Are there any unionized game studios that continue to produce highly acclaimed games?
Bethesda used to make great games, but the last great game they made was Skyrim in 2011, they unionized in 2022, and just recently they had some big layoffs.
CD Projekt made the highly acclaimed Witcher 3 in 2015, Cyberpunk disappointed on it's release in 2020, although it's reviews are mixed. CD Projekt unionized in 2023.
Blizzard have been in decline for a long time, they mostly focus on maintaining the cash cows games WoW and hearthstone. Although Diablo has is mostly well regarded(ignoring immortal). They haven't made any new ambitious game for a while. Their last attempt at making something ambitious was Titan, a cancelled MMO that they worked on for 6 years and supposedly spent $80 million on, cancelled in 2013.
The decline seems to begin well before the unionization, so I wouldn't say it's causal, it's more of a symptom of the company no longer being a place that can foster high functioning teams, where people feel like they are valued and working on something important.
Are there any unionized game studios that continue to produce highly acclaimed games?
In order for that to happen, a game studio that is currently producing highly acclaimed games would have to unionize. All of your examples seem to be of studios that are past their peak... Does unionizing turn that around? Seems like no, but what does?
Anyway, Acclaim Games shut down in 2004, and again in 2010. There's a new Acclaim as of 2025, so maybe there's a chance highly Acclaimed games will come out, but I don't think they're unionized, and it might just all be vapor and puffery.
Aguably those things would have happened with or without a union. E.g. it's extremely rare that any studio could repeat a masterpiece like Witcher 3, and CDPR's earlier Witcher titles also are far away from that quality. This game really was a unique 'perfect storm'.
From what I've seen, success and following decline are directly related. Once a studio becomes successful, they start to attract the sort of people (especially in leading positions) who are great at selling themselves but not much else, and the studio founders haven't learned yet to separate the chaff from the wheat. And then after a while suddenly the company is full of 'mercenaries' which only care about their own carreer advancement but not about the games they create.
I live in Sweden, but my company is not unionized (somewhat unusual). Non-unionized companies at least in tech tend to be _overtly_ better places to work than unionized ones simply because people have the _option_ to go to a unionized company. So the non-unionized companies have to make up for it with better work conditions, benefits and pay.
Even if you are not unionized you benefit from other people being unionized in your profession/area.
My uneducated take here is based my my friend's experience, who is an electrician. He's happy to be more flexible than the law allows him to. Work more hours, longer shifts, worse times of the day. Whatever gets the job done as good as possible. But there's an expectation of mutual respect here. If the boss starts not compensating him sufficiently for the work he is asked to do, not giving him time off and periods of calm, and listening to him when he thinks he's nearing his limits, the system doesn't work.
Just like laws in reality are the to protect the average Joe from an abusive employer, unions are similarly a strength in numbers approach to being treated better.
It seems unionisation is one way people slam the breaks on companies that don't treat them fairly for the effort they are expected to put in. Your evidence seems to indicate the companies had plenty of chances to ask "why are people unhappy" before their employees unionised
I'm not sure I follow the correlation or causation logic here. By the evidence presented the conclusion I would draw is it's very difficult to have repeated success. All your stated failures predated any unionisation.
If anything to unionization seems correlated simply to how long a company has been around.
There aren't many studios that have managed long term repeated success.
The best contenders would be:
Nintendo EPD, Nintendo's internal studio.
~40 years of sustained high quality games.
FromSoftware is also about 40 years old, although didn't really see breakout success until Demon's Souls in 2009.
Naughty Dog, founded in 1989, released Crash Bandicoot in 1996, and have continuously maintained a high bar.
Rockstar is 27 years old and makes great games, though it's been about 6 years since they released a game. Also I believe they have recently begun to unionize.
Valve is also worth a mention, they never really dropped the bar in terms of quality, they just lost interest in making games because they make so much money from Steam.
I guess we will find out when GTA 6 comes out as Rockstar has become unionized.
Although actually…Rockstar didn’t become unionized until most of GTA 6 had already been completed. So I guess we’ll find out when their next game comes out.
Fair point on WoW and I totally forgot Starcraft 2.
Diablo 3 I played extensively, yet I felt somewhat disgusted by the end of it.
But it's a product of that time. If I think about the games I played recently, nothing holds except Warcraft 3 with the custom maps.
I have little time so I play only what I consider "top" for my taste and drop everything else, even in the "good" category.
Due to that my last few years have been games that last me hundreds and hundreds of hours with high satisfaction, or shorter games with high satisfaction.
Either way, I would never play diablo 3 the same amount of time I did back in the day, the only reason I played was because of the friends I had
I don't see how this is a meaningful statement, as it implies there are games that cross this threshold. GTA V and Cyberpunk are some of the most critically aclaimed and beloved games ever made?
