Challenges and opportunities for collective action and unionization in local games industries

Changing attitudes toward working conditions and unionization in the game industry

In 2004 an open letter titled “EA: The Human Story” was posted to LiveJournal strongly criticizing the long working hours imposed by Electronic Arts (EA) on their workers, signed “The EA Spouse.” As Dyer-Witherford and De Peuter (2009) describe in their analysis of the letter and the attention it received from other videogame developers and the press, EA Spouse “articulated a seething reservoir of resentment and discontent within the video game industry.” The persistence of these issues over the intervening years is reflected in the annual State of the Industry survey report, conducted and released by the conference organizers of the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. The 2019 survey found that “nearly half of respondents (44%) say they [work] more than 40 hours a week, on average” (GDC, 2019: 2) Further, the 2019 survey reported a small, but significant number of workers engaged in extreme hours over the year, with 2% of respondents claiming to have worked at least one 91–100 hour week in the previous 12 months, 1% having done at least one 101–110 hour week, and another 1% saying they had worked over 110 hours in at least 1 week. These figures remain largely unchanged in the subsequent 2020 and 2021 reports.

While overwork and crunch persist as the most prominent labor issues in the videogame industry, they are far from the only ones. A fraternal, male-dominated culture underpins chronic issues of sexual harassment and discrimination (Harvey and Shepherd, 2017). Intense surveillance and complex non-disclosure agreements leads to an oppressive culture of secrecy, where individual gameworkers self-censor rather than risk attracting the wrath of management (O’Donnell, 2014). An informal hierarchy regularly relegates quality assurance workers to the bottom rung of the ladder where conditions are poorly paid and even more precarious (Bulut, 2020). Poor and inconsistent crediting practices leads to the unacknowledged labor of individuals who leave a project before its completion (Phillips, 2011) and of entire outsourcing studios located in the global south (Lassman, 2020). Underpinning it all, even in the largest and most successful studios, is a sense that no one is safe, and layoffs can come at any time, regardless of how successful the previous project might have been (Bulut, 2020).

Numerous attempts to identify the causes and dynamics involved in maintaining these pervasive, notorious conditions of gamework have been made. Marie-Josée Legault and Johanna Weststar have extensively researched game industry working conditions and the hurdles facing unionization in the sector. One of their most damning findings is that many developers “operate under a delusion of control over their working hours” (Legault and Weststar, 2017: 75) due to promises from management that often go unfulfilled regarding flex or leave time, peer pressure, and a professional reputational system that rewards “loyalty” and overtime with the promise of continued work in a precarious, project-based environment. Crucially, Legault and Weststar emphasize the importance of the predictability of working time as a necessary factor for job satisfaction and success in balancing work/life commitments, and the naturalization of game development as a project-centered working environment means that “working time is task-oriented instead of clock-oriented; in other words, the working day is as long as it takes to have the task done.” (Legault and Weststar, 2017: 92). They note that, for game developers, “unpredictability is a key feature in their working time” meaning that, in many cases, workers can be asked (or subtly pressured) into working overtime with little to no notice, leading managers to treat workers private time such as evenings and weekends as a source of “emergency working time” (Legault and Weststar, 2017: 77–78).

This point is reinforced by Bulut’s (2020: 116) interviews with the spouses of game industry workers left to look after the home as the developers work these extended hours. For Bulut, the entire lives of game developers has been turned “into a factory. . . where every place and moment is a candidate for value creation.” The “flexible” work arrangement allowing developers to work when they feel like it—a supposed prerequisite for facilitating “creative” work—allows employers to capture “surplus value through a diffuse temporality” (Bulut, 2020: 98). For gameworkers, and as Gregg (2011) has shown to be increasingly the norm for knowledge workers more generally, if you can work at any time, you could be working all the time. Unclear or deliberately vague working hours, combined with milestone-oriented work and responsibilities combine to create an environment where crunch and long-hours come to be seen as necessary to meet personal responsibilities, as opposed to a management failure to schedule the necessary resources. This both perpetuates and is perpetuated by the historically homogenous makeup of game industry workers as young and male: “because time fragmentation leads to scheduling problems in private social life, which particularly discriminate against those with caring responsibilities.” (Legault and Weststar, 2017: 78). We see a similar tendency in the State of the Industry reports (GDC, 2019: 3; 2020: 26) where the most popular response as to why developers overworked was “at least partially self-pressure” in both 2019 (69%) and 2020 (59%).

