Alexandre Paquet traces Montreal’s game industry from publicly subsidized expansion to recurring layoffs and cross-studio organizing. Workers create its cultural value, while owners retain control over projects, investment, and employment. Loving the work has become a way to demand more from people while offering them less security.
- Ubisoft opened its Montreal studio in 1997. Paquet cites research describing a 30 percent labor tax credit as central to the industry’s expansion.
- Carolyn Jong of Game Workers Unite Montreal describes how the culture of “passion work” helps justify exploitation and poor conditions.
- Fragmentation across studios, contracts, and national borders makes collective organizing harder. Game Workers Unite Montreal, launched in 2018, connects workers through workshops, resources, and solidarity.
- Bethesda Montreal unionized in 2024, but Microsoft’s subsequent cuts still reached its workers. A union can negotiate protections and severance even when it cannot prevent layoffs.
- Labor researcher Jamie Woodcock argues that workplace struggle also teaches organizing: workers build the confidence and institutions needed for wider political fights.
Paquet treats union power as something built across repeated struggles. Counting only layoffs prevented misses the relationships, bargaining capacity, and political education that survive a defeat.
An industry sustained by public support leaves workers absorbing privately imposed risks. The people making its games deserve a collective say over the conditions under which that culture gets made.