I want to talk about your GDC talk this week, "Union now? Pros, cons and consequences of unionization." Specifically the talk synopsis mentions, "What unionization can mean for game developers including both good and bad." Can you explain that to me? What is the "bad" of unionization?
JM: So I think one of the challenges that game developers have is that we tend to think of game development in our region, and in our area. So for example a game developers union would by nature be very different than STJV in France which is the game developer's union in France. There are very different laws governing unions, there are very different cultural expectations. That would be very different from a union in South Korea. And South Korea for example just announced laws limiting the number of hours employees can work. So I think one of the things that I'm really looking forward to doing in that talk is to hopefully get people to think about what unionization means on a regional level but also on a global level. And if you unionize in one country what does that mean? Are there repercussions there? If you unionized just in one sector, so if you had a artist's union but not a programmer's union, what would that mean?
I imagine North America as a region is one of the larger regions for game developers. And we had in this past year high-profile layoffs and shutdowns from big companies—Visceral for example. It still feels like there's really no protection for developers that get laid off. There's always grassroots, Twitter campaigns like #GameJobs. Wouldn't a union protect developers from these occurrences?
JM: So I think it depends. We can't assume that there is one single cause of layoffs. So for example if you are a relatively small studio that has laid off a team, odds are you laid them off because you can't afford them anymore.
A union's not going to change that, access to capital is going to change that. [emphasis added by OP] If you are EA shutting down Visceral it's for a different reason that's not necessarily access to capital it's because your relationship with your shareholders and how you are using capitals to further shareholder return on investment. It's a completely different situation... We tend to focus on the stories that get a lot of attention like Visceral, but we need more data.