This “delusion of control” and sense of self-responsibility hinders the ability for game developers to think collectively. In interviews with North American developers conducted around 2010, Bulut (2020) notes that developers saw the particularly “creative” nature of game development work as being antithetical to the perceived rigidity of unionization:

[D]evelopers experienced unstable times, layoffs, and bankruptcy, but unionization never emerged as a topic or option to consider. . . .The discourse concerning ‘doing what you love’ was particularly striking since once somebody was ‘privileged’ to work at a cool job, then organization seemed to be automatically off the table in a world of precarious work where finding employment in and outside the creative industries was tough (p. 156)

Bulut (2020) identifies this indifference to collective action as one part of “the governmental logic of precarization in the industry” (p. 166) that naturalizes poor working conditions, and which has long ensured that notions of unionization seem unfeasible in a workplace that must bend to the whims of individualized creativity.

Yet, gameworker attitudes toward the necessity and feasibility of unionization have shifted dramatically over the past decade. While only 30% of game developers were in favor of unionization in 2009 (Legault and Weststar, 2015), Weststar and Legault (2017: 316) analyze data from International Game Developers Association (IGDA)’s 2014 Developer Satisfaction Survey to estimate that “66 percent of [game developers] would vote for a union at their studio.” Elsewhere, they track a steady increase in the quantity and quality of collective actions among gameworkers since 2014, with a particularly dramatic increase in 2018 (Weststar and Legault, 2019: 851).

Indeed, 2018 was a watershed year for gameworker unionization efforts. Following a controversial proposal of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) to host a “pros and cons” discussion of unionization at GDC, an informal group of game developers took to social media to organize a picket of the talk (Frank, 2018). This outcry grew and mobilized rapidly into the formation of the grassroots Game Workers Unite (GWU) which has subsequently grown via social media, positive press coverage, and high-profile presence at industry events, leading directly to the formation of various chapters around the world to deal with local game industry issues. GWU was so visible and so prominently supported at the 2018 GDC that the 2019 State of the Industry survey subsequently explicitly asked whether game developers should unionize, seizing on the fact that “unionization is a hot topic these days” (GDC, 2019: 7). The results were striking: 47% of respondents replying in the affirmative, another 26% saying maybe, and only 16% saying they shouldn’t (11% were not sure). In the following years GWU chapters set up around the world; most remain grassroots and informal organizations (such as in Australia), but some have since become legal union entities or formalized as chapters of existing unions. The 2018 GDC, where GWU first caught major attention, may be looked back on as a turning point for an industry that has long been famous for exploitation, precarity and overwork, and simultaneously resistant to unionization efforts.

The fragmentation of game development work

While a growing body of literature is developing around this emboldened game industry unionization movement (Kim and Lee, 2020; Ruffino and Woodcock, 2021; Woodcock, 2021), exactly what shifted to facilitate such a drastic shift in attitudes among gameworkers is yet to be clearly articulated. The industrial structure of game development itself changed radically through the 2000s and 2010s, parallel to shifts in the cultural industries more broadly (de Peuter, 2014; McRobbie, 2016). Over these decades, the distribution and development of cultural products became increasingly dependent on a concentrated number of digital platforms such as Spotify, YouTube, Facebook, and the App Store. While platformization “opens up new opportunities for cultural producers to find audiences and generate revenue,” they “simultaneously [lead] to an unprecedented concentration of economic, infrastructural, and political-cultural power among a few platform corporations” (Poell et al., 2021: 17). While cultural workers have always been eponymous gig workers, platform-dependent cultural work is “amplifying some of the enduring features of work in the cultural industries: precarity, individualization, and systematic inequalities” (Poell et al., 2021: 114). Banks (2007: 130) builds off Wayne (2003) to understand these broader shifts of the economic logics of the cultural industries as that of “decentralized accumulation”:

whereby large firms may adopt an apparently ‘disintegrated’ and flexible corporate structure, so creating a space for the ‘indies’ and localized subcontracting, but still ultimately [ensuring] (through an elaborate system of relationships, partnerships and contractual arrangements) that profits and power remain firmly in their grasp

Such decentralized accumulation underpins the “disorganization” (Lazzarato, 1996) of cultural workers, ensuring that “the prospects for the formation of a more oppositional or collective movement of ‘creative workers’” remains repressed “since these are not workers in the conventional sense” (McRobbie, 2016: 40–41). The growth of smaller scale, independent, precarious creative production, McRobbie (2016) argues, can thus be understood effectively as “labour reform by stealth, since the objective is to re-route young people into spheres that are unprotected in advance” (p. 58).

In game development, these shifts played out through the increased ability of a wider range of developers to produce and sell videogames using “free” development software and distribution portals operating under a platformisation logic (Nicoll and Keogh, 2019; Nieborg and Poell, 2018). Considering the full impact of these changes is beyond the scope of this paper (see Anthropy, 2012; Harvey, 2014; Keogh, 2019; Whitson, 2019; Young, 2018) but the most salient feature for our purposes is the rise of independent and speculative gamework by entrepreneurs, amateurs, and hobbyists as starkly different modes of gamework than that of the massive, well-known studios such as Activision, Nintendo, and EA.

