A huge announcement was made today in San Francisco at the 2025 Game Developers Conference. The Communications Workers of America (CWA) has announced a new industry-wide union called United Videogame Workers-CWA Local 9433 (UVW-CWA).
This new union is an "industry-wide video game union with the Communications Workers of America in partnership with the American Federation of Musicians (AFM)." This union is open to all gaming industry workers in the United States and Canada, including those who have been laid off.
The CWA is a union that already represents over 2,000 games industry workers. They represent workers at companies like Activision, Microsoft, Bethesda, and Zenimax.
As part of the United Videogame Workers-CWA launch, members will be gathering signatures for a petition demanding dignity and job security for all video game workers, particularly those facing layoffs. The video game industry is one of the fastest-growing entertainment industries in the world, with huge revenue increases in recent years. Across the industry, over 10,500 jobs were lost in 2023 and an additional 14,600 jobs were lost in 2024. According to the GDC 2025 State of the Game Industry, more than 10% of surveyed game developers reported being laid off in 2024. Over 30 studios have laid off their entire staff and were closed by their parent companies, including some of the largest and most profitable corporations like Microsoft and Sony Interactive Entertainment. The full petition can be found here.
With the tumultuous start of the second Trump Administration, two of the agencies that workers rely on to protect their rights and hold corporations accountable – the Department of Labor (DOL) and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) – are under attack. Between Trump’s illegal firing of NLRB member Gwynne Wilcox, Elon Musk challenging the National Labor Relations Act as unconstitutional, and huge tech giants like Amazon already using the vacant NLRB as grounds to reject union wins, it’s clear that Trump and the billionaire class he represents are working day and night to dismantle labor laws and put even more power back in the hands of corporations. We can no longer expect to rely on traditional legal frameworks to build worker power and to improve workplace conditions.
