Video game development is usually conducted in a casual business environment, with t-shirts and sandals as common work attire. While some workers find this type of environment rewarding and pleasant professionally there has been criticism of this "uniform" potentially adding to a hostile work environment for women. The industry also requires long working hours from its employees (sometimes to an extent seen as unsustainable). Employee
burnout is not uncommon. An entry-level programmer can make, on average, over $66,000 annually only if they are successful in obtaining a position in a medium to large video game company. An experienced game-development employee, depending on their expertise and experience, averaged roughly $73,000 in 2007. Indie game developers may only earn between $10,000 and $50,000 a year depending on how financially successful their titles are. In addition to being part of the software industry, game development is also within the
entertainment industry; most sectors of the entertainment industry (such as
films and
television) require long working hours and dedication from their employees, such as willingness to relocate and/or required to develop games that do not appeal to their personal taste. The creative rewards of work in the entertainment business attracts
labor to the industry, creating a competitive
labor market that demands a high level of commitment and performance from employees. Industry communities, such as the
International Game Developers Association (IGDA), are conducting increasing discussions about the problem; they are concerned that working conditions in the industry cause a significant deterioration in employees' quality of life.
Crunch Some video game developers and publishers have been accused of the excessive invocation of "crunch time". "Crunch time" is the point at which the team is thought to be failing to achieve milestones needed to launch a game on schedule. The complexity of workflow, reliance on third-party deliverables, and the intangibles of artistic and aesthetic demands in video game creation create difficulty in predicting milestones. The use of crunch time is also seen to be exploitative of the younger workforce in video games, who have not had the time to establish a family and who were eager to advance within the industry by working long hours. Because crunch time tends to come from a combination of corporate practices as well as peer influence, the term "crunch culture" is often used to discuss video game development settings where crunch time may be seen as the norm rather than the exception. The use of crunch time as a workplace standard gained attention first in 2004, when
Erin Hoffman exposed the use of crunch time at
Electronic Arts, a situation known as the "EA Spouses" case. Since then, there has generally been negative perception of crunch time from most of the industry as well as from its consumers and other media.
Discrimination and harassment Gender Game development had generally been a predominately male workforce. In 1989, according to
Variety, women constituted only 3% of the gaming industry, while a 2017 IGDA survey found that the female demographic in game development had risen to about 20%. Taking into account that a 2017 ESA survey found 41% of video game players were female, this represented a significant gender gap in game development. The male-dominated industry, most who have grown up playing video games and are part of the
video game culture, can create a culture of "toxic geek masculinity" within the workplace. These factors established conditions within some larger development studios where female developers have found themselves discriminated in workplace hiring and promotion, as well as the target of sexual harassment. This can be coupled from similar harassment from external groups, such as during the 2014
Gamergate controversy. Major investigations into allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct that went unchecked by management, as well as discrimination by employers, have been brought up against
Riot Games,
Ubisoft and
Activision Blizzard in the late 2010s and early 2020s, alongside smaller studios and individual developers. However, while other entertainment industries have had similar exposure through the
Me Too movement and have tried to address the symptoms of these problems industry-wide, the video game industry has yet to have its Me Too-moment, even as late as 2021. Increasing the representation of women in the video game industry required breaking a feedback loop of the apparent lack of female representation in the production of video games and in the content of video games. Efforts have been made to provide a strong
STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) background for women at the
secondary education level, but there are issues with
tertiary education such as at colleges and universities, where game development programs tend to reflect the male-dominated demographics of the industry, a factor that may lead women with strong STEM backgrounds to choose other career goals.
Racial There is also a significant gap in racial minorities within the video game industry; a 2019 IGDA survey found only 2% of developers considered themselves to be of African descent and 7% Hispanic, while 81% were Caucasian; in contrast, 2018 estimates from the
United States Census estimate the U.S. population to be 13% of African descent and 18% Hispanic. In a 2014 and 2015 survey of job positions and salaries, the IGDA found that people of color were both underrepresented in senior management roles as well as underpaid in comparison to white developers. Further, because video game developers typically draw from personal experiences in building game characters, this diversity gap has led to few characters of racial minority to be featured as main characters within video games. Minority developers have also been harassed from external groups due to the toxic nature of the video game culture.
LGBT In regards to
LGBT and other gender or sexual orientations, the video game industry typically shares the same demographics as with the larger population based on a 2005 IGDA survey. Those in the LGBT community do not find workplace issues with their identity, though work to improve the representation of LGBT themes within video games in the same manner as with racial minorities. However, LGBT developers have also come under the same type of harassment from external groups like women and racial minorities due to the nature of the video game culture.
Contract workers Some of the larger video game developers and publishers have also engaged contract workers through agencies to help add manpower in game development in part to alleviate crunch time from employees. Contractors are brought on for a fixed period and generally work similar hours as full-time staff members, assisting across all areas of video game development, but as contractors, do not get any benefits such as paid time-off or health care from the employer; they also are typically not credited on games that they work on for this reason. The practice itself is legal and common in other engineering and technology areas, and generally it is expected that this is meant to lead into a full-time position, or otherwise the end of the contract. But more recently, its use in the video game industry has been compared to
Microsoft's past use of "
permatemp", contract workers that were continually renewed and treated for all purposes as employees but received no benefits. While Microsoft has waned from the practice, the video game industry has adapted it more frequently. Around 10% of the workforce in video games is estimated to be from contract labor.