One theory is that building/maintaining games is knowledge work, and each worker you retain helps with that. But as always, human social groups can deviate against the common good, but they can also boost it, and in this case even protect against abuses of the masses workers by management.
I don't think "raw, unfettered capitalism" and unions are orthogonal.
Actually, quite the opposite - in a free market, labor is free to organize in any way they want. If they have enough leverage over the employer, they'll succeed.
The anti-free market part is the regulatory quagmire that the US has in place for organized labor.
I think that's the thing that most people take umbrage with.
I don't know for sure, but I've heard from knowledgeable folks that it is more effective in Europe.
They are a little bit, because collective action is very hard. If everyone chooses to participate and pay the cost of organizing it is worth the cost and a union will happen. But if a number of people choose not to then everything falls apart, as it is no longer worth it for anyone to pay the cost and the union can't function. Often the benefits of a union are also a public good, meaning everyone gets the benefits of a union fighting for better working conditions whether they pay the cost or not. If so, then there's little incentive to pay and the union will have trouble keeping itself alive.
Unions need some external extra incentive, like the state forcing them to exist or subsidizing the cost of organizing, to exist long term.
I don't think "raw, unfettered capitalism" and unions are orthogonal.
In a vacuum, no. If the most profitable approach means involves maintaining an "all star" cast to keep the best team happy, then everything works out. That's the athlete/celebrity model.
But current dynamics has games divorced from quality to generate the most profit, and companies work to minimize expenses instead, via the assembly line approach. Devaluing labor to maximize money makes unions inevitable.
the expectation combined with more studios doing stuff, the fact that video-games don't have 100 years (so it's a maturing art form, somehow) and also investment money... i believe there's much more chances of quality declining on companies by the hook of investors or at least less innovation (which seems to drive a bunch of 'unicorns' on this field)? graphics kinda topped by now, there's no more magic on realism/fancy graphics! maybe at some point role-play/storytelling will get more complex/infinite with AI but it's not clear how or if it'll, as we have player driven multi-player video-games for quite a while, like Albion or some much older: https://www.havenandhearth.com/portal/ ... maybe man vs. the machine in a sensible way and not those engines stomping pro-players on Dota
I think Valve sets a good example for an alternative, while not union they operate with a flat structure and is not publicly traded which sets them apart. They're kinda like an elite guild of game developers.
I'm not really sure how you could know this? For all we know all the employees are unionized and haven't felt like they need to push management for official recognition.
Let's not get too excited until the game is actually released. Cyberpunk was also irrationally hyped and then was released as a turd which then took 5 more years to become a merely 'good' but not great game.
Unionization seems to be a secondary effect of strategic failure. If there is a causal relationship, I think it happens in reverse.
Walking the game theory backward, if the team was executing successfully and productively and everyone is getting paid fat bonuses then I don't think there is much motivation to get political in the workplace.
Only after the soul has been completely extracted from a company/team does this process seem to occur.
I wonder how many examples there actually are of the people in the trenches doing the actual work getting a 'fat bonus'.
E.g. the idea that unionization might not be a bad idea usually starts with teams not getting any bonuses after they created a highly successful game, and instead the company preventing such 'problems' by firing most of the team right before a game ships.
Linear Technology gave the same bonus multiplier based on overall company profit, paid out every 6 months. Most years this came out as an extra 30% on top of base comp for literally everyone at the company. Then the founders retired, Linear got Acquired by Analog Devices, and the program was scrapped the next year.
There's also RenTech, which allows employees to invest in their private fund that pays out 40% annually.
So to answer your question: not many, especially not in games.
Comments
Are there any unionized game studios that continue to produce highly acclaimed games?
Bethesda used to make great games, but the last great game they made was Skyrim in 2011, they unionized in 2022, and just recently they had some big layoffs.
CD Projekt made the highly acclaimed Witcher 3 in 2015, Cyberpunk disappointed on it's release in 2020, although it's reviews are mixed. CD Projekt unionized in 2023.
Blizzard have been in decline for a long time, they mostly focus on maintaining the cash cows games WoW and hearthstone. Although Diablo has is mostly well regarded(ignoring immortal). They haven't made any new ambitious game for a while. Their last attempt at making something ambitious was Titan, a cancelled MMO that they worked on for 6 years and supposedly spent $80 million on, cancelled in 2013.
The decline seems to begin well before the unionization, so I wouldn't say it's causal, it's more of a symptom of the company no longer being a place that can foster high functioning teams, where people feel like they are valued and working on something important.
In order for that to happen, a game studio that is currently producing highly acclaimed games would have to unionize. All of your examples seem to be of studios that are past their peak... Does unionizing turn that around? Seems like no, but what does?
