The supply/demand thing, I wish he omitted because it lets people look at things way too reductionist.
It’s actually very difficult to look at a salary and have that tell you something about supply and demand for a job. It’s obviously not that simple. In particular, it would be impossible to look at that figure and try to make heads or tails of what the “supply and demand” for executives is, because they’re paid so much radically differently. And yet accelerators churn out CEOs every day! You’d point out that I’m asking the wrong question, “it’s not about supply and demand when it comes to executive pay.” I agree, and I don’t think it’s about supply and demand for game developer pay either.
From a strictly economic point of view, the bonus system is very distorting. You get paid a huge bonus if your game gets a lot of units sold after your crunch time. However, since the publishers own the studios now, that doesn’t happen as much, and the bonuses go to the “shareholder” (ie the CEO and other highly stock compensated executives). Seems like exactly the sort of thing a union could negotiate!
But making the low line developer sound like the antagonist? “People to stop taking on terrible jobs because of some sense of ‘passion.’” Like I know you didn’t mean to sound like the bad guy, but is your line of argument really to ignore how economic structures in the industry underpay people, and instead it’s the underpaid people’s fault for being passionate?