Independent or “indie” game developers are often romanticized within game development discourses as a countercultural movement, as having made a choice to refuse the conditions and stifled creativity of the large studios of the mainstream industry. In this way, indie performs a similar rhetorical shift for gameworkers as “entrepreneur” does in the broader tech and cultural sectors. Oakley (2014: 145) astutely notes that cultural workers are indeed entrepreneurial “but not as they please and not under self-selected circumstances. . . the entrepreneurialism they display is often of the forced, or at least adaptive, kind.” In the game industry we see “indie” mobilized in much the same way as entrepreneurship in the broader cultural industries, serving to mask worsening working arrangements and a lack of stable employment opportunities. Whereas “indie games” was originally conceptualized antagonistically as “not Triple-A” in the North American context (Lipkin, 2013), it is a title that is now feasibly applied to the overwhelming majority of game development teams across the world working in a range of piecemeal situations where relatively stable employment at a larger studio is not an option.

As Keogh (2019) elsewhere describes, the videogame industry has thus become “intensely in/formalized” where just who is or isn’t a “professional” game developer “working” in the videogame industry has become increasingly difficult to distinguish as gamework fragments into mega- and micro-studio environments. This is shown most strikingly in responses of the 2019 State of the Industry survey’s question about the number of employees at the participant’s studio. The largest two options (“Over 500” and “251–500” employees) accounted for a combined 26% of respondents, while the smallest two (“Only myself” and “2–5” employees) accounted for a combined 24%. The other 50% is distributed across a vast range of company sizes between 6 and 250 employees. Surveys of national and regional industries beyond the dominant Triple-A hubs consistently show a median studio size of under ten employees (Dutch Games Garden, 2018; IGEA, 2019; Neogames, 2019; NZGDA, 2019). A significant amount of gamework is now conducted at small, independent scales, in teams of fewer than 10 people, often in informal arrangements. In many such cases, developers aren’t “employees” in the traditional sense at all but working either on successive short-term contracts, or speculatively in the hope of future “profit share.” As a growing body of empirical research on game development in local contexts has shown (Jørgensen et al., 2017; Joseph, 2013; Keogh, 2021; Parker et al., 2018; Švelch, 2018), this broader field of independent gamework is just as, if not more, susceptible to the endemic issues plaguing the large studios outlined above, such as crunch, unpaid overtime, a lack of benefits, precarious work contracts, and self-exploitation (Whitson, 2019).

As the contexts within which gamework happens have expanded, so too have the competing range of developer demographics, esthetic tastes, and political positions among gameworkers. The Gamergate backlash stands out as one particularly violent example that saw many women, nonbinary, transgender, and queer developers speaking up, at great personal and professional risk, about a range of entrenched issues in the game industry only to be targeted for further harassment (see Shaw and Chess, 2015). Indeed, issues of gender discrimination loom large behind the seemingly overnight appearance of GWU International. It’s two original founders, Emma Kinema (pseudonym) and Liz Ryerson were both marginal women within the formal game industry (the former a quality assurance tester; the latter a writer and independent artist). Ryerson had long been an outspoken critic of gendered harassment in the industry (see, e.g. Ryerson, 2014), and Kinema in 2019 organized a walk-out at Riot Games over their response to sexual harassment allegations (Klepek, 2019). A drastic diversifying of new voices in industry discourses, and a concurrent violent intensification of discriminatory politics in and around game development workplaces, were necessary to finally mobilize gameworker enthusiasm for unionization and to commence concrete steps forward.

This point is worth emphasizing: the current push toward unionization across the games industry coincides with a diversification of just who is visible and has the authority to speak at industry events as a professional game developer. Feminist and queer game developers in particular, such as those that founded GWU, are particularly outspoken about game industry working conditions and the need for unionization. The fragmentation of game development over the past decade, via processes of platformisation that encourage disorganized, entrepreneurial, and independent modes of videogame work also provide such gamemakers, in legitimizing them without employing them, a new potential to influence and alter the shape of the industry, as the grassroots origins of GWU demonstrate. Those gameworkers that pose the most significant and unresolved hurdle to gameworker unionization are also responsible for unionization becoming the realistic prospect that it now is.