Anyway, Acclaim Games shut down in 2004, and again in 2010. There's a new Acclaim as of 2025, so maybe there's a chance highly Acclaimed games will come out, but I don't think they're unionized, and it might just all be vapor and puffery.
Aguably those things would have happened with or without a union. E.g. it's extremely rare that any studio could repeat a masterpiece like Witcher 3, and CDPR's earlier Witcher titles also are far away from that quality. This game really was a unique 'perfect storm'.
From what I've seen, success and following decline are directly related. Once a studio becomes successful, they start to attract the sort of people (especially in leading positions) who are great at selling themselves but not much else, and the studio founders haven't learned yet to separate the chaff from the wheat. And then after a while suddenly the company is full of 'mercenaries' which only care about their own carreer advancement but not about the games they create.
I live in Sweden, but my company is not unionized (somewhat unusual). Non-unionized companies at least in tech tend to be _overtly_ better places to work than unionized ones simply because people have the _option_ to go to a unionized company. So the non-unionized companies have to make up for it with better work conditions, benefits and pay.
Even if you are not unionized you benefit from other people being unionized in your profession/area.
My uneducated take here is based my my friend's experience, who is an electrician. He's happy to be more flexible than the law allows him to. Work more hours, longer shifts, worse times of the day. Whatever gets the job done as good as possible. But there's an expectation of mutual respect here. If the boss starts not compensating him sufficiently for the work he is asked to do, not giving him time off and periods of calm, and listening to him when he thinks he's nearing his limits, the system doesn't work.
Just like laws in reality are the to protect the average Joe from an abusive employer, unions are similarly a strength in numbers approach to being treated better.
It seems unionisation is one way people slam the breaks on companies that don't treat them fairly for the effort they are expected to put in. Your evidence seems to indicate the companies had plenty of chances to ask "why are people unhappy" before their employees unionised
I'm not sure I follow the correlation or causation logic here. By the evidence presented the conclusion I would draw is it's very difficult to have repeated success. All your stated failures predated any unionisation.
If anything to unionization seems correlated simply to how long a company has been around.
That's a fair criticism.
There aren't many studios that have managed long term repeated success.
The best contenders would be:
Nintendo EPD, Nintendo's internal studio. ~40 years of sustained high quality games.
FromSoftware is also about 40 years old, although didn't really see breakout success until Demon's Souls in 2009.
Naughty Dog, founded in 1989, released Crash Bandicoot in 1996, and have continuously maintained a high bar.
Rockstar is 27 years old and makes great games, though it's been about 6 years since they released a game. Also I believe they have recently begun to unionize.
Valve is also worth a mention, they never really dropped the bar in terms of quality, they just lost interest in making games because they make so much money from Steam.
I guess we will find out when GTA 6 comes out as Rockstar has become unionized.
Although actually…Rockstar didn’t become unionized until most of GTA 6 had already been completed. So I guess we’ll find out when their next game comes out.
I doubt that any of us will still be alive at the time when GTA 7 releases - at least when looking at the trajectory of GTA release dates ;)
Remember that correlation != causation.
They might also have unionized due to the bad conditions while developing GTA 6, which could also lead to it being a bad game. Who knows though.
Isn't Activision Blizzard, which implies they make call of duty which is one of the games that makes the most money out there?
I don't like any of that, but they do make money.
As for good games, the last one was warcraft 3 maybe
Yeah they still make good money.
I think calling WC3 the last good game is immoderately scornful though.
I regret the time I spent playing WoW, but it was category defining and a cultural phenomenon.
StarCraft 2 was excellent, perhaps to this day the best RTS ever made.
Diablo 3 was highly regarded.
Lol, Diablo 2 was the last good Diablo (it has a great remaster now btw).
Fair point on WoW and I totally forgot Starcraft 2.
Diablo 3 I played extensively, yet I felt somewhat disgusted by the end of it.
But it's a product of that time. If I think about the games I played recently, nothing holds except Warcraft 3 with the custom maps.
I have little time so I play only what I consider "top" for my taste and drop everything else, even in the "good" category. Due to that my last few years have been games that last me hundreds and hundreds of hours with high satisfaction, or shorter games with high satisfaction.
Either way, I would never play diablo 3 the same amount of time I did back in the day, the only reason I played was because of the friends I had
Diablo 3, no, it was horrible
The rest you've mentioned were bangers in their own ways however.
Diablo 3 got such a harsh reaction that one of the lead game developers quit the industry after
Workers unionize when they're being treated poorly by management. Workers in such situation tend to not produce their best work.
You have cause and effect ass-backwards
Patched Cyberpunk is the best game after Elden Ring of the last 10 years
Cyberpunk created a beautiful city and world but it feels so empty with no real interactions possible with the NPCs. Not unlike the GTA games.
