They're also free to bargain collectively. Why should 'freedom' mean capital consolidates and organizes as much as it likes, while labour is reduced to isolated workers making individual choices?
The cold business logic says to consolidate and make partnerships/business unions.
> I don't like doing this, so nobody else is allowed to do this for you either.
Unions very often prevent non-union labor and, as such, enforce their own desires on others. Don't get me wrong, sometimes that's necessary. But there are negatives involved in unions, just like there are positives.
It's also not as simple as "you're free to leave". Most people working in the games industry are young. Many of them do live paycheck to paycheck. In many cases they may have also moved across the country for the job. Quitting a job is in and of itself a substantial risk for many people.
There is a reason we have worker protection laws. That reason is that companies can and will abuse workers without them. This has been proven time and time again.
They knew this industry was like this before they accepted the job. Why do we need to protect people from their own poor decisions? These aren't people who lacked opportunity and got stuck in a bad place in life and need a helping hand, these are highly privileged people who willingly signed up for mistreatment.
Yep. And they are allowing it by not unionizing.
What is the skill gap that a software engineer working in games would have moving elsewhere? The only one I think of would be domain experience in TDD and unit testing. Neither is widely practiced in game development, but they aren't universal for software development more generally either.