Drawing on its years of experience as the majority union in the French video games industry, the STJV was able to draw up an assessment of the industry, which has become a corporate circus. We have drawn up an action plan so that we, the video game workers, can make lasting improvements to our industry.

To demand that the industry finally becomes mature and stable, for workers to benefit from dignified working conditions, and to have confidence in the future, the STJV is calling all workers and students to take part in a general strike of the video game industry on February the 13th, 2025.

We demand:

1. Preservation of jobs, the cancellation of layoffs and the accountability of decision-makers who must first make sacrifices themselves when their companies face difficulties.
2. Companies’ full transparency about their financial situation and economic health, so that workers can plan their future, and profit sharing with workers.
3. Consideration for work-related health and personal life, through work reorganisation and the reduction of work hours.
4. Direct participation of workers in decision-making at their companies in order to avoid management errors and control the proper use of private and public funding.

These demands are highly practical, and come in response to decades of corporate mismanagement, opacity and denial of workers’ suffering. For example, at the time this call is published, workers at Don’t Nod are on strike against a layoff plan caused by years of mismanagement, and unheeded workers’ alerts. Don’t hesitate to support their strike fund.

Although our bosses systematically ignore polite requests, workers can count on their numbers and the solidarity that binds them together. We need to organise everywhere. We encourage everyone to meet their union representatives to talk about the situation, to contact us, to organise actions and discussions in their own areas, and to go together to the rallies that will be organised on 13 February.

This call covers the STJV’s field of action in the private sector, and therefore applies to any person employed by a video game publishing, distribution, services and/or creation company – whatever their position or status and whatever their company’s area of activity (games, consoles, mobile, serious games, VR/AR, game engines, marketing services, streaming, derivative products, esports, online content creation, etc.) – as well as to all teachers working in private schools in video game-related courses. As this is a national strike call, no action is necessary to go on strike: just don’t go to work.

If you want to reuse our GG25 visuals, we produced a press kit: https://cloud.stjv.fr/s/FBSYLQ7QZcqMLcx

Context

Now over 50 years old, the video game industry is not a ‘young’ industry. However, it remains unstable, with antiquated working conditions, and is still underdeveloped, due to a lack of accumulated and advanced knowledge. The vast majority of video game bosses are clowns with over-inflated egos, only accepting totalitarian control and vainly trying to hide their incompetence by treating workers and consumers like stupid children.

The crisis the video game industry is currently going through is entirely due to these bosses but it’s the workers, the very people without whom games wouldn’t exist, who are losing their jobs. Just as capitalism allows.

Social crises and layoffs are multiplying, from Don’t Nod to Artisan Studios via Ubisoft, Leikir, Spiders, Goblinz… The list goes on and on, and the stories of workers in distress are multiplying.

In an initial article we identified three major categories of problem plaguing the industry:

• Unacceptable working conditions, where discrimination thrives, preventing workers from being able to have a real, sustainable career.
• Widespread disorganisation, in which an absence of strategic planning directly impacts workers’ health, job stability, and production quality.
• Complete indifference, if not outright hostility, from companies on issues of work-related health and disability.

Since its creation in 2017, the STJV has taken numerous actions to support workers and improve the industry: legal, moral and financial support, worker representation in companies, data gathering, building relationships with political institutions and trade unions in France and around the world, etc.

While the STJV has succeeded in placing video games among the most unionised private industries in France, the fight is still ongoing.

This was the theme of our press conference on January the 16th, during which we presented the union’s orientations for the coming years. We have reproduced them in this article.

Informing workers

In the video games industry, as in many others, employers are methodically trying to deprive workers of knowledge about their own industry: everyday problems, our skills and trades, our rights, etc. The STJV proposes an action plan to train video games workers on a massive scale about the reality of their industry.

