Is the video games industry in crisis? A nationwide strike is taking place this Thursday 13 February 2025, called by the main trade union. The demands relate in particular to safeguarding jobs and working conditions in a sector that experienced a boom during Covid.
At the time of the Covid pandemic, the video game sector was in a state of euphoria. Many people bought and downloaded games for entertainment.
The enthusiasm has since waned. Our region, a pioneer in the field, has seen the development of this multi-billion-dollar industry.
Video games made in France were born in Lyon! With the Infogrames company. Back in 1983, Infogrames was one of the first video game companies in France, and the iconic brand of the 1980s and 1990s has since become Atari.
The sector has grown. Around 130 companies have sprung up in the region, the vast majority of them based in Lyon. The capital of the Gauls is, behind Paris, the 2nd largest video game centre in France.
This represents around 4,000 jobs in the region, spread across 200 professions: narrative designers or game designers, 3D animators, modellers, special effects creators, IT specialists, coders, etc.
The sector has a turnover of nearly €1 billion in the region. And there are a dozen schools, some of them top-notch, to train new talent.
Lyon is home to world-class champions such as Arkane Studios. The Lyon-based company enjoyed international success from the 2000s onwards, with games such as ‘Dishonored’ and ‘Deathloop’. It was so successful that the Lyon-based studio opened a studio in the United States.
Lyon is also home to such giants as Ubisoft Ivory Tower in Villeurbanne. Japanese giant Bandai Namco is also based in Lyon, as is Electronic Arts, whose French headquarters are on the banks of the Saône. And last but not least, there are the Kylotonn and Eden Games studios in the Rhône.
What does the future hold for the video games industry? Every year, dozens of students head to schools like Game Sup in Lyon. The promise of their training is a job as soon as they leave school. Eight out of 10 students are taken on as soon as they finish their course, particularly in the big-name studios in the region. Rémy Melino, a final-year student, explains. ‘We’ve already got quite a few leads. There are people who have come to the school and hired people here straight after the course.
Although the number of job offers in the region jumped by 30% after covid, it has since fallen back. However, Bruno Marion, Director of Education at Game Sup, is not alarmed: ‘There have been other crises, so this is a bit of a special moment, but it’s not the end of video games,’ he says. ‘You look at the number of people who play on their mobiles, who consume, who buy games, and you have to remember that there are almost 40 million gamers in France. In the 2000s, there were far fewer, and the numbers are still rising.
The director continues, ‘There are between 15,000 and 19,000 games released on a dematerialised platform that gamers know well. Sales of video games have exceeded those of cinema and music combined for over 20 years. Lyon remains an attractive location in the Auvergne Rhône-Alpes region, with more than 135 studios.So there’s a huge amount of employability. I don’t think we should be worried about the future of video games.
Bruno Marion details the working environment specific to video games. ‘Working conditions have improved enormously since the 90s. We have a quality of life at work that has absolutely nothing to do with the early days. Back then, we used to take people with a passion and tell them - you’re already lucky to be working in your passion. Today, working hours are decent, overtime is paid and we’ve become a mature industry.
At the giant Ubisoft, demands for teleworking and pay rises are emerging, hence the nationwide strike action. Corentin Lavergne is a trade unionist, and he expresses the fears of a group of employees. ‘On the one hand, employees feel very concerned by the success of the games, but it’s hard to negotiate at the moment. Ubisoft doesn’t want to give anything up. We feel that we’re in a vertical organisation, up against a wall, and we’re finding it hard to find solutions other than strike action.’
The union is only seven years old. ‘We created ourselves because we realised that we had the same problems as in industry, even though we belong to different companies’. The strikers are calling for greater transparency and social dialogue.