In the past two years, we have heard a lot of news about the game industry to reduce costs and increase efficiency, reduce salaries and lay off employees, but recently, the members of the France game studio Spiders successfully "anti-customer-oriented", and won salary increases and other benefits in negotiations with management, ushering in a victory for grassroots employees.

According to foreign media Games Industry, on August 28, employees of Spiders Studio announced that they would hold a two-day strike on September 2 to protest the company's current problems.

Spiders Studios currently has 95 members, 44 of whom signed an open letter to the strike in more than 20 pages, indicating that many employees have been dissatisfied with the company's management for a long time.

The letter mentions that the company has tripled the size of the studio in just three years, is indifferent to the departure of senior members, and has problems such as low salaries, chaotic management, high employee turnover and gender pay disparities.

On September 6, Spiders issued a statement through the media, saying that it had fully negotiated with employees to provide employees with salary increases, improved working conditions and remote work policies. Starting in September, the minimum wage for company employees will be increased by 11%, while the average salary will be increased by 3%.

In fact, the members of the studio had already staged a strike in January this year, but they were "cold-treated" by the company at that time, and on August 23 this year, employee representatives wanted to meet with the company's senior management to negotiate, but did not receive a corresponding response, and finally there was a follow-up strike.

Spiders, a subsidiary of European publisher Nacon, has developed the RPG "Greedy Autumn" that has sold 1 million copies, and its sequel "Greedy Autumn 2: The Dying World" will launch an EA version on the 24th of this month.

This is not the first time that an employee strike at a gaming company, but there is clear evidence that there are not many cases where employees have succeeded in fighting for the rights they want.

In June, after the 11th wage negotiation of the year failed, the union of Neolpe, the Korea developer of the "DNF" terminal game, declared a strike. "Neople employees make up 20% of the Nexon Group, but as of 2022, the total number of overtime hours of the former has exceeded the overtime hours of the rest of the group," according to the Neolpe union.

At that time, Neople's CEO Yoon Myung-jin responded, "We will continue to actively work to reach a friendly agreement with Nexon to ensure that the operation of the game will not be affected." In the end, Neople proposed a solution that would compensate employees up to 7.5 million won (40,000 won for a contract) depending on the time of entry.

On February 14 this year, nearly 700 France Ubisoft employees participated in a one-day strike action at the call of STJV (France Game Workers Union) - and the trigger for the incident was also the breakdown of negotiations between France Ubisoft and the union, which could not meet the latter's demand for a 5% salary increase for all employees (Ubisoft management is only willing to raise wages by 2-3% depending on the situation).

Looking back, the successive victories in the negotiations that followed the Spiders studio strike may have played a certain role in encouraging and motivating industry developers to fight for their rights. At the same time, the whole incident also reflects many structural problems in the rapid development of the game industry, such as the blind expansion of the company, the lack of attention to the working environment of developers... Eventually, it will lead to a series of contradictions.

The road is long, but we hope that in the future the environment will become more and more friendly to game creators.

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