The Australian videogame industry: Everyone is indie

Australia’s videogame industry provides a perfect case study of this broader restructuring of gamework toward contexts that are small-scale, fragmented, precarious, nebulous, and which pose both intensified challenges and new sites of opportunity for the gameworker unionization movement. While Australia’s economy went largely unscathed by the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of the late 2000s, the national game industry was decimated. Large Australian studios producing shelf-filler franchise titles for American publishers were suddenly confronted with a currency parity that effectively doubled labor costs, and subsequently underwent rounds of redundancies and eventually closure. Being hired at a studio after being made redundant at a previous one, only to be made redundant yet again a few months later, is a not uncommon experience told by our older interviewees. Following the GFC, many Australian game developers moved overseas to search for greener pastures; more left the game industry entirely. According to official Australian Bureau of Statistics figures, the number of people employed in the Australian industry dropped from 1431 in 2007 to 842 in 2016, a near 60% contraction.

In the same time frame, however the number of Australian videogame development companies increased from 45 to 63, a near 30% growth. Through the processes of forced entrepreneurism outlined above, through the 2010s the Australian game industry reshaped itself into one of smaller independent companies producing smaller-scale original titles for digital platforms. This new industry is overwhelmingly young, works in small teams with shoestring budgets, and has little experience of working in more traditional large studio structures. Work in the sector remains highly precarious. According to the Interactive Games and Entertainment Association (IGEA), in 2019 over half (55%) of all Australian studios were less than 5 years old, and only 13% existed prior to 2010. A quarter of all studios were currently working on their first game. Of our 288 survey respondents, over half were in their 20s; a third were either self-employed or contract workers; 40% identified themselves as hobbyists, amateurs, or students; and only 28% identified themselves as either employed at or running a company. Tellingly, 226 survey respondents (78%) self-identified as either “indie” or “independent” developers, further demonstrating how not being independent is hardly an option. With the exception of a small handful of Australian studios with between 10 and 30 workers (though, to stress, not necessarily “employees”), and three studios with between 90 and 150 workers, the vast majority of game development companies in Australia today consist of between 1 and 5 people. ²

In the Australian context, gameworker unionization is particularly challenging. Industrial relations laws in Australia have, since at least the 1980s, worked to stifle union activity in Australia. Most notably, the Industrial Relations Reform Act 1993 limited workers to single-employer bargaining and made union bargaining across multiple employers illegal (Isaac, 2018: 182). This critically weakened Australian unions and, over the long term, “remove[d] the potential for union membership recruitment” (Isaac, 2018: 182). This union hostile legal environment, coupled with the same declines in union density seen in other parts of the West since the 1970s, combine to produce serious headwinds for labor organizers in the country. While some gains are being made for Australian gig economy workers, with wins recognizing gig workers as employees (Veen et al., 2021), the current structure of Australian labor organization, centered on single-employer bargaining arrangements, is particularly poorly equipped to deal with—and until recently have struggled to even account for—precarious workers such as those that now form the backbone of Australia’s videogame industry. While an Australian GWU chapter has been founded, it remains small and volunteer-led. Explicitly not a union itself, the local GWU chapter instead strives to connect Australian gameworkers with existing tech and media industries unions such as IT Professionals Australia and the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance.

In Australia, one could argue that the game industry was not simply rebuilt by entrepreneurial independents after the GFC, but instead restructured by the forces of global production to capture the aspirational, self-supported, and perennially disorganized labor of gameworkers in the net of decentralized accumulation without the need to offer them formal employment arrangements. In this way, and despite the specific disadvantages of Australian industrial relation laws, the situation of Australian gameworkers exemplify the global political-economic dynamics facing regional game industries where “going indie” and relying on the digital platforms of North American (and a handful of Chinese and Japanese) companies is the only feasible avenue for making a living in videogame development. As such, we now turn to our empirical research with Australian videogame makers to detail the specific challenges and opportunities they pose for the gameworker unionization movement.

Australian experiences of precarity

While the workers of Triple-A game studios experience constant precarity as an “existential condition” (Bulut, 2020: 71), where even creating a critical darling or commercial hit is not enough to ensure job security, such workers nonetheless often had a clear sense of at least a hypothetical career trajectory or promotional ladder they could theoretically climb, via planning with supervisors and management and on-the-job performance. Even as such workers move between companies, there is at least a sense of disciplinary advancement and professional development from, for example, junior game designer to senior game designer to creative director. The portfolio careers of independent gameworkers such as those in the Australian industry, on the other hand, are less often defined by a foreseeable career path, instead only becoming legible post-hoc, as developers jump endlessly between projects, teams, and hustles, cobbling together a career and an income from a range of gigs and projects, some of which pay, some of which don’t.

