Counterpoint: I am pretty sure unions would change "a damn thing" in the gaming, because that is what I can assume by looking at what unions achieved elsewhere.

Yeah, like what the achieved in public schools, or police forces and blue wall, or American auto industry... not quite a union but AMA has also achieved a lot for US doctor pay vs the rest of the world. American West Coast port efficiency is also the laughing stock of the world, thanks in no small part to unions. And feather bedded and/or mafia-run infrastructure costs in places like New York.. oh yeah, I'm forgetting the glorious history of unions! That's where it really is, like explicitly racist exclusion during the Great Migration, or volunteer patrols Cesar Chavez used to run to intimidate undocumented immigrants with violence and bribe officials to look the other way.

I personally think, with the exception of those explicitly dedicated to violence or war, American-style unions are the most evil organizations on the planet. If someone paid me to invent a social structure with worse all-around incentives, I probably couldn't do it.

I am not an American and I profit from unions over here even if I am not a member of them.

If your unions turn out to be evil, then organize them differently. What will however not work is hoping that governments and industries will protect the rights of employees and workers without them somehow organizing.

This is a rather vague statement... Protecting the rights sounds noble but I'd look at the whole package. Workers are doing very well in industries like tech with ~0 unions. American auto workers are doing worse than they used to because they made their industry long-term uncompetitive for a short-run benefits.

Police and teacher unions are great for their members (protecting the incompetents, make-work); so are guilds like AMA (artificially limiting the supply of doctors, including qualified immigrants) but terrible for society.

The general pattern is that unions are parasites, so they can only go 2 ways - they can make the host weaker or kill it off; or if the host itself has captive audience (e.g. taxpayers) they just make it worse for everyone on average, while transfering some of the remaining reduced pie to their members. Note how much teacher unions hate private and charter schools - they really don't want people to be able to escape the system, it would interfere with milking the taxpayers with nothing to show for it.

"except reducing net efficiency"

did you mean reducing unpaid overtime and crunch mode death marches?

If dev cycles are increased by a year or two AND wages go up, they will hire a lot less people. Revenue will tank and overhead will skyrocket.

“Our quarterly profits depend on burning out our workers and forcing them into unpaid overtime” is not the argument you think it is.

The cost to deliver your product with employees that work 40 hr weeks, normal PTO, and limiting your “crunch” to 2-3 sprints a year is the cost of doing business.

Except it is. You're only considering this from a union PoV. Corporations are not endless pits of wealth extraction waiting to be tapped by a union, you have to consider what the consequences would be outside of the aspiring utopian objectives.

What does the games industry look like if it takes 1-2 more years to create the same products and with significantly less people?

Where do all the formerly employed QA testers, developers, project managers, etc. go? Start their own business? With what capital? Do they have to pay union rates and fees too? If so, how would it not be somewhere around 5 years before they can make a game? Thats an unsustainable model for anyone but the largest most profitable corps.

> What does the games industry look like if it takes 1-2 more years to create the same products

Healthier. An industry where people can work for a career instead of a 3-5 year stint in their 20s and then quit for something resembling a sane work life balance.

We have to take a step back here. If the games industry can’t exist without mountains of unpaid labor then we already can’t afford it. The idea that devs and artists should apparently just volunteer the extra 40 hours for the benefit of daddy corporate is insane. And the fact that one of the only paths to getting paid fairly is forming a union is total failure of our existing labor laws. Something something wage theft outweighs all other theft combined.

These kinds of things don’t and shouldn’t need a union but it’s the only tool available when your government fails you (or let’s be honest captured by corporate interests). I guaran-fucking-tee you that eliminating the overtime exemption would overnight kill the desire to these workers to unionize.