The League of Game Developers
Charter
Preamble
The people who built this industry love making games.
They do not love what the industry has become.
Three generations of players. Hundreds of billions in annual revenue. A medium that shapes how the modern world understands narrative, agency, and what it means to be inside a story — all of it built by engineers, designers, artists, writers, composers, testers, producers, and operations staff who staked their careers on a craft that did not exist a generation before them.
They built the most culturally significant entertainment medium in human history. In return, they were given an industry that treats them as disposable.
There is a fog of war across this industry, and it is maintained on purpose. The people who control capital use it to keep labor isolated, uninformed, and accepting terms it would otherwise refuse. Salaries are hidden. Contracts are opaque. Studios close without warning. Credits are suppressed. Institutional knowledge is scattered every time a team is dissolved, and the cost of that loss never appears on any balance sheet. This is not market drift. It is a business model, and it has gone largely unchallenged for the entire history of this medium.
We can no longer accept the premise that capital acts in the best interests of the people who create its value. That premise has been disproven by every studio closure, every omitted credit, every decade of expertise walked out the door in a cardboard box and never replaced.
If a studio can be closed days after a successful launch, then the people who shipped it need compensation structures that survive their employment — residuals, revenue share, mechanisms that do not evaporate the moment someone decides the team is cheaper to dissolve than to keep.
That is not radical. That is alignment.
If this industry generates record profits year after year, those returns cannot flow exclusively to executives and shareholders while the people who generated them see stagnant wages and rolling layoffs. You cannot grow an industry by starving its workforce.
That is not revolutionary. That is arithmetic.
If labor is treated as an expense to be cut rather than an investment that generates returns,
then capital is liquidating the very thing that makes it valuable. Studios are not cost
centers. They are the engine. Dismantling them to improve a quarterly number is not fiscal
discipline. It is the conversion of long-term capacity into short-term optics, and it is
making the industry illiquid in the only resource that actually matters:
the people who know
how to ship.
What follows is the founding charter of the organization we intend to build. Part One defines what it is, who it serves, and how it operates. Part Two names the specific professional rights it exists to defend — rights that belong to every person who has ever contributed to the making of games, in any country, in any discipline, at any level of experience.
These rights are not aspirations. They are not favors. They are the conditions under which a creative profession can survive, and they have been denied long enough.
Definition
The League of Game Developers is a trade association organized exclusively for the benefit of individuals who make games.
Mission
Its purpose is to build and maintain the professional infrastructure this industry has never had; defend, through legal and legislative mechanisms, the rights enumerated in Part Two of this charter; and provide the institutional foundation — career continuity, credential systems, mentorship, legislative relationships, and organizing support — that individual practitioners cannot build alone.
Necessity
This organization exists because the structural conditions of this industry left no alternative. Creative professionals in film, television, music, and theater organized decades ago. The game industry's practitioners — who generate more revenue than any of them — have had no equivalent institution for their entire history. That absence was not an oversight. It was convenient for the people it benefited.
It is no longer acceptable.
Dignity
To protect the dignity of every person who contributes to the making of games — whether or not their name appears in the credits, whether or not the game shipped, whether or not the studio still exists.
Infrastructure
To build the collective infrastructure that individual practitioners cannot build alone — the credits registries, the mentorship networks, the legislative relationships, the professional knowledge base that this industry has needed for twenty years and never had.
Recognition
To standardize the recognition of work. A credit is a professional fact, not a favor from a publisher. The mechanisms used to erase that fact — NDAs wielded as suppression tools, credits policies that strip names after departure, studios that close and take the record with them — are the mechanisms this organization was built to resist.
Continuity
To defend against disposability. Against the treatment of skilled practitioners as interchangeable cost inputs. Against layoffs that strip institutional knowledge from the industry and call it efficiency. Against closures that happen not because a studio failed but because it became inconvenient to a balance sheet.
Accessibility
To create clear inroads into the craft. Entry into this profession should not depend on geography, connections, or the financial ability to attend the right schools. The knowledge required to build games belongs to this community, and this organization exists to make it accessible.
Organizing
To support the infrastructure of organizing. Members of this organization retain the full right to organize, collectively bargain, and act in their own interest through every legal mechanism available to them, in every jurisdiction where they work. The League exists to provide the institutional support — the professional network, the knowledge base, and where legally permissible, the financial backing — that makes those efforts more possible.
