I read this as ‘cause delays for the Polish’ and was like, “What did the Polish do?”

The problem is that they can’t.

Crunch is a product of poor project management and underfunded projects. Neither of which are things a union can really fight against.

So what triggers crunch? Oversimplifying, but the investor/publisher says “Yeah, we are cutting you off. Go gold in 2 months”.

Depending on the ubiquity of the union at a given company, the only thing they can really do is say “Yeah. We aren’t working more than 40 hours in a given week”.

That… isn’t going to make the publisher or investors provide more money. It will just mean that what goes gold is even more broken and even less complete. And that just means the studio will get shut down even faster and it will be even harder for union outlets to get funding in the future.

Game dev is so fundamentally broken and the funding market is so dire that I very much consider it to already be in “it can’t get much worse…”.

But stuff like this and the countless sex pest “revelations” are very much a case where People need to learn what unions can and can’t do.

I would strongly encourage listening to the Remap Radio podcast when they talk about this. They are very much leftists and actually have firsthand experience (at Vice) of what unions can and can’t do for their members. And that often is more about making the good times better and trying to make the bad times less bad. And game dev is very much in the bad times and has been for years.