Nothing significant stops people from forming worker collectives. Maybe it's telling that they're so uncommon?
Maybe you meant “well, if people are so upset by the status quo, why don't they just all quit and form their own co-operatives to make Starcraft 3?”. This is a great point, and a really interesting question. I think we should all encourage these more just ways of organising companies, but I think people really hesitate to do this because it's really drilled into us culturally that the current system is the only way. In particular, we want to be successful, and be seen as successful, and we get a lot more points in that category if we work for a successful corporation such as Meta, compared to forming some ragtag co-operative.
I do think, and hope, that this is starting to change. I admire the fact that sourcehut [0] is basically organised as a co-operative, and for that matter, so is Valve.
As a result, co-ops need to grow differently and often compete differently; you can't afford to pay 50 people right out the gate to build Starcraft 3 to sell in 2 years' time. You need to be making money from day 1, and you can't compete directly with companies that have access to capital or you lose immediately.
There do exist co-ops in the video game industry - Motion Twin, behind Dead Cells, is one.
So let's open a couple of Ask HN/Pool HN: Are you an investor? Did you invest in a coop-like startup? Would you invest in a coop-like startup? Under which conditions?
It's the intrinsic structure of being owned by the workers that makes co-operatives less financially attractive to outside investors. My previous comment about why: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11166080
Co-operatives also have to compete in the marketplace (compete in both the costs & revenue) with other companies that are not co-ops. This financial pressure from other global economic actors is what causes co-ops like Mondragon to outsource labor to subcontractors or workforce in other countries who are not true members of the co-op. Mondragon appliances, etc still have to compete in sales with everyone else.
If so, the question that remains is a relatively open one. Let's say that, for the sake of argument, we reached the conclusion that organising companies as co-operatives would bring considerable social benefits to the majority of people compared to the current way or organising work. If this were true, what would have to be changed so as to make them a reasonable option? Perhaps our values of prioritising economic values over social value? Perhaps regulations on shareholders?
Yanis Varoufakis proposes a system that answers this question in Another Now [0], but I'm also curious to hear other answers.
[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49098225-another-now
You can always start a co-op which makes a WoW clone. Nothing stops people from that. The fact that it's practically never done says a lot about real-life applicability of co-ops.
I think it proves that co-ops are just worse at complex tasks. A company requires just one dedicated and driven individual (the founder), and the rest of people can be hired and just do tasks assigned to them. Whereas, in a coop, the decision-making process is much harder, and just doesn't work as well for complex organizations. And, game devving (like many other complex tasks) is so hard and fraught with perils, that you don't want to throw in additional complications if you don't have to.
Worker collectives, because they are uncommon, and do not operate under well-known legal framework, face significant obstacles in, for example, getting loans.
This seems to be very much in contrast with the linked article. There are significant legal obstacles as well as much resistance in the form of illegal violence.