We want to :

• Produce more data on the problems and working conditions in the video game industry in order to make them more objectively known.
• Establish a credible reference framework of video game professions, by and for workers, with the aim of establishing clear job descriptions and fighting against the vagueness and even active disinformation about our skills and professions, which are damaging our careers and benefiting employers.
• Create more public documentation on workers‘ rights and employers’ obligations, to combat employers’ abuses and train workers in the sector. Employers would also benefit from this learning a great deal themselves.
• Draw up an assessment of self-employment (‘freelance’), which is becoming increasingly common in the video game industry, but whose status is little known and poorly documented. All too often it is a form of disguised salaried employment, depriving workers of the majority of state protection schemes, while directly exposing them to job insecurity.
• Inform students who need to know both their specific rights, but also to be better trained in labour law and the specific situation of our industry as future video game workers.
• Improve training for workers, in particular by enabling them to use the twelve paid days of economic, social, environmental and trade union training leave to which they are entitled each year in France.
• Ensure that the voice, information and representation of workers are respected. Employee representative bodies are still not respected by employers, who block all attempts at change and improvement, leaving workers in the dark. We encourage these bodies to sue their companies whenever necessary and will commit the necessary means to help them do so.

Raising awareness among public authorities

For a long time, the video game industry was only represented by employers‘ lobbies, which kept the public authorities in the dark, allowing employers to shower themselves with public money while continuing to violate workers’ rights with total impunity. The STJV wants to put a definitive end to this situation by showing the true face of the industry to elected representatives, the CNC, the French labour inspection authority… and to any other institution concerned.

We want to :

• Demonstrate the strategic value of the video game industry. Between advanced technologies that can be used in sensitive areas, the soft power that it represents, and the hegemony of foreign groups and capital within it, public authorities should take an interest in the sector.
• Inform elected representatives and institutions about the state of working conditions and widespread non-compliance with the law in the video game industry, with job and career insecurity directly threatening French video game production and its international competitiveness in the short and medium term.
• Inform elected representatives and institutions about the public subsidies used in the video game sector, how they are distributed, and how they are actually used. They must be able to measure the real value of this aid and the shortcomings of its current use, to enable them to better frame their political action.
• Inform elected representatives and institutions about institutes in the public and private video game education system, many of which receive public funding. The hegemony of big private groups and their influence on studying conditions, where high prices, mediocre teaching standards, and the maintenance of a code of silence are just as much a threat to the industry.

Reorganising video game productions

Corporate disorganisation and lack of strategy, fuelled by the incompetence or malice of our bosses, are the main threats to workers’ health and jobs, as well as to the quality and diversity of productions. If these problems are not resolved, the very existence of the video games industry is threatened.

We will fight to :

• Establish common principles of healthy and efficient production management that do not crush workers, while stabilising jobs, and leaving room for creativity, innovation and worker expression. This will result in quality games produced under good conditions.
• Impose the most horizontal hierarchy possible in companies. Integrating workers directly into decision-making is a necessary measure for jobs and business survival. Workers have predicted every business failure or bankruptcy that has hit the industry in recent years. A dictatorial hierarchy refusing to listen to their solutions has prevented problems from being solved on time.
• End the cult of the author and allow workers to choose what their work contributes to. This is a democratic measure, of cultural and economic salvation, to break the current vicious circle of standardisation in games. Games are the complex result of collaboration between workers with a wide range of skills, not of solitary creative ‘geniuses’ that don’t exist.

Making the fight international

Like many industries, the video game sector is part of an international context that has a direct impact on workers’ rights. Social dumping (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_dumping) is one example of the concrete impact it has on jobs and working conditions.

Taking an internationalist position, the STJV has made this an essential factor in its action since its creation, whether through the exchange of knowledge or support for foreign unions, including in their creation process. The development of global trade unionism in video games means that we can do even more, together.

Our ambition is to :

• Set up joint actions with foreign unions, in a spirit of international solidarity to help video game workers organise everywhere, and to fight against companies putting workers in competition with each other, particularly through outsourcing.
• Inform and raise the awareness of foreign unions and international institutions about the video game industry in order to get higher levels involved in legislation and eventually negotiate international agreements. This may include strengthening our presence within the Uni Global Union, of which the STJV has been a member for several years.