Eliza is a 39-year-old Sydney-based freelance music composer who exemplifies such a portfolio career. Working on a range of games at once, Eliza said she doesn’t have a job so much as “a range of things that I do,” of which only some are paid: “I’ve done a lot of music for free, and a lot of kind of in-kind informal arrangement, [but also] a mix of profit share and upfront payments.” Many independent developers in Australia, especially those working on small teams or across multiple contracts, when asked for their job title similarly struggled to provide a definitive answer, often defaulting to listing their varied responsibilities on the day of the interview. In small game development teams what would typically be the labor of a specialized worker in a larger team instead gets distributed across the entire team, and so the specific job responsibilities of individuals become vague and nebulous (Whitson et al., 2021). This ambiguity of responsibility creates a situation ripe for (self-)exploitation as work is even more defined by the list of tasks to be done, and not by the amount of time spent working.

The future is often just as, if not more, unpredictable than the present for Australian gameworkers. Developers we interviewed rarely had a plan of where they expected to be 5 years from now or, even, where they would be once the current project wrapped up. Instead, answers to this question were presented as aspirations (“Hopefully, if this project does well. . .”) or a desire for individual improvement and fulfilment (“I just want to get better and make cool stuff”). Zach, a 32-year-old Melbourne-based indie developer working in a team with two fellow co-founders, was interviewed during a prolonged period of self-imposed crunch as they neared the release of their indie mobile game. He conveys the unpredictability of such speculative independent work vividly:

“Fucking no idea [where I will be in five years]. . . . Just so much is weighted on how well [this game] goes. You know if it tanks, if it goes well, if it goes really well, if it goes okay, if it doesn’t go at all . . .how well the game goes determines the next project. But ultimately, you’re hoping that everything you’ve been working towards pays off and you can just keep working on it and making it better. Realistically that’s all you can really ask for.”

The ubiquity of these type of responses—anchored more in the hope for stability than any ability to plan for it—demonstrates how the individualized demands of creative entrepreneurism stand in for a lack of career certainty for independent game developers.

Faced with chronic job insecurity and a lack of typical work benefits such as superannuation and maternity leave, it will not come as a surprise that the desire to be creative is a major reason why many Australian game developers persisted. McRobbie’s (2016: 37) concept of the creativity dispositif is writ large in the responses of Australian independent gameworkers—that is, a system of governance that reframes poor working conditions as an individualized adventure and which retranslates “an inner desire for rewarding work” into “a set of techniques for conducting oneself in the uncertain world of creative labour.” Melbourne-based Cooper, 40-years-old, was one of a number of participants who founded their own smaller independent studio after losing their job at a larger studio after the GFC. Cooper directly contrasts their current independent situation with that work that was conducted in the larger studios before the GFC:

“From an on-the-ground perspective it was easier prior to the GFC . . . but it was all based on debt and just making shovelware ³ for American studios. . . . The money wasn’t great but the stress wasn’t what it is now. But at the same time I actually think the work is more interesting now.”

Here, more regular work is currently unavailable, but it is also positioned as more tedious and less fulfilling, and dismissed as less desirable than the unpredictable, poorly paid, creatively fulfilling work that is now the only option. This is not to suggest that these developers are misguided for the preferences they hold but rather how they, as Bourdieu (1983: 343) would say, “make a virtue out of necessity” when faced with particularly bleak economic conditions.

Attitudes of collaboration

While Australian game developers regularly articulated independent gamework as both more creatively fulfilling and more precarious than large studio work, a common theme was the notion that it was also more open and collaborative:

“[Before the GFC] when I was at [Large Studio 1], [Large Studio 1] people didn’t talk to the [Large Studio 2] people, who didn’t talk to the [Large Studio 3] people who didn’t talk to the [Large Studio 4] people. It felt very competitive. . . . Now, it’s a lot easier. Maybe we’ve all grown up, or maybe it’s the fact that all the companies now are independent. That makes it feel different, but it’s like, you know, you know, we’ll talk to [Independent Studio 1] about something and they’ll ask us stuff. It’s all very friendly. . . . we can all do well, or we can all do badly, and if we all fight, nobody’s gonna win.” (Graham, 47, commercial director, Brisbane)

“There used to be a very closed culture before the GFC. . . . After the decimation of the industry during the GFC there’s definitely not that anymore. . . I think the collaborations we see now, like bigger studios trying to help out smaller ones, that sort of thing would not have happened 10 years ago, no way in hell. There’s an attitude of collaboration and helping each other out that you only get out of adversity and everyone kind of panicking about survival.” (Daphne, 33, Freelance game developer and educator, Melbourne)

This “attitude of collaboration and helping each other out” was a prominent theme that recurred throughout our interviews across Australian cities—one worthy of both optimism and scrutiny, as it contrasts significantly with typical accounts of game industry work as secretive, competitive, and individualized (Bulut, 2020; O’Donnell, 2014). While the dream of creatively fulfilling independent work seems, in many cases, a thin veil covering the shift of risk from corporate publishers onto individualized, disorganized workers, for Australian gameworkers the capability of this independent work to be collaborative and communal in the absence of studio surveillance and the fierce competition over contracts also suggested potential alternative imaginings of a collaborative and even compassionate videogame industry.

