Organizing Gamers from the Bottom Up

The gaming industry is one of the most powerful—and least accountable—sectors of the economy. After the pandemic slump, global gaming revenue is now expected to grow by 6% to $350 billion by 2030. People are playing more, including those who were once skeptical: 40% of Boomers and over 50% of Gen X game four to five hours a week. Overall, about 200 million Americans play video games. This entertainment medium, often associated with children, is now an industry worth more than the film and music industries, combined.

It’s a good time to be a gaming executive. In 2020, the 42 top gaming CEOs were handed a total of $842 million in compensation. The pay increases kept going up: in 2024, Electronic Arts (EA) CEO Andrew Wilson received $30.5 million, or 260 times more than the median EA worker. It would be easy to assume that business is booming, but that’s not the reality for developers or consumers.

The post-pandemic gaming boom saw record layoffs (it even has its own Wikipedia page) where 45,000 people lost their jobs. Consumers faced price hikes everywhere, from subscriptions to console hardware and $80 games. Monetization models pushed by corporate publishers crossed into unethical territory, embracing gambling tactics that trap consumers in vicious, addictive cycles. And record-breaking industry consolidation has intensified concern among gamers about the monopolization of the industry.

This disconnect between the enrichment of executives and the worsening of conditions for consumers reflects an industry that increasingly answers to Wall Street over loyal gamers. Consolidation has concentrated power in the hands of so few corporate publishers that short-term profits now outweigh long-term creative sustainability, mirroring a broader economy where corporate power exploits workers and consumers for astronomical gains.

Despite how widespread these negative experiences are for gamers, they are rarely treated as a collective problem. Instead, much of the controversy inside the gaming world has been captured by culture wars, producing cycles of division that manipulate public anger while leaving corporate power largely untouched.

Over the past decade, gamers have been exploited by corporations and isolated by ideological warfare that either forces people to pick a side or be left out. But what if there’s another way to approach gamers? That question became the basis of the Players Alliance.

A New Alliance

If the goal is to unite and mobilize gamers against corporate greed, organizing along rigid ideological lines makes little sense. That approach is tired, insular, and ultimately self-defeating.

The Players Alliance organizing theory begins from a basic truth about power. In gaming, power flows upward. Corporate publishers and executives sit at the top, exploiting gamers and workers who keep the industry alive. If gamers want a different future, power has to be rebuilt from the bottom up.

Bottom up organizing begins with shared values that invite people into common ground they may not know they share, rather than into a political identity. Gamers across political backgrounds face the same material conditions created by corporate greed. These conditions do not belong to the left or the right. They are structural, and they impact anyone who plays or makes games.

When gamers are organized around shared values rather than partisan identity, new coalitions become possible. Over the past year, membership in the Players Alliance Discord server has grown from a single-digit community to over 600 members. In our first in-person action, Players Alliance members delivered 5,000 petition signatures to the Treasury Secretary demanding that the US government block EA’s buyout, and then met with congressional staff to make their case.

For many members, it was their first time taking part in any organizing action, let alone one in Washington, DC. They took part not as seasoned activists, but as gamers who understood that organizing gave them a way to act together.

This growth is not constrained by any single political tendency, because leadership in the Players Alliance is earned through participation. In doing so, we better avoid the pitfall of rewarding political allegiance with more influential positions—which, in turn, shuts out those not otherwise aligned, and ultimately insulates an organization from those who could have been brought into the fold.

Instead, leaders are made when members take on organizing responsibilities. First, a member joins a dedicated team for content creation, streaming, or outreach. Their participation is then measured through attending meetings, volunteering for tasks, staying active in Discord, and helping onboard others. In doing the less thrilling but critical functions—sending texts and DMs to encourage meeting turnout, drafting agendas, facilitating meetings—they train other members in the nuts and bolts of what it takes to organize a growing group.

After consistent participation, members are invited into “Leader” roles as team captains; there’s no strict timeline by when this occurs. As leaders, they coordinate with other leaders to manage their teams’ workload. This decentralized approach allows the Players Alliance to expand its capacity, and avoids bottlenecks where one or two organizers control all the decisions.

Coalition of the Possible

Some members who openly identify as politically conservative have stepped up as core leaders within the Players Alliance. One member leader, in between job shifts, regularly takes on outreach duties. It’s a task that requires him to break ice with gamers from very different backgrounds. Daunting for beginners, but, in January for the first general meeting of the year, turnout exceeded 50 attendants—a record turnout and above the average, which hovers at 30.

Another Players Alliance member, a gun enthusiast from the rural Midwest, sits in organizing meetings alongside queer gamers from coastal cities. Under most political frameworks, they are assumed to have nothing in common. In gaming, they do. And because his enthusiasm for firearms was not shunned, he felt comfortable tapping into his existing gamer circles, which ended up making him one of the most effective recruiters for the Players Alliance Discord.

The worker-versus-boss nature of bottom up organizing also opens up space for developers to explain the power dynamics inside the studios. Gamer outrage tends to be aimed at developers rather than executives; learning from developers helps demystify where power actually lies in game development. Players Alliance general meeting agendas dedicate space for educational segments where, for example, developers have a forum to explain how a game’s creative decisions are constrained by executive demands, impossible deadlines, and profit targets set far above the creative level.

Members are taught to interpret industry controversies through a different lens, and they increasingly recognize how little power most workers actually hold. Therefore, they foster deeper worker solidarity grounded in shared experiences of being exploited by the same corporate executives. As video game workers unionize, the new posture opens up the path for embracing organized labor as part of a new gamer coalition.

Ultimately, these relationships change how members understand how and why power is concentrated at the top. The power of bottom up organizing replaces ideological partisanship with shared struggle. It builds unity where pundits insist only division is possible. And in an industry shaped by corporate greed, it offers a way out of cultural warfare and toward collective power.

Members of the Players Alliance are gamers, developers, and creators
organizing to stand up against corporate greed and to end the predatory practices
that are killing games. Join the Alliance on Discord.

Featured image: Kimmie Dearest for Convergence