In Hollywood that’s ... complex. There’s nothing stopping you from filming a production with non-IATSE (or any other union) labor, but you wouldn’t be able to get union labor or “above the line” union talent (actors, writers, directors, etc). (In practice, it’s not quite that simple, especially given the ubiquity of international shoots and that many indie filmmakers see even the ultra-low budget SAG-AFTRA sheets as unrealistic, but the basic rule holds.)

So, in the video game industry a “global rule one” scenario would see a nonconforming studio unable to hire experienced and unionized programmers, artists, QA, or even SAG-AFTRA actors or AFM musicians. This wouldn’t be so much an issue for indie developers, but it would do a number on studios who depend on high-profile vocal talent as well as experienced developers, let alone tie-in games that trade on actors’ likenesses.

So from reading it appears that there are a lot of folks who want to work for a game company, but they are not considered precious, because there are so many of them (this totally baffles me as what I saw in game dev was really hard).

But on the other hand, if you standout somehow (experienced?) - you would not face such issue. So why employer would employ "commodity devs" who are part of the union, and why devs, who standout and have a leverage would option to join union?

Gamedev is and is not hard. The availability of engines like Unreal and Unity and all the plugins and example game kits available mean that it's trivial to make a simple game. The proof, 20000-40000 new games ship every month on iOS+Android

At the simplest level you basically download a kit for the genre you want, skin it, ship it.

Of course a good game is often much more work and requires more talent but in some ways it's getting to be the same as video and music. It used to be to be anything at either required lots of expensive equipment and connections to the gatekeepers. Now a days anyone can make a video on their phone and post it to youtube or make some music in music app of their choice and post it to youtube etc.

So, we see an explosion of content. Youtube has tons and tons of channels. Twitch a bunch more. The stuff people like raises to the top but there's zillions of people who get very few views because whatever they are making isn't quality or appealing.

Games are getting to be the same. So many people making so many games.

Also as the industry goes mostly toward a few engines it gets easier to shuffle people around. You and post a job listing for someone with Unreal or Unity experience. Before those 2 engines became so popular no one generally had experience with the engine another studio was using.

Also to the business people it's not clear what's needed for a hit. In general the top movies are mostly big budget movies. The top 10 movies for 2018 are all effects based movies with staff of 1000s+. There's a few non big budget movies in the to 20.

In games in the last few years there have been several hits that had low budgets including Candy Crush Saga, Clash Royale, Puzzle and Dragons, PUBG, Minecraft, and others, many of which made as much or more than their AAA expensive competition like GTA5 or Red Dead Redemption 2 and cost 1/10th to 1/20th those bigger games.

It's just like any other art form in this regard. Anyone can splatter paint on canvas or fill a book with words. Making something worth looking at or reading is much harder. Being able to masterfully execute the motions of your craft is just the bare minimum requirement for entry.

> why employer would employ "commodity devs" who are part of the union, and why devs, who standout and have a leverage would option to join union?

The parent poster answered that question for Hollywood. Union members (and here I'm speaking of SAG-AFTRA, which represents actors) are not allowed to work on non-union productions. Union productions, which encompass almost all major studios, are required to give first preference to union members and only hire non-union members when they are of "essential skill and quality"[1][2]. A non-union member who works on a union production has 30 days to join the union. If they do not join, they can't work on any more union productions.

Since all the big name stars are union members, big studios have to have union productions in order to be able to hire them. Stars make plenty of money regardless of whether they're in a union or not, because their agents negotiate well for them.

But most stars were once unknown and so they had to join the union when starting out, in order to be able to book gigs and build their career. For a millionaire actor union dues aren't a big financial hardship, and union membership doesn't affect how much money they make now. And they need to maintain union membership in order to continue working on union productions with other big stars.

A game industry union would probably work the same way. An employer would be forced to give first preference to a "commodity" union dev if they want to be able to employ the star producer or designer on their production. A non-union commodity dev has to take union membership after getting their first job offer else they can't work on another union project.

It would also probably mean that game industry jobs become like entertainment industry jobs: you're hired for a specific project and you move on when it's finished - instead of being like the rest of the white-collar workforce's model, where you're hired at a single company and build a career there.

1. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/UnionsInH...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act#Close...

The way you explain the Hollywood example, it sounds like the star actors are the linchpin of ensuring junior actors and commodity workers get union benefits - and yet, the star actors don't need the union's negotiating power, as their agents negotiate much better rates.

That's all very well for Hollywood, but surely it's a difficult model to kickstart in other industries.

Not necessarily. Every production will need mostly non-star workers. If they're all unionized, the stars have little choice but to sign up or work in the few productions that re non-union. Additionally, the Hollywood model is to sign up stars to unions before they're stars. This is further bolstered by the fact that every trade in Hollywood - directors, writers, producers, technicians and handymen - has its own union.

