Video Game Industry Layoffs Are Structural to Capitalism, and Unionization Is the Workers' Path to Collective Power
Source: Alexandre Paquet. "The Video Game Industry’s Crisis Is a Crisis of Capitalism." October 18, 2026. jacobin.com
The Gist
The author argues that constant layoffs in the video game business are not a glitch but the way capitalism works: companies profit from workers' labor and treat the workers as disposable. Because unions can't always stop layoffs but do give workers a voice, protections, and experience fighting back, the author says game workers should organize to build the power to resist cuts and, ultimately, the system behind them.
Conclusion
The recurring layoffs and precarity in the video game industry are an inherent product of capitalism rather than an aberration, and game workers should organize unions to build the collective power needed to resist both individual rounds of cuts and the system that produces them.
Premises
- Despite the industry's enormous profitability and growth (e.g., CAD$1.4 billion in annual revenue in Quebec, heavy public subsidies), game workers face record precarity and recurring annual layoffs, as with Microsoft's 3,200 Xbox job cuts.
- Under capitalism, workers collectively produce value while corporate owners privately control it, so those who make the games own little of what they produce and bear the risks.
- Capital's interest is in extracting surplus value rather than making games, so crises and layoffs are built into the system ('not a bug') rather than the result of mistakes.
- Game workers are disadvantaged in organizing by industry fragmentation, a 'passion work' culture that justifies exploitation, weak worker self-identification, and employer union-busting.
- Even though unionization did not prevent Microsoft's layoffs at Bethesda Montreal, unions give workers a collective voice, contractual protections, and severance, and serve as institutions where workers learn to struggle and build political capacity.
- Union organizing in games has advanced rapidly (from nearly nonexistent to present at major companies in about seven years), and a visible unionized sector telling success stories can spur further organizing.
Assumptions
- Recurring layoffs in a profitable industry are best explained by capitalism's structural logic rather than by industry-specific factors such as overexpansion, post-pandemic correction, rising development costs, or interest rates.
- The value of unions should be judged by long-term capacity building and not just by their ability to prevent particular layoffs.
- Workplace struggle is a necessary training ground for broader political confrontation with capital.
- Worker radicalization and willingness to strike in Montreal are representative enough to indicate a broader trend.
- Unionization can meaningfully change outcomes in a transnational, fragmented industry where capital is highly mobile.