Video game workers, regardless of their profession, employer, or status, are clearly fed up. This month alone, the labor movement has made its biggest advances yet in organizing the technicians, artists, and creators who run and thrive in the largest and most culturally significant sector of the global entertainment industry.
First, on July 19, the union received full recognition. fall outThey partnered with maker Bethesda Game Studios so that everyone from engineers to artists could form an umbrella unit with the Communications Workers of America, and they were quickly recognized by parent company Microsoft, making it the first successful all-out effort at a major tech company's game studio.
On July 24, even more employees joined the game. Hundreds of employees from Blizzard Entertainment World of Warcraft Following Bethesda's lead, dozens of Texas-based quality assurance testers and specialists organized themselves into guilds under the CWA. By Friday, game performers and voice actors, represented by the Screen Actors Guild, had begun a strike that affected operations at 10 major game studios, including Epic Games, EA and Microsoft's Activision.
This SAG-AFTRA strike is not as thorough or strict as last year's Hollywood strike. The guidelines do not include restrictions on games that were already in development before September 2023, such as Grand Theft Auto VIGame makers can still sign actors to interim contracts during the strike if they wish, but this marks a transformative moment for the video game industry, especially for all the workers who pour their time and energy into all the franchises you love.
Games workers at all levels, whether they test games for bugs, deliver the voices and dialogue that bring stories to life, or design characters that populate virtual worlds, have long needed to apply their passion to a highly lucrative and popular industry that has exploited their creativity and devalued their work. But now, with the specter of generative artificial intelligence looming over their career paths, basic job duties, and chances of breaking into this competitive industry, the creators and programmers who are lucky enough to still have jobs at major studios are looking to prove their value and usefulness and avoid being disposable in the workplace.
Momentum for these subsequent actions had been building for years: In 2022, quality assurance teams at two of Activision Blizzard's game companies voted separately to organize the company's first labor union under the CWA, while quality assurance testers at Microsoft's ZeniMax Online Studio worked to form the first labor union at a Microsoft game company.
That year Also Voice and motion performers under SAG-AFTRA have begun negotiating new contracts with game studios as their previous contracts expire on November 7, 2022 (somewhat ominously, just a few weeks before ChatGPT's surprise launch). still The two companies had been trying to hammer out a new contract due in large part to disagreements over the appropriate terms of use of AI tools like voice cloning and motion capture technology. This became the most contentious part of the negotiations, leading to a strike authorization vote in September by 98% of SAG-AFTRA's Interactive Media Caucus.
Since going mainstream in 2022, AI apps have been a concern for visual artists, software engineers, narrators and other game industry workers. But even before that, the game industry was a labor nightmare. The industry has experienced a phenomenal high growth rate in the past few decades, with huge growth and profits, increasing annual revenue by nearly $100 billion between 2012 and 2022 alone, according to British market research firm Pelham Smithers.
You know who didn't see most of that cash or overall prosperity? Yes, the workers. Sudden, devastating layoffs were already a dire norm for staff by the 2010s. Workers were hired en masse to finish a game under a tight deadline, then fired after that game was released, or after investor meetings where shareholders demanded that game company executives cut expenses (i.e. employees) to inflate profits and earnings. Until now Salaries for over-compensated executives.
Their time was often defined by brutal exploitation: meager wages, endless high-pressure work hours, sexual harassment and workplace abuse, grueling physical labor for voice and motion acting, and of course, the looming threat of layoffs. Video games have brought fame and fortune to executives, stakeholders, competitive players, streamers, and intellectual property professionals. Exclude For the people who make them, who love the creative process, and who have overcome all odds.
There's also been rapid consolidation over the past few years. Global tech giants such as Sony, Nintendo, Tencent, Embracer, Take-Two, and of course Microsoft have acquired studios large and small. Each acquisition came with the threat of future cuts, layoffs, and even the closure of entire studios. The cycle of M&A and subsequent cuts and closures has escalated so much over the past few years (largely due to the aftermath of the pandemic-era gaming boom) that Wikipedia has a standalone article covering the roughly 21,000 jobs lost in the games industry from the start of 2023 to the present.
One of the protagonists in that sad story is Activision Blizzard, the world's largest gaming conglomerate. Activision Blizzard was formed in 2008 from a mega-merger between California-based Activision and Vivendi Games, the French holding company that owned Blizzard Entertainment. It is a company that distributes games across all platforms (e.g. call of duty, Candy Crush, Overwatch), the company has a habit of laying off large numbers of employees even after reporting high profits in 2011, 2012, 2017, 2019, and 2021. In early 2024, the company sold itself to Microsoft, but an already skeptical Federal Trade Commission noted that this appeared to backtrack on the companies' promise to keep their businesses relatively independent. However, Microsoft closed its game studios in May and further cut associated jobs, including at unionized ZeniMax.
Incidentally, Microsoft has also invested heavily in ChatGPT's creator, OpenAI. Activision, too, had begun integrating products like ChatGPT and the controversial image generation tool Midjourney into its game development workflow as it was in the process of acquiring Microsoft. As tech commentator Brian Merchant reports, such AI tools are already being used by Activision and other studios as a way to reduce the need for human labor in creative processes such as visual art.
Why stick with humans over AI in the game creation process? Because unlike pre-trained bots, real people can create, edit, tweak, and spontaneously shift gears no matter how amazing these apps are. Can notAI text, image, video and audio generators cannot yet perform the kind of fine-tuning of their output that humans can easily do, and while they may have lots of training, they have no quality control. experience This is necessary to assess whether the desired prompt or idea is valid in the first place.
AI apps are generally unreliable and prone to hallucinations, hacks, bugs, errors in recognizing or generating certain qualities, such as text in an image or hands that look like real hands, etc. A gaming workspace that removes the many tech gurus and artists with the experience to forestall such glitches is not going to be more productive, or better at creating blockbuster games.
And it's not just this: If you're watching the Olympics on Peacock, you'll be hearing recaps by an artificial voice modeled after veteran announcer Al Michaels. Voice acting has been at the forefront of AI anxiety in nearly every medium: audiobooks, radio, music, etc. So it's no wonder there's anxiety about voice actors in games. Don't forget, these people Many They have an indomitable spirit. The most recent strike, which began in 2016, lasted almost a year over issues related to pay, hiring transparency and safety measures. With the current existential issues, SAG-AFTRA actors Really Claiming what they want.
To be sure, these jobs are miserable and exploitative. had Let it be so. Humans love making video games for human reasons: we love creating, we love imagining and bringing ideas to life, we love working with other people, we love building relationships with players and fans, we love the space where we can apply our imagination in different ways. That's why unions aren't just fighting against AI, but for better jobs, and part of their efforts is even to make it so that bosses can't just fire employees at will and then immediately fill the role with someone else.
The games you have enjoyed in your life involve a lot of people who came up with great ideas and worked hard to execute them for your benefit. They deserve your support. They should not be cut off or locked out of their creative sphere because of management greed. The gaming world would be better off with unions and negotiators on strike, because you would miss them dearly when they had to leave to strike. good.