Eligibility
Membership is open to any individual who works in or has worked in game development, in any discipline, at any level of experience, in any country. Engineers, designers, artists, technical artists, producers, audio professionals, QA practitioners, writers, narrative designers, level designers, systems designers, community managers, localization specialists, UX researchers, and all others who contribute to the making of games.
No credential is required. No shipped title is required. No current employment is required. If you have dedicated professional effort to this craft, you belong here.
Individual membership only
There are no corporate memberships. No studio, publisher, platform holder, investor, or other corporate entity may hold membership, purchase governance influence, or fund League activities in exchange for preferential access. The interests this organization represents are the interests of practitioners, and that alignment is enforced by structure, not goodwill.
No financial barrier
No financial hardship shall prevent a qualified individual from membership. The mechanism for hardship accommodation is structural, not discretionary. It does not require application, justification, or disclosure. Someone already covered your seat.
Member responsibilities
Membership carries baseline expectations: respectful conduct, good-faith participation, confidentiality where required, and the avoidance of harassment, discrimination, and abusive behavior. The League is a professional commons, not an attention platform. Members do not use League infrastructure as a recruiting pipeline, a sales funnel, or a venue for self-promotion at the expense of collective purpose.
Member authority
The League is governed by its members. Its board is elected by members, accountable to members, and removable by members. No founder, donor, or institutional partner holds permanent authority over the organization's direction. The people this organization serves are the people who decide what it does.
Board structure
The board shall consist of members in good standing, elected according to procedures established in the bylaws. Terms are finite. No individual may hold board authority in perpetuity. The transition of leadership is a feature of institutional health, not a symptom of institutional failure.
Amendment
Changes to this charter require member ratification. The board may propose amendments; members vote to ratify or reject them. No amendment may be made that compromises the individual-membership structure, the prohibition on private inurement, or the anti-capture provisions of this article.
Conflict of interest
All board members and officers must disclose financial interests in related entities, recuse from decisions where conflicts exist, and avoid self-dealing arrangements. Related-party contracts must be transparent, documented, market-reasonable, and approved without conflicted votes. Trust requires enforceable structure.
Anti-capture
The League shall maintain no mechanism by which outside funding, corporate sponsorship, or institutional relationships can direct organizational priorities, constrain advocacy positions, or override member governance. Capture is the most common failure mode of organizations built to serve their members, and these provisions exist to prevent it by design.
When corporations buy seats, they buy outcomes. When institutional donors set conditions, they set priorities. When founders entrench themselves, they become the thing the organization was built to resist. None of those paths are available here.
Dues fund services
Member dues fund member services. Surplus, if any, is directed by members toward member priorities. No dues revenue may be used for founder liquidity, speculative ventures, or purposes unrelated to member benefit. The money follows the mission. There is no other destination.
No private inurement
No officer, founder, director, or employee may personally profit from League revenues beyond reasonable compensation for services rendered, disclosed to and approved by the membership. This organization serves its members, not its leadership. That principle is non-negotiable and structurally enforced.
Transparency
Financial operations shall be transparent to members at a level appropriate to organizational scale. Budgets, spending priorities, and compensation arrangements are documented and available to members in good standing. The fog of war that defines this industry's labor conditions will not be replicated inside the organization built to fight it.
Corporate funding prohibition
The League shall not accept corporate sponsorships, corporate-sponsored memberships, or bulk institutional dues programs. The reason is straightforward: money buys influence, and influence must flow from members, not from entities whose practices this organization exists to challenge.
Dissolution
If the organization winds down, remaining funds after obligations are handled in accordance with applicable nonprofit dissolution requirements. No individual may extract residual funds. If The League fails to deliver value to its members, it closes cleanly. An institution that cannot justify its own existence does not deserve to perpetuate it.
Defense of rights
The rights enumerated in Part Two of this charter are not aspirational language. The League commits to defending them through legislative advocacy, legal support for member disputes, public accountability for documented violations, and direct engagement with employers and platforms. In jurisdictions where these rights are already protected by law, The League will advocate for enforcement. In jurisdictions where they are not, The League will advocate for their establishment. The goal is a global floor beneath which no game developer's working conditions should fall.
Member support
When a member's rights are violated — credits suppressed, portfolio locked, studio closed without consultation, salary discussion punished, contract terms deliberately obscured — The League stands with them. Not as a courtesy. As a function of what membership means.
Organizing infrastructure
The League is not and cannot be a collective bargaining agent. In many jurisdictions, this is a legal constraint of the organizational structure; in others, it is a practical boundary that preserves the League's ability to serve all members regardless of their organizing choices. This is a structural reality, not a philosophical position.
