Just Cause maker Avalanche Studios announced on Friday, April 12, 2024, that it intends to enter a collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with Swedish labor unions Unionen and Engineers of Sweden. The Stockholm, Sweden-based company said “CBAs offer a long-standing framework for constructive relations between employer and employee.
The terms of the agreement will take effect from the second quarter of 2025 and will apply to all employees of Avalanche Studios all over Sweden. Outside of Stockholm, Avalanche Studios has offices in New York, Malmo, Liverpool, and Montreal.
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Only workers in Stockholm and Malmo will benefit from the CBA. According to the Swedish company, once the CBA kicks into effect, “it will help standardize frameworks around essential areas such as salaries, benefits, employee influence, and career support”.
“Over the past years, we’ve taken significant steps toward making Avalanche one of the best workplaces in the games industry,” said Avalanche Studios CEO, Stefanía Halldórsdóttir.
“Our inclusive, warm, and welcoming culture, sound work-life balance, profit sharing, and parental leave policy – just to name a few – are a testament to that. These are all things that set us apart and allow us to focus on making great games. We hope that signing a CBA will be yet another step in that same direction.”
The management of Avalanche said that in the coming months, the company will work with the respective labor unions including Unionen and Engineers of Sweden, the company’s union club, and the employer organization Almega to smoothly implement the framework.
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“It’s important for us to approach the transition in the right way,” said Halldórsdóttir. “This is why we’re not rushing the implementation of the CBA. We’ll use the coming months to carry out the necessary work in a careful, structured, and non-disruptive manner – all while continuing the development of several new and existing games.”
Avalanche Studios CBA is nearly two years in the making
Avalanche Studios has an impressive portfolio of games including the Just Cause franchise, Mad Max, Rage 2, theHunter: Call of the Wild, and Ravenbound. The studio was founded in 2003 and develops all its games using the Apex engine.
The journey of Avalanche Studios employees to forming a union started nearly two years ago. Chairman of Avalanche Workers Sweden Union Club, Love Arvidsson, shared the timeline of the events that led to the April 12 announcement.
“Nearly two years after we started talking seriously about unionizing, one year after we formed our local union club and half a year after we began formal CBA negotiations, the organized workers of Avalanche Studios Group have convinced the company to sign a CBA,” wrote Arvidsson on LinkedIn.
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“While the timeline is longer than we had hoped for, we have faith in the company’s commitment to signing, and will be working closely with company leadership over the coming months in preparation for that moment.
“I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve accomplished here; none of it would have been possible without my club board members, nor would we have been able to get this far without the trust and support of our members!”
Layoffs in the video game industry have been rife since 2023. Several studios have announced restructuring leading to the loss of thousands of jobs. Last year, around 10,000 people lost their jobs in the industry.
In the first three months of this year, layoffs have already exceeded 8,000. Due to the spate of layoffs in the game industry, there has been an increased call on workers in the industry to unionize to protect their collective interests.
Therefore, it was not surprising that the unionization of Avalanche Studios’s Swedish workers was met with excitement. But, will the workers in the company’s other studios in Canada, America, and the UK replicate the same?
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