Hands down, the last few years have been some of the roughest for game developers. From the horrendous state of mass layoffs to the threatening expansion of AI and machine learning, picking up a role within the gaming industry seems more challenging than ever.
In the last year alone, we’ve seen strikes such as those from video game actors in connection with SAG-AFTRA, specifically citing concerns that the increase in practices such as AI voice acting breaches the integrity and ethics behind video game acting.
This year, game developers announced at the Game Developers Conference that they have formed their union, United Videogame Workers (UVW), alongside the Communications Workers of America (CWA).
As recently announced by Kotaku, the developers of Overwatch 2 at Activision Blizzard have joined the CWA, officially forming their own union of around 200 workers called the Overwatch Gamemakers Guild.
One of the massive goals from this union, as you can likely tell, is fighting against the mass layoffs that have recently swept the industry. As revealed at the last Game Developers Conference’s yearly poll, the fear of layoffs for game developers is higher than ever.
Simon Hedrick, an analyst at Blizzard, told Kotaku that, up...