The wholesale destruction of the Australian industry through the GFC functions as a formative collective trauma for Australian gameworkers, deeply influencing the industry’s current, more collaborative shape in a number of ways. The constellation of small independent studios that popped up in each of Australia’s capital cities following the crash were in large part founded by former colleagues that had been laid off by the larger studios in town, ensuring a certain level of collegiality and camaraderie already existed. Furthermore, a sense of having “gone through the war together” ties Australian game developers of a certain generation together, having survived the transition to radically different conditions largely without help from either the (now-absent) foreign publishers, or a federal Australian government that has shown itself mostly indifferent to supporting creative industries. The rapid studio closures of the GFC—combined with their widespread mismanagement before the GFC—has imbued many in the Australian industry with a deep cynicism for the traditional game industry model where workers’ labor is controlled and determined by multinational publishers and shareholders.

More open attitudes toward collaboration were visible in local developer communities through local meetups, informal socializing, festivals, and interpersonal relationships. Developers spoke of an openness of process and a sharing of resources. For example, if one team had a contact at a publisher like Sony, they would provide those contact details to their fellow developers or make an introduction. Financial information such as sales records and royalty rates were often discreetly shared between teams in direct breach of publisher contracts, a practice commonly referred to by participants as informal “FriendDAs” (a play on “NDA,” the abbreviation of non-disclosure agreement) in a move to increase transparency. In each capital city, games-centric coworking spaces have been established, some formally as either businesses or non-profit organizations (such as The Arcade in Melbourne and GamesPlus in Adelaide and Canberra), and others informally as multiple teams share a lease and collectively pool what minimal individual resources they can muster (such as Share House in Melbourne and Secret Lab in Hobart). Female, non-binary, queer, and transgender developers spoke of informal whisper networks established to identify employers and publishers known to be abusive or predatory. Perhaps most surprisingly, in three different instances we heard of commercially successful studios providing unpublicized zero-interest loans to emerging studios so that they might complete their games. In each case this was not treated like a traditional “investment” but was rather done to assist a team in the local community.

As stated explicitly by a number of interviewees, such collaborative actions were seen as a rising tide that would float all boats. While the desire for individual success and a sense of competition remains present, the sense for many Australian game developers was less that they were in competition with each other, rather they were in competition together against the large, impersonal studios and platforms situated overseas. Given these circumstances, there are glimmers of potential for a greater sense of sector-wide solidarity across this dispersed workforce in the absence of managerially enforced secrecy.

Further, the trauma felt during the GFC itself and the working conditions in the larger studios prior (either directly experienced or, for younger developers, understood through mythologization) directly impacted the work environments and business models of newer independent studios founded by Australian game developers:

“A lot of the people that are running companies now were fucked over by upper management . . . [The people running the companies now] have a very strong affinity for the team, as opposed to back then it was like ‘I’m running the business and you work for us and these are the deadlines. . . . It’s like how people who grow up being abused often come out of that and be like ‘the trauma stops with me’. I think we feel the same way. It’s like ‘this bullshit stops now.’” (Sebastien, 31, Studio founder, Melbourne)

Later in the interview, Sebastien lamented the number of companies that rely on fixed-term contracts to pay their staff, and insisted his own company would not do this: “We want to be a pillar of what to be after coming through [the GFC]. So we’re like let’s just hire people [full-time] and give them their rights and make sure they are getting superannuation.” Similarly, Ned is a 31-year-old studio co-founder in Melbourne who, at the time of our interview, had worked for 2 years without pay on his studio’s first game. While working for free, Ned insisted that the other developers on his team (all contractors) were paid for all the hours worked, and that if there is a gap in funding, production would slow or come to a halt as Ned and his co-founder undertook contracting for other studios to raise funds to pay their own workers.

Managers explicitly calling for game industry structures where they would be restricted from exploiting their own staff was also a regular and surprising theme. In Melbourne, 27-year-old David was in the process of attracting investment to grow a new startup. As part of a longer complaint about endemic low pay in the industry, David insisted that “As an industry we have to be super conscious to make sure nobody is getting exploited.” For David, this meant thinking about “What can I do to protect people in case I go insane in the next five years? How can I idealistically now protect people against, you know, capitalist me in five years?” In Brisbane, 41-year-old Robert, co-founder and director of a larger independent studio, explicitly voiced a desire for Australia to have “stronger” labor laws: “as somebody who runs a company, they’re occasionally a pain in the ass because they stop you doing things as easily or quickly as you’d like to. Nonetheless, the erosion of labor laws in our country by people who run companies, purely for personal profit, is a contemptible situation.” The sympathies of the new proliferation of “bosses” of smaller studios in the contemporary Australian game industry who were themselves exploited workers only a decade ago highlights the increasing complexity of employer/employee relationships in precarious gamework that unionization strategies need to account for. Above all, however, it’s not clear yet if or how this sympathy for the plight of workers by worker-cum-employers or by employers who are simultaneously contractors at other studios, translates into material improvements in conditions.

