To an extent. There is always the chance that the collective action discounts the impact to the business too heavily and ends up driving the company under, making the outcomes worse for everyone. We saw this a couple years ago with Yellow Trucking.

Well, this economic downturn might have something to do with the games industry continuing to push out products that nobody wanted (or were no good in the first place) at absolutely lavish budgets. It didn't seemingly come out of nowhere.

Cue Concorde.

If you spend half a billion, to make a game that's five multiplayer maps, fail to do any market research, to find out that the part of your audience that isn't indifferent to your game actively hates it, playing the role of innocent victim subject to the whims of evil studio execs, is somewhat unproductive.

This is true, but there's still the problem of how things are distributed within the collective groups.

When the labor market gets competitive, you start to see long probationary periods, two-tier pay and benefit scales, hiring people on as casuals instead of permanent members, and other bargaining concessions that end up favoring some union members over others. I know some unions over the last few years have managed to fight against two-tier systems, but if there's any sort of serious economic downturn I'd expect them to become commonplace again.

I'm curious to see if they can come up with a way to organize that works for everyone, or if it'll end up as something like the Longshoreman's union: a fantastic deal, provided you won the lottery to get in and then stuck around long enough to be a permanent member.

The devs probably looked at what happened to the music dept at Id as a cautionary tale.

When companies aren't doing well either, demanding more money will only result in bankrupt companies and out sourcing.

It's probably the worst time to do it.

I've only seen unions work well in the long-run with government jobs. The USPS is a good example. Mostly because you really can't fire the workers and the main entity won't ever go out of business because of government bailouts.

interesting to see in the replies such incredible pearl clutching on behalf of the poor, poor businesses whenever unionization gets brought up. brain folds lighting up like a fireworks show just to combat the idea of [checks scroll] uhh not exploiting workers.

The problem is that there is actually an abundance of resources available, they're just horribly imbalanced. There's an entire megathread complaining about RAM prices, and very few people have said "maybe one single person shouldn't be allowed to make computers expensive for the entire rest of the planet".

In an 'economic downturn' where the rich keep getting richer, at least. This is a very weird downturn.

Wrong, collective action doesn’t change anything. It simply interchanges who gets poorer.

I don't understand the video game industry from an insider perspective, but is it wise for id Software to unionize after Doom: The Dark Ages didn't do as well as Eternal? I haven't spoken to anyone who mentioned D:TDA IRL, but knew a fair amount of people who preordered Eternal.