Gavrilovic is the founder of the video game company Gamechuck. Based out of a tiny office crammed with computers in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, the company is organized around equality: Each worker earns the same salary and shares the profits of the games they create. All decisions are reached through anonymous voting on Discord: The 17-person collective recently voted to shorten workdays from eight hours to six. And nobody gets fired. (They can technically vote people out, but they try not to.) “We wanted to show that you don’t actually have to work like everyone else to be successful,” said Gavrilovic.
Gavrilovic’s company is an outlier in the gaming industry, known for its grueling hours, high turnover rates, and worker discontent. Over the past five years, industry giants such as Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts, and Ubisoft have faced lawsuits over mistreating their employees, while grappling with increasing unionization efforts. Since 2018, around 140 collective actions by game workers—including labor complaints at Nintendo, walkouts at Riot Games, and strikes against Blizzard—have been recorded around the world, according to Game Worker Solidarity, a project that tracks labor movements in the industry.
Add new comment