabricate the following era of consoles became scarcer as a result of generative AI push. And the Trump administration’s merciless and discriminatory immigration insurance policies have further stressed an trade characterised by distant work and worldwide collaboration.

This overarching surroundings—marked by new and controversial applied sciences, ever-increasing company consolidation, hostility to organized labor, and harsh political headwinds—was evident on the convention.

“The vibes are off,” stated Anna C. Webster, an organizer with the UVW, after I ask her on Wednesday morning about what it’s been like on the convention this 12 months. “It’s much smaller. There aren’t as many people. People aren’t coming internationally because they don’t want to get detained and deported, and even, like, those who are American [citizens], they might not have a job or the ability to attend because it’s so expensive.” When I converse with the UVW’s president, Aurelia Augusta, they put it succinctly: “There’s not a lot of great feelings.”

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Last 12 months, the UVW was a purely theoretical enterprise; a direct-join group was a brand new tactic in a younger unionization effort, and its capabilities have been nonetheless untested. Now, there’s extra proof of what it might probably do. 

“We’re here to organize the industry. And that comes in two forms,” Augusta stated. “One part is helping people form sort of shop unions at companies, your traditional ‘I’m a Blizzard worker. And now here’s a union for my unit.’ And then there’s also freelancers, we have contractors, we have co-ops, we have all sorts of different other forms of employment and participation in the games industry. Let’s organize that. Let’s make it so that we have standard rate tables, standard contracts…. There are so many ways that games are made that we want to be a union that, like, organizes the entire industry as it is, not according to some idealized model.” 

These efforts are bearing some fruit. Augusta stated that each the UVW and the broader CWA’s membership has grown significantly over the previous 12 months. Earlier this week, employees on the indie studio Heart Machine (greatest identified for his or her 2016 hit Hyper Light Drifter) introduced that they had secured voluntary union recognition from their management; final summer time, ZeniMax—a studio below the Microsoft umbrella—ratified their first union contract after two years of negotiations. And each Augusta and Webster allude to underground union campaigns nonetheless in progress. “There is a strong understanding that this is a movement that needs to exist, and exists to help us all, as game workers, get what we deserve,” Augusta stated. 

The wins hopefully set employees up for larger successes down the road as nicely. Webster chairs the UVW’s freelancing committee, which is at the moment working in the direction of offering insurance coverage for all union members, not simply freelancers. “I do think companies are going to start getting nervous, because insurance so often [is] their, like, carrot they dangle on a stick to keep you at a bad job. And that gives us so much power and so much leverage,” she stated. 

But such an initiative received’t come to fruition in a single day. Webster defined, “Traditionally, there’s a giant pool of money that’s known as a Taft-Hartley account, and to start one of those from scratch is crazy difficult. So we are pursuing other avenues right now, until we have such a membership that we can create something like that.” 

Building up that membership, towards growing precarity and company disinterest, presents distinctive challenges in many alternative arenas. There is company union-busting, as within the case of Rockstar UK, however there are nonetheless extra avenues the place union dialogue is seemingly discouraged. In December, a supply advised me that GDC’s administration refused to approve any of the talks that the CWA had proposed for this 12 months’s convention. The union does have a sales space on the Expo Floor, which it paid for, they usually held one panel dialogue on Wednesday afternoon. Last 12 months, along with their sales space, the union sponsored three talks and occasions.

I deliver up the tip I acquired to Augusta, and ask her the way it had been to work together with GDC administration this 12 months. They reply, “We applied for a variety of talks. The only panel we were able to give is the one that we paid for as part of our delegation and booth.” She cites the convention’s annual State of the Industry report from earlier this 12 months, which states that 82% of employees help the trade’s unionization efforts, and that 62% are thinking about becoming a member of a union themselves; this would appear to point that occasions round unionization, run by the union itself, can be welcome and related to GDC’s viewers.

But, Augusta stated, “There has been a real feeling of organizational disinterest… I don’t know what’s going on in their intent. I don’t know their capital flows.” (A request for remark from GDC’s administration was not returned by press time.) Augusta stated the union will preserve attempting to succeed in individuals. “We are working on a pilot version of a Game Workers’ Conference for May 22nd and 23rd,” they advised me. “It’s like, if it’s not going to be given to us, we’ll do it ourselves.”

After talking with Augusta and Webster within the morning, I attended the only UVW-CWA panel within the afternoon. The viewers appeared smaller than final 12 months’s, however the panel nonetheless culminated in a march to Yerba Buena Gardens, choosing up some stragglers and incomes cheers alongside the way in which. After a brief rally, the demonstration advanced right into a city corridor, the place organizers break up attendees into smaller dialogue teams and handed across the first draft of their proposed Game Workers’ Bill of Rights.

The crowd dwindled, however those that stayed spoke passionately in regards to the trade that they needed to see. In my group, we learn off the varied provisions one after the other. There was one merchandise that the employees in my group agreed was crucial. It learn, “Neutrality agreements for workers organizing a union.”