Creating and securing new rights

While we are still a long way from it on many issues, the video game industry’s outdated working conditions will not improve simply by complying with the legal minimum. Video game workers, like all workers, must be able to work in dignified conditions and to get the recognition they deserve, so they don’t waste their lives fighting to receive what they are due.

In addition to representing the industry before the institutions, we are going to use all the levers of action at our disposal to:

• Obtain new rights for all of society, by getting the video game industry involved in inter-professional actions whether they be international, national or in branches close to the video game industry. The diversity of our industry means that we can play a liaison role between industries such as IT and animation.
• Obtain new rights in companies, by negotiating company agreements with the aim of standardising these rights as far as possible across companies and workers in the industry.

We will first focus on the urgent issues in the video game industry:

• Tracking and restructuring and reducing working hours, so that working life no longer devours life altogether, and to prevent companies abusing working hours as much as possible.
• Disabilities, so that the video game industry finally becomes accessible to everyone, with positions adapted to each individual, and so that disabilities are acknowledged, including those that are widespread in the video game industry but that have little to recognition from the State.
• Physical health, work-related illnesses and accidents, and ergonomics. The risks associated with office jobs, in particular musculoskeletal, neurological and visual disorders, must finally be taken into account. Solutions must be found so that workers can remain in good health beyond a few years of their career.
• Psycho-social risks, such as depression, burnout and anxiety which wreak havoc among video game workers due to the disastrous working conditions, and which remain systematically ignored by companies.
• Consumer violence to which video game workers are exposed, particularly in online marketing teams, and the consequences of which are almost universally ignored. The STJV would like to introduce the concept of operational protection, which exists in the civil service, into our industry.
• Emergency protection measures for workers, in particular by stopping production when there is too much sick leave taken in a short time period, which is a sign of serious organisational malfunctioning endangering workers.
• Workers’ compensation and in particular, in the form of contractual bonuses, the sharing of the value they produce when a game is a commercial success.

The general strike

We know from experience that our bosses, whatever the company and although they claim the opposite, do not listen when we ask them regularly to improve our working conditions and our careers. It is therefore necessary to make them understand in a different way that workers, their rights and their working conditions are not mere adjustment variables to make up for their incompetence.

Employers have colossal means at their disposal, because they use the value created by workers against them, with lawyers, crisis communication firms and trade union repression consultants – however, workers have numbers and the solidarity that binds them together.

To demand that the industry finally matures and becomes stable, that workers benefit from dignified working conditions, and that they can have confidence in the future, the STJV calls on all workers to take part in a general strike of the video game industry on February the 13th, 2025.

We will publish a detailed call for strike action tomorrow, Friday 17 January 2025.

7 years ago, the STJV was created to address video game workers’ problems.

Over the past 5 years, our activities in representing workers in companies and our work with freelance workers have intensified and, over the past 2 years, we have seen them multiply even further.

Today, despite our successes and ongoing efforts, working conditions in the industry have deteriorated to such an extent that all the alarm bells are ringing.

Our assessment of the situation has identified several major bottlenecks, associated with problems that will have to be corrected if the industry is to get back on the right track:

• Careers and discrimination
• Disorganisation and lack of strategy within companies
• Total disregard for workers’ health and safety.

Chaotic jobs and careers: an obstacle course

Severance agreements as a career goal

Problems start at school, with courses that are extremely expensive, inadequate and dangerous for students’ health. In these institutions where nepotism reigns supreme, we are taught the harmful culture of crunch, all of this with no proper training for entering a hyper-competitive working world where we will have to get by despite wages that are not always sustainable, and the lack of supervision and on-the-job training.

Why is there a majority of young workers in the video games industry? Because older workers have long since left the industry. Why? Low pay, unstable contracts, hidden work, lack of career progression, negative impact to family life… In other words, not only is it a real struggle at first, but working conditions don’t even improve with time and experience.