Members retain the full right to organize, to join or form unions, and to engage in collective action through every available legal mechanism in their jurisdiction. The League provides the infrastructure — the professional network, the institutional connections, the knowledge base, and where legally permissible, financial support — that makes those efforts more possible. Supporting the conditions under which members can organize is a core purpose of this organization.
Self-accountability
The League is itself subject to the principles it enforces. Members who believe the organization has violated its own charter have standing to raise that concern, compel review, and seek remedy through the governance mechanisms established in Article III. Any institution that demands accountability from others must accept the same constraint itself through enforceable rules, not personal virtue.
These rights belong to every person who contributes to the making of games.
They are not new. They are not gifts. They are not contingent on the goodwill of employers or the convenience of publishers. They are the conditions under which a creative profession can function with dignity, and they have been systematically denied for the entire history of this industry.
In some jurisdictions, many of these rights are already protected by law — and routinely violated in practice. In others, the legal framework does not yet exist. The League's commitment is the same in both cases: to name these rights, to defend them through every available mechanism, and to build the institutional power necessary to make that defense meaningful.
We are naming them. We intend to make them real.
The cycle is not a secret. Studios crunch their teams to hit a ship date, then lay off the people who just killed themselves to make it happen — often before the game has been on sale long enough to measure whether it succeeded. The layoffs come at the exact moment when the team is most exhausted, most depleted, and least able to organize or negotiate. This is not an accident. It is a business practice, and it has been the default operating model for decades.
A sustainable profession cannot be built on a cycle designed to burn people out and replace them. The expectation of post-ship layoffs as a routine cost-management tool — rather than a genuine response to business failure — is a structural choice that treats human beings as disposable inputs. It violates working time protections that already exist in many jurisdictions and circumvents the spirit of labor law in nearly all of them.
That choice is not inevitable. It is a practice, and practices can be changed.
Your portfolio is yours. The systems you built, the problems you solved, the craft you demonstrated under pressure — these belong to you, not to the entity that paid you to build them. Non-disclosure agreements exist to protect trade secrets, not to prevent professionals from proving they have a career.
Using an NDA to erase a person's professional history is not intellectual property protection. It is professional suppression. It prevents mobility. It concentrates power in the hands of employers who benefit from a workforce that cannot demonstrate its own value to anyone else. In jurisdictions that limit the enforceability of non-competes and overbroad NDAs, these provisions are already legally questionable. In practice, they persist because individual developers lack the institutional support to challenge them.
That support now exists.
When a decision is being made that will change your working life — a studio closure, an acquisition, a project cancellation, a return-to-office mandate, a mass layoff — you have the right to a voice in that process. Not as a courtesy. Not at the discretion of leadership whose interests are not yours. As a professional standard.
In the European Union, works council directives and consultation requirements already establish versions of this right in law. In the United States and many other jurisdictions, no such requirement exists for non-unionized workers, and the game industry has exploited that absence thoroughly. Developers learn that their studio has closed from a mass email. Teams discover their project is canceled from a press release. The contempt with which the idea of consultation is met is not a cultural accident. It is a policy.
We intend to change it through legislation where possible, collective bargaining where applicable, and sustained institutional pressure from a profession that refuses to be managed in silence.
You built it. You were there. Your name belongs in the record of this medium.
Regardless of what a publisher chose to include in the credits file. Regardless of whether the game shipped. Regardless of whether you left the studio before it did. Regardless of whether the studio still exists. A credit is not a favor. It is a professional fact, and no legal instrument, no corporate policy, and no credits guideline drafted by people who did not do the work should have the power to make it disappear.
The League's credits registry exists to make this right permanent. Verified by the teams who were there, searchable, and unchallengeable. Your contribution to this medium will not be erased because it was inconvenient to acknowledge.
The conditions of your employment — your compensation, your title, your contractual obligations — are yours to share.
The systematic use of non-disclosure provisions, non-compete agreements, and opaque compensation structures to prevent professionals from understanding the market value of their own labor is not intellectual property protection. It is information asymmetry maintained by contract, and it serves exactly one party. Capital benchmarks every role, every salary, every compensation structure across the entire industry before extending an offer. Recruiters track comp data as a basic function of their work. Employers have near-perfect market information. The contractual provisions that prohibit salary discussion, that isolate developers from their professional communities, that make compensation structures deliberately incomparable across studios — these exist to ensure that labor does not.
