CWA Members Organize the Video Game Industry at GDC 2025

 
CWA worker-organizers and staff in front of the CODE-CWA booth at the 2025 Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, Calif.

Last week, over 40 CWA worker-organizers and staff attended the 2025 Game Developer Conference (GDC), the world’s largest industry event for video game professionals. There they connected with other video game workers, helped spread awareness for key issues in the industry, and launched United Videogame Workers-CWA (UVW-CWA), a direct-join, industry-wide video game union in partnership with the American Federation of Musicians (AFM).

Workers announced the union on Wednesday afternoon at their panel titled, “Video Game Labor at a Crossroads: New Pathways to Industry-Wide Organizing.” Following the UVW-CWA launch, workers led GDC attendees to Yerba Buena Gardens for a rally calling on executives to put power back into the hands of the people who make the games. Bloomberg News’ Jason Schreier interviewed CWA’s Senior Director of Organizing Tom Smith during the second panel that closed out the day.

The next day, UVW-CWA members held a launch party at the Tenderloin Museum where members of the UVW-CWA organizing committee shared their mission statement and their petition addressing mass layoffs in the video game industry. Since their launch, over 390 dues-paying members have joined.

On Friday, CODE-CWA Senior Campaign Lead Emma Kinema led a roundtable discussion with CWA members to share organizing experiences and negotiation wins at some of the largest video game studios in the country. The conclusion of GDC 2025 also coincided with the announcement of Activision user research workers overwhelmingly voting in favor of union representation, joining over 2,000 workers at Microsoft-owned studios to organize under the company’s neutrality agreement with CWA. The workers will be members of CWA Local 9400 in Los Angeles.

“We are excited to join our fellow game makers across the video game industry to show what’s possible when workers can freely build solidarity in the workplace. Many of us were mobilized to do something about the layoffs in 2023 and 2024, and now we can look out for each other with a union,” said organizing committee member and quantitative user researcher Nicolaas VanMeerten.

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This post originally appeared on cwa-union.org.