Late last year, more than 100 employees at Avalanche Studios, the creators of Just cause, . Workers a collective agreement with the Swedish unions Unionen and Engineers of Sweden. The agreement will enter into force during the second quarter of 2025.
While details of the deal are unknown, Avalanche said it will “help standardize frameworks around essential areas such as salaries, benefits, employee influence and career support.” The company says it is working closely with both unions to ensure a smooth implementation of these frameworks.
Avalanche was founded in Sweden, but has since become a global entity. Taking this into account, the decision to unionize only affects workers located in Sweden, which number around 100 people. The company employs more than 500 workers worldwide.
Despite that warning, this is another high-profile step toward improving workers' rights in the gaming industry. Avalanche joins several other companies that recently organized under collective bargaining agreements. Sega of America workers, a measure that impacted 200 employees. More than 300 QA workers from ZeniMax Studios and parent company Microsoft stayed out of the way. Activision, another Microsoft company, has a union with more than 600 members.
This is all good news for workers, but there is also a dark cloud hanging over the industry. They have done it for the last few months. In fact, more than 6,000 people lost their jobs in January alone. The affected workers come from many of the companies mentioned above, such as Sega of America, Activision Blizzard, and ZeniMax.
As for Avalanche, he continues working on the . The game has been in the works since 2021 and appears to be an open-world cooperative adventure set in the 1970s.