And that’s if you’re lucky enough not to suffer harassment and discrimination. From difficult recruitment processes to being forced to resign, as well as the routine hell endured in a culture of sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia and so on, the video games industry can become a self-esteem black hole.

Disarray is the norm, nothingness is the strategy

“I played a game last weekend”

From the earliest stages of development, games face many obstacles. They are made despite the incompetence of upper management. A lack of knowledge about the world of video games, a focus on profits and ever-increasing productivity demands, the invention of so-called ‘solutions’ without consulting experts, a permeability to the industry’s latest fads: these are just some of the characteristics that describe decision-makers in the video game industry.

As a result, ordinary workers have to deal with the fantasies of their hierarchy. Their expertise is not acknowledged, and they are not trusted, so they have no choice but to adapt to decisions that are at best clumsy, often completely stupid. They also have to deal with a host of top managers who waste precious time on inefficient processes, meetings and cumbersome, time-consuming micro-management. Unable to come up with realistic schedules and briefings, let alone effective supervision, they foster confusion at the expense of organisation.

As for creative directors, it’s the rule of silence. Despotic and untouchable, these people use their seniority and connections to do as they please, without any possible challenge from workers. This is how we end up wasting time, money and skills by restarting productions several times over, at a simple request from upper management, who are content to follow the latest trends blindly

Despite decades of history of this “young” industry, production targets are still totally distorted by a short-term vision based on inevitable crunch and the desire to impress executives or publishers. In addition, cost estimates are unrealistic and do not take into account the realities of producing a game. And when the results or financial estimates are not to their liking, production is further compromised by accounting schemes designed to mislead shareholders or executives, just to ensure bonuses and dividends.

This lack of communication and information also undermines the quality of games. Throughout all phases of development, the excessive division of labour isolates teams from each other. Not to mention the industry’s legendary paranoia, which obscures the strategies and overall vision of a project or a company. Everything is stretched thin, done in a vacuum, with no room for hindsight, benchmarking, self-criticism or experimentation. As a result, there is no room for innovation and creativity, which leads to mediocre games.

In smaller companies however, the ask for polyvalence can turn into a real balancing act. While it is understandable that smaller teams mean that boundaries are less defined, it often ends up means outright not having required skills available from team members (specifically when it comes to quality assurance or communications, but also by asking for separate specialties like going back and forth from 2D to 3D graphics) in the hope that someone within the team steps up and shoulders the burden.

Abandonment as a prevention policy

Burnouts, muscle pain, fruit baskets

Unfortunately, the problems described above affect not only the games themselves, but also those who make them. They are subjected to working conditions harmful to their health, but these problems are systematically downplayed and overlooked.

To begin with, companies refuse to acknowledge any problem as systemic. Everything is treated as individual responsibility in the neoliberal fantasy, making it impossible to genuinely tackle issues and implement appropriate policies.

Within companies, staff representatives are often blocked through a lack of documets, information, consultation…Another strategy is when some companies try to outright block the setup or basic functions of employee representatives (by avoiding speaking about it, or by organising elections too early where only the first employees are eligible). As for independent workers, they are subjected to the do-or-die doctrine, since the question of health in the workplace simply does not exist (no tracking, supervision, or laws).

In any event, we can never count on work-related accidents and illnesses being taken into account, let alone disabilities, which are denied and swept under the carpet. Only solidarity between workers can sometimes prevent the worst from happening.

Workstation and career adaptations, meanwhile, are subject to the whim of employers, who see them as unnecessary comfort. Ergonomic tools, part-time work and remote working, for example, are refused purely because of ideology and autoritarianism.

In short, workers have to fight constantly to achieve the legal minimum, and well-being at work is treated as an incidental luxury of which they should be lucky to get even the smallest crumb.

Faced with these problems, and faced with the current state of our industry, which employers seem to want to reduce to rubble, the STJV does not intend to remain inactive…

… see you in 2025.