Staff members at CD Projekt Red, the Polish game studio behind the Witcher series and Cyberpunk 2077, have unionized.
The action comes in response to a series of layoffs at CDPR in recent months, in particular the decision to let go of approximately 100 employees over the summer, according to the union’s website. The website further explains, “This event created a tremendous amount of stress and insecurity, affecting our mental health and leading to the creation of this union in response. Having a union means having more security, transparency, better protection, and a stronger voice in times of crisis”.
Called the Polish Gamedev Workers Union, the union was formed by Lev Ki and Paweł Myszka, CD Projekt Red employees in programming and quality assurance. Polish Gamedev Workers Union is part of a larger Polish union, OZZ IP, that operates across several companies in Poland. The union seeks to protect “all professions and people working in the game development sector in Poland”, consequently covering CD Projekt Red employees in Poland, but not CDPR employees in Vancouver.
Polish Gamedev Workers Union’s first goal is to add more people to its membership, claiming that “mass lay-offs are a danger to the gamedev industry and we believe that unionizing is a way for us to preserve the industry’s potential”. The aforementioned “mass layoffs” refer to the glut of layoffs currently happening in the videogame industry at studios owned by the Embracer Group, Epic Games, and Team17 to name a few. Over the course of 2023, well over 6000 jobs have been lost in the games industry.
Polish Gamedev Workers Union, however, is also part of another new videogame industry trend of unionizing. Over the summer, Sega of America workers voted to unionize, followed by developers at Just Cause studios earlier this month. As further instability ripples across the industry, it’s more and more likely we’ll continue seeing studios unionize to meet the moment.