WARSAW — For most of the past 15 years, the story Poland told about its video game industry was one of sleepless brilliance: small studios that outworked richer rivals in Los Angeles and Tokyo and produced global hits on budgets a tenth the size. The sleeplessness was part of the brand. This autumn, for the first time, the people doing the work are organizing against it.
Employees at three Warsaw studios have formed union chapters since January, with a combined membership of about 1,100, according to the Game Workers’ Union of Poland, a body that did not exist two years ago. A fourth studio, in Krakow, is expected to vote next month. The industry employs about 15,000 people nationwide.
“We were told crunch was the price of being Polish and small and winning,” said Kasia Nowakowska, 31, an animator who helped organize the chapter at her studio, a mid-size developer she asked not be named because negotiations were continuing. “Then the game shipped, and 200 of us were laid off by email on a Tuesday. It turns out the price was not for winning. It was just the price.”
The industry has shed about 2,000 jobs in Poland since 2024, part of a global contraction after a pandemic boom, and studio owners say the economics have become brutal: development costs have tripled in a decade while prices for games have barely moved. “I understand why people are angry, and I do not think a union is the end of the world,” said Michał Sadowski, who runs a 90-person studio in Warsaw that has not been organized. “But I cannot promise nobody will ever work a weekend. The alternative is that nobody works here at all.”
The new union’s demands are modest by the standards of Polish labor law, which already caps overtime at 150 hours a year, a limit developers say is routinely ignored through self-employment contracts. The chapters are asking for genuine employment contracts, overtime paid at the legal rate, and 30 days’ notice before layoffs. One studio has agreed to all three; the other two are in talks.
Jakub Lewandowski, a labor economist at the Warsaw School of Economics, said the organizing wave mirrored one in the United States and Sweden but had a Polish character. “Here the union is not fighting a giant corporation. It is fighting a myth,” he said. “The myth is that passion is a substitute for a contract. That myth made some people very rich and a great many people very tired.”
Ms. Nowakowska said the hardest part had been persuading colleagues that joining was not a betrayal. “People love these games. They love the studios. I love the studio,” she said. “I just want to love it with a pension.”
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 12, 2026, Section A, Page 12 of the European edition with the headline: Poland’s Game Developers, Long Proud of Working Through the Night, Are Forming Unions.
