It’s the night of the 2025 Game Awards, a major industry event where the best games of the year are crowned and major publishers reveal forthcoming projects. In the shadow of the Peacock theater in Los Angeles and next to a giant, demonic statue promoting new game Divinity, which would be announced on stage later that evening, stands a collection of people in bright red shirts. Many are holding signs: a tombstone honouring the “death” of The Game Awards’ Future Class talent development programme; a bold, black-and-red graphic that reads “We’re Done Playing”; and “wanted” posters for Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick and Microsoft CEO Phil Spencer. This is a protest.
The protesters, who were almost denied entry to the public space outside the Peacock theater (“they knew we were coming,” one jokes), are from United Videogame Workers (UVW), an industry-wide, direct-join union for North America that is part of the Communications Workers of America. “We are out here today to raise awareness of the plight of the game worker,” says Anna C Webster, chair of the freelancing committee, in the hot Los Angeles sun. “Our industry has been strip-mined for resources by these corporate overlords, and we figured the best place to raise awareness of what’s happening in the games industry is at the culmination, the final boss, as it were: The Game Awards.”
