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To get a sense of the scale here, video games are worth more than the film industry. And the music industry. In fact, the video game industry is bigger than both of those industries combined.

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tens of thousands of workers had been laid off in the last two years, including ten thousand this year alone.

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good, old fashioned exploitation driven by a power imbalance between the suits and game designers, and further exacerbated by a growing labor pool and limited — though growing — unionization.

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That includes higher unionization rates, breaking up consolidated gaming company giants and preventing future consolidation, tackling workplace abuse through state policy and enforcement, and forcing gaming companies to adopt and enforce their own policies for eliminating toxicity among gamers who abuse their co-players.

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Fixing the industry means rebalancing the distribution of power, which disproportionately rests with owners and bosses instead of workers (or gamers themselves, for that matter, who are stuck with a handful of companies to choose from).

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solution is worker-owned cooperatives, a model some in the industry have already started to adopt. Worker-owned studios would help address several issues by providing new options for gamers to choose from while freeing workers from being under the thumb of the suits.

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