It’s been a pretty depressing year for the games industry, with more layoffs and cutbacks than anyone can justify, while the corporate bigwigs are still taking home huge paydays or waltzing in golden parachutes. As much as they can, developers are trying to combat this wave of misery, but it’s a difficult task because developers aren’t quite ready to do it yet. Disco Elysée successor studio Eternal summer I know it only too well.

The group made it clear when they announced the creation of the collective, that they believed it would not be an ideal solution to all the problems that the games industry currently poses to developers, but rather something that will have to try to ‘exist at best. this can be done within the limits of the established system. With that in mind, I recently asked some Summer Eternal developers what they thought about the chances that the video game industry could actually change in order to provide a better future for developers than our current gloomy status quo, in the part of an interview that you can read the gist here.

“The strikes and pickets we are witnessing these days at Ubisoft premises are the first step towards more power for industry workers,” Aleksandar Gavrilovič, who played a role important in shaping the structure of Summer Eternal, “I myself adhere to the accelerationist view that the only way to achieve better conditions is to enter into crises that highlight the contradictions of society and we force us to remake the world.

“The past few decades have been quiet for game developers, and my own organizing efforts have had only limited success (a few collective bargaining agreements signed locally), because the time was not right. Today, after tens of thousands of layoffs, now seems like the right time for game developers to stand up for their rights against systemic greed.

“I’m still looking forward to a second crisis, which would highlight the biggest structural problem in game development: the fact that a third of all PC revenue from all developers (from indies to AAA) is siphoned off to the digital fiefdoms, of which Valve is the most egregious example I can imagine a near future with more worker power, but I lack the imagination to envision replacing Valve with a community-owned alternative. ‘Winter’ won’t fall so easily, but we should at least start discussing alternatives openly.

Meanwhile, former ZA/UM writer Dora Klindžić said: “It’s true, Summer Eternal won’t fix the video game industry, even if, as a byproduct of our operation, we might generate a panacea for agriculture, astronomy, inaccurate bus schedules, those hoax messages targeting your mother, local elections and syphilis I think this industry is over But luckily for everyone, video games. are not.”

For more thoughts on the state of the video game industry in 2024, when it feels like the good (big video games), the bad (layoffs and closures), and the ugly (also layoffs and closures) flow into the river of our hobby with more breathtaking volume and rhythm than ever before, see this feature.