I think what confuses me is the chicken and the egg problem - I wonder how did Unions in Holywood become so powerful, that they could command companies to hire only unionized employees.

The SAG's own history page is pretty vague about why big stars signed on: "Protests against provisions in FDR’s National Recovery Administration's proposed Motion Picture Code of Fair Competition result in mass exodus of stars from Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in early October. Major stars like Robert Montgomery, Fredric March, James Cagney, Ann Harding, Eddie Cantor and Groucho Marx join SAG." [1]

I think the amount of control studios exerted over even big names was a factor. Stars did well financially but were still treated as disposable and second-class. They were signed to multi-year, exclusive contracts that had onerous restrictions.

1. https://www.sagaftra.org/about/our-history/1930s

Given the voice talent, maybe the key to this is to get the core artists accepted by the IATSE, or some kind of subunion.

That said, its really hard to imagine any union growth given 27 states in the US have right to work laws (aka right-to-get-laid-off laws). Meaning companies will be free to have layoffs like this independent of union wishes to negotiate such actions.

Companies should be able to freely lay off people independent of what a Union wishes. The other members of the union should just show solidarity and threaten to quit/protest if a company does that.

Unions work by collectively bargaining with the employer to secure terms for the benefit of the group. The terms that get negotiated aren't set in stone: the point is to present a common front in the negotiations so that the employer can't use a divide and conquer strategy against the workers.

The problem is you switch having almost no negotiating power against the employer as an individual... to having almost no negotiating power against the union as an individual. You're just trading masters and you don't get any more say. If you are young for example, and the union wants pay to be by seniority, then the union may be working against your interests and you could be better off negotiating with the company.

That is a more fundamental issue than whether or not you have Unions, and that's the out-of-control scaling of the economy. Companies have become so big that individuals are insignificant, period, outside of a few elites. If corporations were kept within healthy limits, unions wouldn't have to be equally huge to keep pace. The law of large numbers demands that individuals get reduced to statistics. Statistics get measured, they don't get to negotiate! Individual misery can be averaged entirely out of the picture.

Unions are a response to a shitty situation, and they have flaws. Not having unions, in the face of dwindling individual share in a growing economy, that's even worse.

Well that is the fault of the #1 union in the center of the north American continent... The US federal government, which is there to represent "We the People" not the corporations, or political parties, k-street lobbies, or any of that other nonsense.

I think you deeply misunderstand the way the US government functions. Let's start with: it's not a Trade Union. That's some audacious spin.

How it functions, or how its suppose to function, or rather how the elites want it to function?

Or maybe its all nonsense because repeatedly people in the US have shown a susceptibility to propaganda and a willingness to vote against their own best interest? Or for that matter to vote for politicians that refuse to take stances which deviate from the party talking points.

The way it actually functions is to reward those who are able to organize, and repeatedly that has been overwhelmingly those with money and resources to devote to such organization. That means wealthy elites and corporations, who have lobbyists and PR firms working for them. Individuals who are not able to organize at scale are not represented. The PR war against trade unions is part of the effort to suppress the influence of those lacking large bank accounts or leisure time.

To reply to the later bit about spin...

Fundamentally, the us government is there to represent the interests of the citizens. Or if you go back far enough the states, which in turn are there for the citizens. Unless you buy into the idea that really the representative nature of the government is to represent the interests of the wealth elite and make it appear that the people have a say by electing their representatives. Something that I think the 17th amendment/etc tries to clear up...

Labor unions are there to represent the interests of labor.

Given that the majority of voting age people in the us, fall into the labor category there is a fairly large crossover of common interests between labor unions and general government when it comes to economic issues.

Representing the interests of its citizens is "How it's supposed to work" but the way it actually works is that politicians represent the people who have real influence over getting them elected. That means anyone who isn't very rich or the leader of a big voting bloc has no influence.

As I mention in my cousin-comment, our system is set up to reward those who can organize, which the wealthy elite and large corporations are much better at than the population of individuals with divisive identity politics being shoved down their throats by PR companies. Breaking people's ability to organize is why there is such a push to convince us that trade unions are evil.

I see the logic but still have to dissent. The needs of labor are sometimes at odds with the needs of any given community or the nation as a whole. Pork-barrel spending is a thing, and it has a negative connotation because it's not necessarily good for everyone, even if it can be good for labor. So, some politicians are elected to prevent it, to varying degrees. This is the (a?) way in which the government is not a labor union, even at the conceptual level.

That's not how it works for actors, though...

You may have heard the term Right to Work state. This is the situation it covers. In a rtw state an employee doesn't have to join the union to work, in a non rtw state you have what are called closed shops. You can't work there without joining the union.

That depends entirely on the union.

There are a multitude of ways to organise and run a union.