Political consciousness

This sense of Australian gameworkers having been particularly hard done by during the GFC led to an exciting theme in the fieldwork: an emerging sense of political consciousness, especially in regards to working conditions. This is in stark contrast to previous research on gameworkers employed in larger studios (Bulut, 2020; Legault and Weststar, 2015) and creative workers more generally (McRobbie, 2016). Participants brought up the discussions of unionization occurring throughout the industry at the time and raised, when asked broadly about the challenges of game development, systematic labor issues of crunch, unpaid work, sexual discrimination, the cost of living, and broader social welfare conditions. Australian developers, as well as independent developers in fieldwork sites overseas, undeniably work within contexts of entrepreneurial precarity and self-exploitation, but were also conscious of and articulate about this self-exploitation. As Damien, a 36-year-old solo developer in Tasmania, put most bluntly: “If we could find a way to have some kind of French revolution where we got rid of those people at the top and then more equally distributed [the resources of videogame development] around then I think maybe that would be better.”

Participants commonly demonstrated an awareness of their own position in the prevailing economic system, occasionally doing so through the lens of progressive politics. Developers acknowledged the privilege involved in being able to take the risks required to work as an independent creative, such as their relative youth, childless status, or having a partner with a more stable income to fall back on. For instance, after Ned, introduced above, justified spending 2 years of unpaid work on his “dream game,” he quickly added the caveat that he could only do this because he’s “in a super privileged position with a lot of safety nets around funding. I don’t know many other people in that position.”

Some interviewees explicitly pointed toward the current political-economic situation in Australia, identifying features of it that helped or hindered both themselves and others as creative workers:

“I’ve got some privilege in that I’m married, my husband [has a stable job]. And so if I have a week where I haven’t invoiced a job or anything and no pay comes in that’s okay, we’re not going to starve, the rent is going to get paid. . . . It’s a lot worse for other people. . . Obviously capitalism is to blame. I mean if we had a universal basic income. . .where no matter what else was happening I’d know I can pay rent or I can buy some food, that would be a game changer, knowing that everything isn’t riding on this one project.” (Cloe, 36, freelance illustrator, Hobart)

Similarly,

“The fundamental challenge of being a creative person is the neoliberal bullshit that’s stopping you from actually getting work done. I feel that very acutely especially as a mother and with these other caring responsibilities I have. Just getting the time to sit down with the craft and actually do it. . . . I’ve got to do a million other things to keep afloat and feed myself because the game development work is not enough on its own to do that.” (Daphne, 33, Freelance game developer and educator, Melbourne)

The frequency with which participants brought up the politics of contemporary capitalism and economic inequality generally, and the cultural work issue of passion versus pay specifically, speaks to a much greater consciousness among independent and precarious game developers as to the political situation of their work than the existing literature on game developers—predominately focused on those in larger studios—has previously suggested. There was a general acknowledgment among participants that their current work conditions should not be so precarious, and indeed that they could be significantly better.

Alternative approaches to building solidarity

What Australian gameworkers remained unsure of, however, was how a desire for more equitable work conditions could be translated into action in the exhaustively individualized and fragmented industry in which they find themselves. As Daphne, a staunchly pro-unionization games writer and educator based in Melbourne, succinctly put it: “when there’s no one to unionize against, no bosses, it’s difficult to do that.” Participants commonly saw unionization as a necessity for improving their conditions, but also struggled to imagine how to bring it about among for a fragmented and precarious workforce:

“The Australian game industry is too small a sector to deserve a union of its own. It would be nice if there was an advocacy group that wasn’t necessarily a union. . .I don’t actually know how it would work. . .we just need someone to be able to muscle in when shit gets nasty and be like ‘Oi cut it out’. . . .That could be a union that could be anything else, that could be an advocacy organization.” (Daphne, 33, Freelance game developer and educator, Melbourne)

Nor could participants imagine game development unionization emerging under Australia’s current industrial relations laws:

“We’ve talked about [unionization] for a long time, since [I worked in] Triple-A. I think at that point I was like yeah that’s never going to happen. Do they even make unions anymore? That’s not going to happen. But something had to happen. But I think I don’t really see a traditional union being formed. I mean, even now they’re busting unions aren’t they? Corporate has a lot of power.” (John, 39, Solo developer, Melbourne)

