The US video game industry is going through a phase of growing interest in trade unionization, although the recent attempts at training unions at companies such as Sega of America and Bethesda have undergone a setback. A new impulse could come from the Communications Worldrs of America (CWA), which has announced an initiative destined to reinvigorate movement. During the Game Developers Conference 2025, the CWA presented the United Videogame World (UVW), a new organization affiliated with the aim of involving video games developers of different disciplines and studies in a wider union struggle in the sector level.
The mission of the UVW-CWA, as reported in a press release, is twofold: on the one hand, to promote the community and solidarity between the workers in the videogame sector; on the other, launch large -scale training campaigns on the union organization within the industry. Unlike the individual company unions that negotiate contracts with employers, the direct adhesion model of the UVW works similarly to a voluntary category association, where the membership fees and resources are common to support different union disputes in the broader market. This initiative is part of a context in which the video game actors, represented by the SAG-AFRTRA union, have been on strike for nine months to obtain protections against non-regulated use of artificial intelligence, while the publishing houses experience with digital replicas.
Emma Kinema, video game developer and a key figure in the 2018 Game Workers United Game Workers, now operational for Code-Cwa, underlines the historically precarious nature of the legal forms of union, existed for most of the modern industrial history. Kinema highlights how legal protections, sanctioned by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, represent a “peace treaty” which could be compromised by future political changes. Despite the training of developers unions at some of the largest video game companies in the United States in recent years, nobody has yet managed to successfully negotiate the first contract. For example, the staff in charge of the quality control of Raven Software, who works on Call of Duty for Activision (now owned by Microsoft), approaches the third anniversary of negotiation of a collective work agreement with the company. The group filed a complaint for negotiation practices in Malafede against Activision and Microsoft last autumn.