Membership to the Recreation Staff department of the IWGB union went up by ‘virtually half’ between December 2022 and December 2023.
That is based on The Guardian, which studies that in October 2023, membership in Recreation Staff rose by 12 per cent within the wake of layoffs, together with job cuts at Fortnite maker Epic Video games.
Of the roughly 11,100 redundancies in 2023, within the area of 900 impacted UK employees.
That was earlier than the current wave of mass redundancies; thus far, round 3,400 jobs have been reduce in 2024 thus far.
“It’s felt like a deluge of redundancies up to now 5 or 6 months. It simply retains coming and coming,” IWGB Recreation Staff chair Austin Kelmore.
“And with this wave, I’ve seen individuals saying ‘we have to be part of unions’. Our membership went via the roof. We had the most important progress of recent members in any month in our five-year historical past on the finish of final 12 months.”
Daniel Wooden, the co-chair of UK video video games commerce physique UKIE, added: “It has been troublesome to listen to of the job losses within the video video games sector over the current few months. Our evaluation suggests this can be a rebalancing following successive years of serious progress in the course of the pandemic.
“We proceed to work laborious to make sure the UK stays an awesome place to start out and scale up video games companies, and we urge the federal government to make use of the finances to create the situations wanted for video games companies to develop.”