Nobody is watching a movie because Jim Gaffer designed the lighting rigs, yet Jim Gaffer is protected by a union and Joe Programmer is not.
You don't have to be a star in order to collectively bargain, you just need to organize with your colleagues.
You don't have to be a star in order to collectively bargain, you just need to organize with your colleagues.
Collective bargaining would not yield Tom Cruise-like returns or even exceptional returns.
The reason is that devs are ultimately a commodity.
Actors, by the way - even good ones - are even more of a commodity. There are tons of spectacular actors who would work cheap.
What brings in the audience is not the quality of the acting, it's the familiarity of the person, or the 'living brand'.
The 'human being Tom Cruise' obviously has the most amazing, unbreakable IP protection on the 'brand Tom Cruise'.
And it's the 'brand Tom Cruise' that has value. (And He only has to be a decent actor, not a even a great one)
Unions might help with some things ... but generally that's not going to be it.
The other thing to consider is the hugely risky and hit-driven nature of the business. Any 'investor' in games is risking so much, that the returns may be a little biased.
Consider that even for a game that 'made a lot of money' - it still may not be rational to have invested in that game! It still maybe overall a 'bad investment' to invest in such things.
A union could do a lot for those who work in the game industry. Game developers work such insane hours during crunch time when there's really no need for it. With a union mandating a standard work week, the onus would be put on the producers of the game to plan effectively in order to meet a deadline.
Game producers would have us all believe that games are uniquely complicated in a way that sets them apart from films and requires such ridiculous time commitments. That's rubbish. The vast majority of the work that goes into a triple A game is asset creation (graphics and sound). This makes games extremely similar to films which are dominated by CG and post-production work these days.
Some games, especially follow ons of well established 'game brands' I can see as being less risky ... but for new titles?
But yes, there's no reason for the countless hours, that's basically just taking advantage of creatives no doubt and admittedly unions may help in some way.
Issues in getting jobs have to do with the limited supply of capitalized projects, high project transactional costs (including fairly high financial, equipment and professional costs), restrictions upon actor country of origin on the basis of bilateral entertainment tax treaties and a number of other structural issues. All of these issues mean that there's a substantial amount of activation energy required to get an entertainment product off the ground, which limits the amount of product projects in motion at any given time.
Feel free to look up the various guild pay grades. The minimums are very low, and they're designed to prevent the 'be in this motion picture for free for exposure' race to the bottom, not to price small projects out of the market.
If the Weinstein scandal is any indication, no it hasn't. Unions are not without their problems, while more widespread awareness about the actual working conditions in any given industry (be it acting or game development) is highly effective, one way or the other. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
It takes some fighting and searching to get all three, the last seeming most hard. But it is possible and not really hard.