Montreal has been touted as a major creative hub for the video game industry for over twenty years, leading the province of Quebec’s efforts to develop its digital creative sector. The industry reportedly generates CAD$1.4 billion in annual revenues within the province, yet game workers feel the lack of job security more than ever.

At the end of the summer, games workers rallied in Montreal to support the Bethesda employees affected by recent layoffs. Back in July, Microsoft announced it was eliminating 3,200 jobs within the Xbox division before the end of the year. Among the employees affected is Simon Préfontaine, a designer with over nine years under his belt at Bethesda Montreal. He explains that layoffs have become an annual occurrence across Xbox studios and the industry more broadly.

What does worker power look like in an industry where the people making the games often have little control over whether their jobs, studios, or projects survive? According to Préfontaine, “People are now much more motivated and radicalized. We are ready to strike. [These companies have] pissed these people off enough.” There seems to be a growing sentiment among game workers in Montreal that organizing themselves and unionizing their workplace is becoming necessary.

At the heart of Montreal’s game industry, there is a familiar contradiction of capitalism: while workers collectively produce value through their labor power, corporate owners privately control that value. The video game industry exemplifies this contradiction. The people who make the games own very little of what they produce while bearing all the risks. But how did Montreal become such a hub in the first place?

The turning point can be traced back to 1997, when Ubisoft established a video game studio in the city. As Sylvianne Pilon and Diane-Gabrielle Tremblay note in their study of video game clusters, there were multiple converging factors leading to this development, such as the city’s strong digital animation culture and its pool of creative talent. But most important of all was Quebec government policy, which subsidized the employer’s wage bill. A 2020 study found that public support included a 30 percent labor tax credit, amounting to about $100 million per year.

What followed was a flourishing of the industry, according to La Guilde du jeu vidéo du Québec, a nonprofit cooperative that brings together members of the video game industry. Electronic Arts Montreal was established in 2004, Eidos-Montréal in 2007, and a wide range of independent developers followed. Quebec, and Montreal in particular, became the hub it is today.

If this industry is growing, then why are game workers feeling such pressure? Precarity is at an all-time high, and layoffs occur constantly, sapping the morale of workers already struggling to remain afloat. As Préfontaine puts it, “They’re asking you to give 110 percent, but they’re not even going to give you thirteen months without making you worry [about your job]. It’s very difficult.”

What Préfontaine describes is not an isolated incident or a specific case of targeted layoffs at Bethesda Montreal. Rather, it is part of the general experience of workers who bear the brunt when capitalism’s recurring crises hit. As Eric Cazdyn puts it when describing crisis within capitalism in The Already Dead: “Crisis is not what happens when we go wrong; crisis is what happens when we go right.” Crisis, in other words, is built into the system itself. The widespread layoffs affecting the industry over the past three-plus years seem, once again, to confirm this point.

Workers organizing in the video game industry are at a disadvantage due to the industry being fragmented across studios, projects, contract types, and national borders. Further, the industry has long relied on the culture of “passion work.” As Carolyn Jong from Game Workers Unite Montreal explains, “It is a very passion-oriented industry. And that is used as a vehicle for justifying a lot of exploitation and poor working conditions.”

Jamie Woodcock, a senior lecturer at King’s College London and member of the Game Worker Solidarity Project, identifies an apparent paradox of the industry: despite its enormous profitability, it is repeatedly hit by layoffs. “The reality is that capital doesn’t care about making games. The interest of capital is about extracting surplus value from the production of games. [This crisis is] not a bug.” These conditions help explain why collective organization has proved so difficult for game workers in spite of the example set by established trade unions.

While the historical decline of unions under neoliberalism is well documented, Woodcock argues that this is less the result of the disappearance of existing unions than of a failure to unionize new sectors of the economy. Companies have worked hard to convince people that unions are unnecessary or harmful while also engaging in union-busting practices the push the boundaries of legality. A recent example is Rockstar Games’ termination of thirty-four employees, widely suspected of being a union-busting initiative.

Yet the reality might not be as grim as it seems. In fact, Woodcock suggests that, when compared to trade unions, which took decades to organize, the video game industry is actually progressing very quickly. “Over the past seven years, we have seen unions go from effectively nonexistent to having unions at some of the largest video games companies,” he explains.

Thinking back on the beginnings of Game Workers Unite Montreal’s efforts to organize workers within the city, Jong mentions that an early challenge was the lack of knowledge about unions and how to even begin to organize. It took some time to change the way workers in the industry thought about their relationship to their work. In fact, “the instinct to self-identify as a worker wasn’t really there,” she says.

Game worker organizing has progressed considerably since 2018, when the Montreal unit of Game Workers Unite launched. The organization now supports workers across multiple studios, providing resources, materials, workshops, and more. They played a big part in supporting the August 18 rally for Bethesda workers, for example. They also provide a platform for cross-studio organizing within the city as well as bridge between the local realities of Montreal and the global network of game workers worldwide.

Bethesda Montreal was the first studio to formally unionize in Quebec back in 2024. However, unionization did not stop Microsoft’s subsequent layoffs. Préfontaine’s experience illustrates the limits of what a union can do. Although often incapable of preventing an employer from cutting jobs, unions can give workers a collective voice over the process and help secure contractual protections.

But, as Jong argues, it would be a mistake to judge unions solely by whether they can avert any particular round of layoffs. Their broader value lies in the possibilities arising from an organized workforce.

As Woodcock puts it, “labor unions are the vehicle through which workers can fight in the workplace against capital.” On this view, developing an alternative conception and practice of work requires struggle in the workplace — struggle that unions can organize and sustain. “Struggle is also pedagogical. If we can’t learn to fight in our own workplace, then the chance that we can take on a capitalist government or capital is vanishingly unlikely,” he adds.

Unions can improve wages and conditions, negotiate severance, and give workers a collective voice. But their importance extends far beyond this. They also provide institutions through which to develop the knowledge, resources, and practices needed to confront the volatility that capitalism inflicts on them. Such gains may not be immediately apparent, but they remain vital for creating a more confident and politically capable working class.

Woodcock notes that game workers need a “a unionized sector that tells stories about unionization.” This is how both workers and the public can come to see unionization not only as possible but as a source of tangible workplace gains.

In Montreal, game workers collectively produce games that generate enormous cultural and economic value. Yet control over employment, investment, and ownership remains largely in the hands of local and multinational corporations. Unions can provide workers with a collective voice and the means to push back in times of crisis, even when the results fall short of what they hope for.

Préfontaine encourages all game workers to reach out to Game Workers Unite and other organizations supporting unionization initiatives. Looking back on his own involvement in Bethesda Montreal’s unionization efforts and recent layoff, he states: “I do not regret anything.” Workers may not be able to stop the next layoff on their own, but, organized together, they can begin to build the power to resist not only the next round of cuts but the system that makes those cuts inevitable.