EMERGING research into the Scottish gaming industry is shining a light on how unionisation is emerging among worker communities, and how employers are reacting.
Scottish studios have punched above their weight, contributing to the release some of the world's most popular games, and with six universities teaching subjects like game design, the country is a major talent producer for the global industry.
But there have been concerns about a lack of support from the UK and Scottish Governments, as well as a lack of employment stability for workers.
The rise of AI in both creative arts and coding, waves of layoffs and a love for the projects being worked on makes the sector a unique tinderbox for employee-employer conflict.
Last year Rockstar North – the Edinburgh studio behind the Grand Theft Auto (GTA) series – hit the headlines as workers accused the firm of engaging in "union-busting" activity.
The Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB) has said it appears that 30 members of staff at the company had been sacked for “trade union activity” and claimed that the dismissals were “unlawful and retaliatory”.
This was disputed at the time by Take Two Interactive, the parent company of Rockstar, who's spokesperson said: "Rockstar Games terminated a small number of individuals for gross misconduct, and for no other reason."
While the case of Rockstar caught the most attention, due to the GTA franchise being the world's most profitable, with GTA 5 alone generating more than $8 billion in revenue since 2013, Daniel Jordan, a PhD researcher at the University of Glasgow, told me that it's likely not a "lone outlier."
"Rockstar is the highest-profile flashpoint, but I'd resist calling it a lone outlier," he said.
"The October 2025 firings are the most dramatic instance, and they're now heading to a full tribunal hearing later this year. This is closely followed by the mass redundancies at Build A Rocket Boy and the refusal of trade union recognition there too.
"But the broader pattern of employers being cool-to-hostile toward organising is wider than one studio; what's changed is that it's now visible and contested."
Jordan's PhD research, due to conclude this year, has looked into how and why workers in the sector are starting to organise collectively, and how policy and employers respond to that. The emerging data has come from a sample of 45 interviews with industry workers, and analysis of union material and the proceedings of an event.
The makeup of the industry itself is playing a part in this, Jordan explained, saying the "American approach to trade unions seems to have been imported" by the large multinationals that dominate much of the workforce, with Rockstar North (Edinburgh) and Rockstar Dundee making up "more than half of the total video game worker headcount" in the country.
"They're subsidiaries of American multinationals and the American approach to trade unions seems to have been imported," he explained, adding that "the rest of the industry is made up of quite small companies who generally work on the IP [intellectual property] of other companies," making their revenue and long-term stability inherently unpredictable.
It is an industry that Scotland has historically punched above its weight in, with a 2022 report showing it generates more than £330 million per year and employs more than 2100 people across 130 gaming businesses, with growth across all three metrics from the previous decade.
There are now plans in place to grow the sector to a £1bn behemoth through the Scottish Games Network and Scotland's Game Action Plan, which will attempt to integrate the industry to form a "cluster" for investment and development.
The industry is built upon a labour of love, Jordan explained, saying it's rather unique in the sense that people are generally more willing to stick with the job through long hours and job insecurity because of the personal connection they have to the projects being worked on.
He said: "People enter and stay because they're passionate about making games, and that attachment has historically been leveraged to normalise long hours, insecurity and modest pay.
"It also makes collective grievances feel like disloyalty to the medium, which makes it harder to get people onside.
"Layer on a fragmented structure (lots of small and mid-sized studios, project-based and freelance work, high churn) and there's no established tradition of union recognition to inherit the way there is in, say, screen or print.
"So, organising has largely come through more grassroots organisations (like the IWGB Game Workers Union) rather than an incumbent sectoral body. As the union is so young, it leans hard on building density and leaders from the ground up rather than work being done by union staff."
For the nascent union bodies, there are also new challenges ahead. Artificial Intelligence is growing in its adoption across many UK industries, including gaming. "It seemed like a deliberate move to reduce costs and headcount," Jordan said.
"I spoke to one worker who worked in a company specialising in video game translation work and they said a lot of that work is now being done by AI," an example he said was one of the most "concrete" examples of how AI is impacting employment.
There is pushback from other groups in the space as well, as it's not just employment that is being contested but also copyright and access.
"Equity has launched a Game On! campaign which is pushing for informed consent on how actor voices and likenesses are used to train AI," he said.
"Otherwise, there are general issues about how generative tools get introduced without worker consultation, what happens to entry-level roles, and questions of consent and credit around training data and workers' own outputs."
There is progress being made though, with experiences seeming to be studio-dependent and somewhat disjointed, but signs are there that the industry is changing.
"The counterpoint to Rockstar is ZA/UM, the Disco Elysium studio, [which] has a large-ish studio in England. [It has become] the first UK studio to formally recognise a union.
"So my reading is less 'one bad actor' and more that the sector's at an inflection point where recognition is genuinely on the table for the first time.
"Consequently, employer responses run the full range from voluntary recognition at one end to what may be legally decided as union busting at the other," he explained.
