The film industry has a lot of young talent trying to break into the industry, but the industry is mostly composed of older people with better sense of their own worth.

The games industry has almost no old talent. There are many non-trivially-sized game studios where nobody working there is over 30.

Presumably, on the film-industry side, this is in part a work of the unions, acting as barriers-to-entry to the industry and thereby limiting the supply of (⇒ increasing the demand for) their existing membership.

Not knowing much about the history of film, I would guess that film-industry unions — besides the blue-collar labor unions, that likely arose organically just as they did everywhere — originally arose out mostly from the natural limited supply of "famous actors" who thus already formed an implicit power bloc within the industry.

The games industry really doesn't have a natural power bloc equivalent to "famous actors." There are some famous directors, but they just go found their own studios if they don't like working conditions elsewhere (since business/people management is already their comparative advantage.)

Unions create a wage floor and standards of working conditions which eliminates the main benefit of churning though young and optimistic people trying to break into the industry. That's another reason (besides barriers to entry) that unions are responsible for why the film industry has more "old" talent than games.

Ehhh... the "wage floor" in the film industry is nothing to strive for.

https://www.thelightleaks.com/think-pieces/reality-of-unpaid...

>The games industry has almost no old talent.

Guess I need to tell all the older people in the game industry I know they need to quit.