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.