The majority of development studios are relatively small and, if you follow industry news, bankruptcy is a routine occurrence; even some well known small and indie names are only one or two flops away from bankruptcy. Unions might be able to make headway against EA, Valve, or Activision but for the smaller studios, well, there is no surplus. You can't get blood from a stone no matter how hard you squeeze.
I think the question is "Is there a better deal that's possible without bankrupting the studio?" When it comes to it, a lot of game companies are essentially running like startups, but without the massive gluts of VC funding to give them runway. It's questionable how much small-to-mid-sized studios can increase costs without making it all the more risky that a single underperformance kills the studio.
Obviously, this is less the case at somewhere like EA/Activision/2K/Epic, and you could make the case that if they can't treat the employees better, then the project doesn't deserve to exist.
I think there are a lot of poor analogies and comparisons being made to Hollywood. AAA linear game development accompanied by massive sustained growth in production budgets has made some segments of games look like Hollywood.
Some segments of game development may continue to look like that. However, the mix of procedural content generation, user generated content, a strong skilled global talent market, and the US being of piece of a much larger global sales pie, makes it look nothing like Hollywood.
Hollywood has traditional been very much an American cultural product dependent on American talent both on and off screen to produce. Games are neither.
The boom-bust cycle of studios is of course another matter. Games-as-a-service may appear to be more suitable for unionization but the end result may just improve the economics of user generated content marketplaces.
No game developer is living on starvation wages, it is just a question of how much they get. If a game company can provide for its people and offer enough incentives that its workers aren't fleeing to better jobs it deserves to exist.
So why aren't the people leaving then? Maybe they love the game they are working on and prefer bad conditions over working on something else? Maybe they have non-standard backgrounds and would be forced to wash plates if not for this company? It isn't clear to me that a union would make the life of these people better.
> "If it can't afford to provide for its employees, why should a small company exist?"
If I rephrase that as "If a startup can't afford to provide for its employees, why should a startup exist?", it should be clear to HN readers why that is problematic. Without a way for new players to enter the market cheaply, you wind up with a stagnant industry fully of deeply entrenched players who are afraid to take creative risks. (Not unlike Hollywood, come to think of it.)