In the United States, the National Labor Relations Act already protects the right to discuss wages and working conditions. In the European Union, pay transparency directives are establishing similar frameworks. In practice, the game industry routinely uses contractual language and cultural pressure to suppress these rights regardless of jurisdiction.
This is a documented pattern of suppression, and it ends when professionals have institutional backing to assert what the law already provides.
When you assign rights, sign agreements, or accept compensation structures, you are entitled to understand what you are agreeing to.
The deliberate obfuscation of IP assignment, revenue participation, and NDA scope in game development contracts is not standard legal practice. It is a mechanism of extraction. It relies on information asymmetry — on the assumption that developers will not hire lawyers to review employment agreements, that they will sign what is placed in front of them because the alternative is not getting the job, and that the complexity of the language is itself a deterrent to understanding.
Plain language is not a courtesy. It is a precondition for consent. A contract that cannot be understood by the person signing it is not an agreement. It is an imposition.
The laws that govern this industry are being written without us.
Platforms, publishers, and IP holders have lobbyists. They have relationships with legislators and regulators on every continent where games are sold. They have seats in the rooms where the rules are made — rules about intellectual property, about platform liability, about data use, about labor classification, about tax incentives that flow to studios and never reach the people who work in them.
The professional community of game development, as a body, has never had equivalent representation. Not in Washington. Not in Brussels. Not in Westminster. Not anywhere. That gap has been permitted to exist for the entire history of this medium, and every year it persists, the rules are written a little more in favor of the people who showed up and a little less in favor of the people who didn't.
We are closing it. The League will build and maintain legislative relationships in every jurisdiction where its members work, and it will be present in those rooms on behalf of the people who have been absent from them.
A professional environment free from harassment, discrimination, and retaliation is not an aspirational goal. It is a baseline.
The documented pattern of systemic harassment in this industry — and the institutional response that consistently prioritized reputation management over accountability — is a matter of public record. Studios have paid settlements, issued statements, and promised reform, and the underlying conditions have persisted because the incentive structure never changed. Reporting harassment remains a career risk. The people who engage in it are protected by the same institutional power that the people who report it are told to trust.
The right to work safely — and the right to meaningful accountability when that safety fails — is not a negotiating position. It is not a culture initiative. It is not a line item in a corporate responsibility report. It is a professional right, and it is enforceable.
When your creative work generates commercial value, you have the right to be recognized as its author and to participate in the structures that compensate authorship.
Revenue sharing, royalties, and residual arrangements that reflect the contribution of the people who actually built the thing are standard practice in adjacent creative industries. Screenwriters receive residuals. Musicians receive royalties. Actors receive compensation when their performances are rebroadcast. These structures exist because those industries organized and demanded them.
The absence of equivalent structures in games is not a technical limitation. It is not an economic impossibility. It is a choice — made by the people who benefit from its absence, never by the people who bear its cost. A developer who spends three years building a game that generates a decade of live service revenue has no structural claim on that decade. The people who financed it do. That asymmetry is not inevitable. It is a practice, and the creative industries that came before us have already demonstrated that it can be changed.
Your creative work — your voice, your art, your design, your code — may not be used to train automated systems without your explicit, informed agreement.
Authorship does not end at delivery. It follows the work forward into every system that learns from it, every model that replicates it, every tool that was built on the patterns you created. The question of whether generative AI is beneficial or harmful to the craft is a question this community will answer for itself, on its own terms, in its own time. That is not what this right is about.
This right is about whether anyone asked.
In the European Union, GDPR and the AI Act establish frameworks for consent and transparency in the use of personal and creative data. In other jurisdictions, the legal landscape is evolving. In all of them, the principle is the same: the people who created the work have a say in how it is used. That say cannot be waived by a clause buried on page forty of an employment agreement that nobody was given time to read.
They should have asked. Going forward, they will.
This charter governs the organization. The manifesto explains why it exists. Together, they constitute the founding commitment of The League of Game Developers to the professionals it serves.
The work ahead is substantial. We intend to lobby in every jurisdiction where our members work, sit across the table from publishers, platform holders, and legislators, and make the case for the people who built this industry with their hands. We intend to build the professional infrastructure the next generation of game developers should inherit as a given, not a gap.
This is more than a protest or a petition. It is an institution in formation, and institutions are how durable change happens.
The history of this medium is ours. The future of this industry is ours to shape.
The League exists to make sure we have the power to do both.
Next
Know your rights before you sign anything.
The Charter enumerates the rights. This guide explains what they mean in practice — across five jurisdictions, in plain language.