People Make Games

Bonsoir from France!

Added 2019-06-10 19:30:06 +0000 UTC

Hey Patrons,

I went to visit the Notre-Dame this morning and just like all the other tourists who'd come to gather around the cathedral as it undergoes reconstruction, I didn't really know what to do. So I took a photo.

I'm not a religious person, but I've spent a good chunk of today looking at this picture and thinking back to a video I watched on the night of the fire, as a group of Parisians watched and sang as the flames eventually claimed the building's spire. Gosh that makes me sad.

Sorry, this has become a very sombre opening to a Patreon post that isn't actually about the Notre-Dame, or Paris. But it is about France!

I'm here to see what happens tomorrow as a number of different unions representing the employees of Activision-Blizzard in Versailles respond to the proposed 134 job losses that were announced earlier in the year.

You might remember this news came from an earnings call in which the company's CEO Bobby Kotick announced record-breaking profits, moments before it was also revealed that roughly 8% of the workforce were about to lose their jobs.

Elsewhere in the world, little was done to fight this decision. It was, to some extent, treated as business as usual in video games. But in France, things are different. This is a country with some of the strongest labour laws in the world and its unions are well experienced in using them to protect their members.

And so, we want to find out what happens when people from the games industry do unionise. This is likely set to be one of the biggest potential changes coming to games in the next few years: unionised workers. Not just in France, but worldwide.

We know many of you are concerned by the way in which the games industry treats its employees at present. We're concerned too. How many stories about crunch have you read this year alone? What about discrimination? Unfair job losses?

So here's the question: can unions help provide a solution to these problems? We're hoping tomorrow can shine some light on that.