What's "real interactions"?
Care to provide counterexamples?
I don't see how this is a meaningful statement, as it implies there are games that cross this threshold. GTA V and Cyberpunk are some of the most critically aclaimed and beloved games ever made?
Baldur's Gate 3 is much better on this front.
I don't really know what unionization has to do with making good games. We've seen plenty of studios fall from grace with raw, unfettered capitalism.
It ultimately will come down to if it can retain talent and don't do a soft reset every project.
One theory is that building/maintaining games is knowledge work, and each worker you retain helps with that. But as always, human social groups can deviate against the common good, but they can also boost it, and in this case even protect against abuses of the masses workers by management.
I don't think "raw, unfettered capitalism" and unions are orthogonal.
Actually, quite the opposite - in a free market, labor is free to organize in any way they want. If they have enough leverage over the employer, they'll succeed.
The anti-free market part is the regulatory quagmire that the US has in place for organized labor.
I think that's the thing that most people take umbrage with.
I don't know for sure, but I've heard from knowledgeable folks that it is more effective in Europe.
They are a little bit, because collective action is very hard. If everyone chooses to participate and pay the cost of organizing it is worth the cost and a union will happen. But if a number of people choose not to then everything falls apart, as it is no longer worth it for anyone to pay the cost and the union can't function. Often the benefits of a union are also a public good, meaning everyone gets the benefits of a union fighting for better working conditions whether they pay the cost or not. If so, then there's little incentive to pay and the union will have trouble keeping itself alive.
Unions need some external extra incentive, like the state forcing them to exist or subsidizing the cost of organizing, to exist long term.
You might be surprised to learn that much of the regulatory quagmire you speak of was devised by supposed proponents of the free market.
In a vacuum, no. If the most profitable approach means involves maintaining an "all star" cast to keep the best team happy, then everything works out. That's the athlete/celebrity model.
But current dynamics has games divorced from quality to generate the most profit, and companies work to minimize expenses instead, via the assembly line approach. Devaluing labor to maximize money makes unions inevitable.
the expectation combined with more studios doing stuff, the fact that video-games don't have 100 years (so it's a maturing art form, somehow) and also investment money... i believe there's much more chances of quality declining on companies by the hook of investors or at least less innovation (which seems to drive a bunch of 'unicorns' on this field)? graphics kinda topped by now, there's no more magic on realism/fancy graphics! maybe at some point role-play/storytelling will get more complex/infinite with AI but it's not clear how or if it'll, as we have player driven multi-player video-games for quite a while, like Albion or some much older: https://www.havenandhearth.com/portal/ ... maybe man vs. the machine in a sensible way and not those engines stomping pro-players on Dota
I think Valve sets a good example for an alternative, while not union they operate with a flat structure and is not publicly traded which sets them apart. They're kinda like an elite guild of game developers.
I'm not really sure how you could know this? For all we know all the employees are unionized and haven't felt like they need to push management for official recognition.
If a union had managed to organize the most profitable-per-employee company in the video game industry, it would have been front-page news.
That's my point. There is no requirement in the US that you organize explicitly. You could just as easy do it without requesting recognition.
Valve doesn’t release that many games though.
Presumably they subsidise the good conditions, few but high quality releases etc with the Steam store, which does set them apart from most studios.
CPR is about to release The Witcher 4, probably it’s going to be a masterpiece.
Let's not get too excited until the game is actually released. Cyberpunk was also irrationally hyped and then was released as a turd which then took 5 more years to become a merely 'good' but not great game.
All those studios were actually already on a downward trend I'd argue. Unionisation may turn it around
Cyberpunk may have had a bad launch, but in 2026 it is a great game, and worth playing. One of the best games I've played in years.
I remember it being called "Cedarpunk" on account of its rendering issues.
Unionization seems to be a secondary effect of strategic failure. If there is a causal relationship, I think it happens in reverse.
Walking the game theory backward, if the team was executing successfully and productively and everyone is getting paid fat bonuses then I don't think there is much motivation to get political in the workplace.
Only after the soul has been completely extracted from a company/team does this process seem to occur.
I wonder how many examples there actually are of the people in the trenches doing the actual work getting a 'fat bonus'.
E.g. the idea that unionization might not be a bad idea usually starts with teams not getting any bonuses after they created a highly successful game, and instead the company preventing such 'problems' by firing most of the team right before a game ships.
Linear Technology gave the same bonus multiplier based on overall company profit, paid out every 6 months. Most years this came out as an extra 30% on top of base comp for literally everyone at the company. Then the founders retired, Linear got Acquired by Analog Devices, and the program was scrapped the next year.
There's also RenTech, which allows employees to invest in their private fund that pays out 40% annually.
So to answer your question: not many, especially not in games.