Most common of all, as was a major issue faced by IWGB Game Workers in the UK (Ruffino, 2021), developers were uncertain as to whether they would even be allowed to join a gameworker’s union, as they were simultaneously both precarious independent workers and occasional employers of others:

“I’m kind of curious to see what happens with the union stuff. Whether I would join a union or not I don’t know. I don’t know where my role is [as a solo developer who hires contractors sometimes].” (Daniel, 40, Solo developer, Melbourne)

Importantly, participants who voiced such doubts are not simply excusing a lack of unionization due to the perceived incompatibility of creative work with collective action. Unionization, while strongly desired in order to address the ubiquitous feelings of precarity, is correctly identified as being complicated by wider economic and industrial configurations, such as a growing ambiguity in terms of who is “employee” and who is an “employer.” Generally, those Australian gameworkers that highlighted unionization as necessary for the industry had no clear sense of what it would or could look like in the context of Australia’s fragmented and small-scale game industry.

While pro-unionization gameworkers were unable to picture how a gameworkers union might effect change, or even for that matter how it might be formed in the first place, they nevertheless had strong and well-articulated ideas of how the culture of game development could be altered for the better through grassroots actions involving building solidarity and education:

“I try to immunise students from [exploitation in the game industry] as much as I can by telling them to unionize, telling them to collect together and to never leave anyone behind and that kind of thing. But I also tell them what bad conditions look like. It would be great if there was a union to do that work [helping junior developers understand their rights] but in the absence of that it takes people who have been around for a while to step up.” (Daphne, 33, Freelance game developer and educator, Melbourne)

“I think it really has to do with education honestly. Like educating people as to their value and their negotiating power and also hopefully getting more experienced people to stick around in those environments where young people are coming in so that they can mentor them. . .There’s a lot of young people that just don’t know what they’re worth or how to bargain for themselves. It’s too easy to divide and conquer.” (John, 39, Solo developer, Melbourne)

Perhaps most interestingly, Daniel noted that in lieu of employers, it is the platform holders that collective energy ought to be directed at:

“I think it’s more like you have to form co-ops and things like that because the platform holders have so much power. It’s almost like they’re our employers, right? . . . They’re the ones that run [the videogame industry] in a sense but I don’t know how you’d get any power over them because they’re global. There is no way I can make a living just selling my games on my website. I need a platform that’s kind of like a storefront.” (Daniel, 40, Solo developer, Melbourne)

This is a striking articulation of the nature of platform capitalism that cultural production now occurs within (Nieborg and Poell, 2018; Srnicek, 2017) and speaks directly to the entrenched challenges and emerging opportunities for building local solidarity when the dominant source of power no longer resides with the boss, but with the platform.

Some saw their relative autonomy from the industry’s most powerful companies as giving them a responsibility to be more explicit in their push for unionization, despite knowing that traditional unionization would be unlikely to improve their own situation directly. Exemplary of this perspective was Jessica, who we interviewed in Montreal as part of the international component of our fieldwork. Jessica co-founded and co-directs a small independent studio. Jessica insists that “I very strongly think people need to unionize as soon as possible” but also adds the caveats that:

Honestly, unions will never be very effective in the indie space. It’s too ragtag. There’ll never be a fist of unionists crushing [our studio]. So it’s a safe place for me to be like, ‘Oh, yeah, unions are great.’ But I feel if you have the privilege to be able to say that . . . because I feel safe saying things that [people who work in Triple-A studios] don’t feel safe saying, I feel like I have to. I have to be pro-union loudly.

Thus, disorganized gameworkers, like those that initiated GWU and those that are increasingly the majority of gameworkers globally, feel a responsibility to be vocal about unionization explicitly because they can afford to be. They have no employers threatening to fire them if they discuss collective action or speak out publicly about work conditions. Yet, the same lack of traditional employers means that the traditional union structures independent gamemakers are so vocal about are unlikely to improve their own conditions.

None of these strategies, which amount largely to ad-hoc and informal collective support, can do much to produce the sort of worker power that results in better wages and conditions. Neither is it clear how to build such a union or network or even against whom said power would be exercised. However, what they do demonstrate is a desire among independent game developers to explore and expand vectors of solidarity that would have once been (and often remain) impossible under the secretive structures of Triple-A studios. As the growing momentum around GWU demonstrates, these strategies gesture toward and open opportunities for creating a different work culture and workplace expectations, envisaging a self-governing game industry that is more compassionate and collaborative, even in the absence of the top-down legal requirements and corporate frameworks of the multinational games industry.