Unionization Similar to other tech industries, video game developers are typically not
unionized. This is a result of the industry being driven more by creativity and innovation rather than production, the lack of distinction between management and employees in the white-collar area, and the pace at which the industry moves that makes union actions difficult to plan out. However, when situations related to crunch time become prevalent in the news, there have typically been followup discussions towards the potential to form a union. A similar survey of over 4,000 game developers run by the
Game Developers Conference in early 2019 found that 47% of respondents felt the video game industry should unionize. In 2016, voice actors in the
Screen Actors Guild‐American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) union doing work for video games struck several major publishers, demanding better
royalty payments and provisions related to the safety of their vocal performances, when their union's standard contract was up for renewal. The
voice actor strike lasted for over 300 days into 2017 before a new deal was made between SAG-AFTRA and the publishers. While this had some effects on a few games within the industry, it brought to the forefront the question of whether video game developers should unionize. A grassroots movement,
Game Workers Unite, was established around 2017 to discuss and debate issues related to unionization of game developers. The group came to the forefront during the March 2018
Game Developers Conference by holding a roundtable discussion with the
International Game Developers Association (IGDA), the professional association for developers. Statements made by the IGDA's current executive director Jen MacLean relating to IGDA's activities had been seen by as anti-union, and Game Workers Unite desired to start a conversation to lay out the need for developers to unionize. In the wake of the sudden near-closure of
Telltale Games in September 2018, the movement again called out for the industry to unionize. The movement argued that Telltale had not given any warning to its 250 employees let go, having hired additional staff as recently as a week prior, and left them without pensions or health-care options; it was further argued that the studio considered this a closure rather than layoffs, as to get around failure to notify required by the
Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act of 1988 preceding layoffs. The situation was argued to be "exploitive", as Telltale had been known to force its employees to frequently work under "crunch time" to deliver its games. By the end of 2018, a United Kingdom trade union, Game Workers Unite UK, an affiliate of the Game Workers Unite movement, had been legally established. Following
Activision Blizzard's financial report for the previous quarter in February 2019, the company said that they would be laying off around 775 employees (about 8% of their workforce) despite having record profits for that quarter. Further calls for unionization came from this news, including the
AFL–CIO writing an open letter to video game developers encouraging them to unionize. In January 2020, Game Workers Unite and the
Communications Workers of America established a new campaign to push for unionization of video game developers, the
Campaign to Organize Digital Employees (CODE), in January 2020. Initial efforts for CODE were aimed to determine what approach to unionization would be best suited for the video game industry. Whereas some video game employees believe they should follow the craft-based model used by SAG-AFTRA which would unionize based on job function, others feel an industry-wide union, regardless of job position, would be better. Starting in 2021, several smaller game studios in the United States began efforts to unionize. These mostly involved teams doing
quality assurance rather than developers. These studios included three QA studios under
Blizzard Entertainment:
Raven Software,
Blizzard Albany, and Proletariat; and
Zenimax Media's QA team.
Microsoft, which had previously acquired Zenimax and announced plans to acquire Blizzard via the acquisition of
Activision Blizzard, stated it supported these unionization efforts. After this acquisition, the employees of
Bethesda Game Studios, part of Zenimax under Microsoft, unionized under the
Communications Workers of America (CWA) in July 2024. Over 500 employees within
Blizzard Entertainment's
World of Warcraft division also unionized with CWA that same month. Similarly, Blizzard's
Overwatch team unionized in May 2025, Raven Software, Blizzard's story and franchise development team, and Blizzard's
Diablo team separately voted for unionization in August 2025, and the
Hearthstone and
Warcraft Rumble teams followed with their vote in October 2025. By this point, over 2000 Blizzard employees had become unionzized. Sweden presents a unique case where nearly all parts of its labor force, including white-collar jobs such as video game development, may engage with labor unions under the
Employment Protection Act often through
collective bargaining agreements. Developer
DICE had reached its union agreements in 2004.
Paradox Interactive became one of the first major publishers to support unionization efforts in June 2020 with its own agreements to cover its Swedish employees within two labor unions
Unionen and
SACO. In Australia, video game developers could join other unions, but the first video game-specific union, Game Workers Unite Australia, was formed in December 2021 under
Professionals Australia to become active in 2022. In Canada, in a historic move, video game workers in Edmonton unanimously voted to unionize for the first time in June 2022. In January 2023, after not being credited in
The Last of Us HBO adaptation,
Bruce Straley called for
unionization of the
video game industry. He told the
Los Angeles Times: "Someone who was part of the co-creation of that world and those characters isn't getting a credit or a nickel for the work they put into it. Maybe we need unions in the video game industry to be able to protect creators." An industry-wide union, the United Video game Workers-CWA (UVA-CWA), for North American workers, was announced in March 2025 with support from the Communication Workers of America.
ZA/UM, the developers of
Disco Elysium, became the first video game studio in the United Kingdom to unionize under the
Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain in October 2025. Video game scholars have argued that systematic issues in the industry, such as improper creditation, exploitaiton, and crunch, can directly impact games produced. The best known example of this is
Warren Robinett's Easter Egg in
Adventure (1979). At the time,
Atari did not credit developers for their games, reducing their bargaining and star power . Robinett created a hidden room in which the words 'Created by Warren Robinett' appeared on an infinite loop, which became known as one of the earliest video game Easter Eggs . According to Spowage,
The Last of Us reflects problems faced by developers in its
semiotic landscapes. Workplace signs in-game register problems that faced developers working on the game, including low pay and lack of unionisation . Because of these kinds of examples, Dyer-Witherford and de Peuter argue that developers have a 'disruptive potential' with regards to the products of development (games), even where denied control over the process of development ==See also==