We all say we'll happily pay more for the same product. But those words often aren't backed up by actions.
Developers who actually sleep and spend weekends with their families produce a better product than those who just accept dead marches. If managers are aware that they can not get away with those shenanigans it's possible that we'll actually get better games.
The point is, though, many people are willing to put up with that "bullshit" (which, judging by what you say later, mostly revolves around working hours contrary to what you write in this first paragraph). As much as we try to convince ourselves that crunch time and long hours don't work, plenty of studios demonstrate that is does. RDR2 is probably one of the best games of 2018 and it relied on crunch time. At the end of the day, a studio that can't demand crunch time is going to be at a disadvantage compared to those that can.
In an ideal world we'd all have well paying jobs in fields we love that offer good work life balance. But we don't live in the ideal world, we live in the real one. And many game developers are willing to make the sacrifice of long working hours.
What a lot of people don't realize is that unions can also cause wage suppression when they decide that more members working is better than fewer members working at higher pay.
I expect this trend to continue along the lines sketched out by the film industry: smaller core teams with specialized support studios/groups brought onto projects as needed and heavy use of contractors to scale staffing at different points of the project. This works in Hollywood in large part due to the union protections afforded to that temporary workforce, from actors to camera operators to screen writers.
As it stands now, video game development looks a lot like the (film) VFX industry and I think both are in an untenable place for long term sustainability. Something needs to change and I think organizations like SAG are a model for that.
General software development gets moved overseas and comes back all the time.
Software development is hard. Pushing it to a cheaper third party usually increases costs a lot in the long term due to the increase is development complexity and generally a decrease in worker skill.
A strong union can also prevent companies from moving some jobs overseas.
The Witcher 3 was a pretty good game (Polish developers) - many would call that an understatement. The Uncharted series since 2 or 3 relied heavily on outsourced development (especially for art assets). Arma 3 was developed by Czech devs. These countries probably produce lower budget games on average, and don't have lots of existing infrastructure to leverage. But that makes what they have accomplished all the more impressive given what they were working with.
What makes you so confident in the class that developers in countries with lower costs of living are worse than ones in wealthy countries? Do you think that Polish or Bulgarian developers are on average worse than American ones, and it so do you have something to back up that claim?
General software development also isn't unionized. As soon is it is, moving overseas becomes vastly more attractive.
> Software development is hard. Pushing it to a cheaper third party usually increases costs a lot in the long term due to the increase is development complexity and generally a decrease in worker skill.
What's actually harder about outsourcing is management and quality control. The developers in cheaper countries aren't somehow inherently worse.
Many publishers have studios around the world, working on entire games by themselves. Why keep funding an expensive studio in the US that's getting unionized? That better be high caliber, which most studios aren't.
> A strong union can also prevent companies from moving some jobs overseas.
Maybe in a big monolithic company, but that's not how game publishers operate.