Last month, Myriame Lachapelle’s small studio, Vodeo Games, made gaming history: its staff formed the first game worker’s union in North America. With help from the Communications Workers of America (CWA), the staff at Vodeo now have greater bargaining power than most of their industry peers.

“I love the game industry, even though sometimes I hate it,” Lachapelle tells me. “I've been in the industry for many, many years now. And every time I get people at school asking me ‘should I really do this’?...I don't want to discourage people. Like yeah, the industry is bad, but it's changing, and it's changing for the best.”

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Workers at Vodeo now have a say in how their workplace is run. They can come together and call for changes to pay and work hours. They can have legal representation assist them with any disputes. Through collective bargaining agreements, they’re now better protected against unjust dismissals or working environments, as we see so often in the gaming industry.

As groundbreaking as it is, forming a union sounds like a natural decision for the team. “It was kind of like a no-brainer,” Lachapelle says. “If we want what’s best to happen, we need to have a seat at the table.”

“I definitely had bad workplaces in the past. But I've always been at least lucky personally to have coworkers that I can trust.”

One of those co-workers, Carolyn Jong, agrees that having that kind of support has made a difference to how it feels to work as a game dev.

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“Even that process of talking to each other and building solidarity as workers has already helped me feel more secure in my job,” Jong says. “[It feels] more like we have a voice. If something does happen, we know we have each other's backs. And that's priceless. There's nothing that can replace that.”

Before the union, Vodeo Games was best known for Beast Breaker, an RPG available on Nintendo Switch and PC. Development went well, and even as a fully remote studio, the team became close. They wanted to build upon the aspects of working at Vodeo that they liked, which had led to key changes in the development of its second game. The specifics are yet to be revealed, but this process is likely to look quite different now that they’re unified in fighting for a healthy work-life balance.

One way they’re working towards this is introducing a four-day work week, and making that arrangement permanent. Following this is having more transparent processes and discussions in place, so the workforce has a say in their well-being. What makes this news truly game-changing, however, is that they’re including contract workers in the movement: a group of workers that are usually overlooked in contract negotiation, despite facing some of the worst treatment in the industry.

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“We were really, really committed to having every worker at Vodeo using their voice on the job,” explains Lachapelle. “And more than half of our unit consists of contractors. So having both employees and individual contractors in our union was a big win for us.”

Recent controversies show just how important this is. Twelve contractors at Call of Duty developer Raven Software - which is owned by Activision - lost their jobs just days before Christmas, and even after a month of strikes, Activision is still dragging its heels. By offering some staff permanent contracts but refusing to return jobs to the rest, the industry giant is hoping to rely on a divide-and-conquer tactic. Developers standing shoulder to shoulder with their colleagues in more precarious contracts could threaten this anti-union tactic.

But it’s Activision’s own alleged abuses - and that of the whole gaming industry - that could now be its downfall. It’s this sort of behaviour that inspired Lachapelle and Jong to take action.

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“It's always scary to take that step for sure,” Jong says. “It helps that there had been a lot of groundwork laid over the last few years in terms of spreading more information about what unions are, and examples of workers winning really concrete victories. I think that's actually helped to break down a lot of those anti-union sentiments that people may have.”

“It'd be great if that was part of game dev education, for example. And part of the curriculum is that you learn about your rights, you learn about what to do if those rights are violated.”

But both feel that actual change needs to happen outside of the workplace too, and within the gaming community itself. Jong suggests that what we can do to help, especially as outsiders, is to unionize our own workplaces, even if they aren’t gaming related.

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Lachapelle also has a message for allies. “If there are studios that are having strikes or doing collective action, read the demands,” Lachapelle says. “I see things of like, ‘oh, we need to boycott and not buy their games’. Don't try to spread something that the workers themselves have not asked.” She adds that boycotts are fine if the developers ask for them, but if not “don’t try to be a hero”.

Despite the positivity and optimism about the effects this will have on their own workplace, both are aware that for the rest of the industry, we’re not seeing many positive headlines just yet.

“I think it's gonna take a while before it's really widespread across like the whole industry,” Lachapelle says. “I hope that our situation will inspire others. Even if your studio is very small, it can happen. We did it, and we did it by also winning with our contract workers - it's possible.”

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Jong echoes the last point. “I think that's going to become more and more important, because it does feel like a lot of jobs are shifting towards contract work. And more and more of these positions are precarious by nature.”

“It's in [management’s] best interest not to allow workers to have a say, and have a voice at the table. And so often, unfortunately, that leads to them taking these knee-jerk, anti-union kind of stances.”.

But even if the bosses are an obstacle, Jong still feels there’s no better time to unionize than now. It’s the best step to take towards instilling lasting change in the games industry - one that will inspire similar movements and make a mark in gaming history

“The emergence of all these different movements and organisations like the Voltage [Organized] Workers, the United Paizo Workers, the ABK Workers Alliance, there's just a lot going on in the industry. And so it really made sense for us to join in on this movement, and hopefully, help set a positive precedent for the gaming industry.”

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