In the past few years, what remains of video game events has become as much about labor and politics as it has talking about games. At this year’s Summer Game Fest, members of the IGN Creators Guild took the gathering as an opportunity to highlight their current fight to bargain their first union contract with owner IGN Entertainment. The Guild chalked around 100 pro-union messages outside the IGN Live venue in downtown LA, all of which were erased. Then, days after IGN Live ended, some workers on the company’s tech teams, which the Guild has been fighting to include in their unit, were laid off. While people who spoke to Aftermath were clear there’s no provable connection between the two, both events have left workers climbing uphill in their union fight.
According to a former worker, six members of the engineering team that works on IGN.com and Humble Bundle were laid off on Tuesday. Of those laid off, four could have been eligible to join the IGN Creators Guild, which requested expanding their unit to include engineering, product, and Humble Bundle workers last year. The cuts leave two engineers working at Humble Bundle, both of whom worked at the site prior to its acquisition by IGN Entertainment in 2017. A member of the IGN Creators Guild unit council told Aftermath that “we don’t know how the IGN website or Humble Bundle will receive updates or fixes going forward” given the reduced numbers after the cuts.
According to the former worker, this leaves three engineers who would be eligible to join the IGN Creators Guild should its fight succeed, though more non-eligible employees also remain. The Guild took its expansion proposal to the National Labor Relations Board last year, but according to the unit council member, “we haven't heard back in over six months because the NLRB has been gutted. So the Product/Engineering/Humble folks are currently in limbo.” The former worker noted that two people who spoke at the NLRB hearing were cut on Tuesday, and that the group has lost more potentially eligible members over the last few years due to other cuts at the company.
Both the former worker and the Guild unit member told Aftermath that the company cited “restructuring” as a reason for the cuts. The unit member speculated that “we don't think the layoff decision was made in response to any of our [union] actions, but it could be linked to [product, engineering, and Humble's] unionization efforts.” Both expressed concern that, regardless of the reason for the layoffs, they had affected people who could have been part of the Guild and have reduced the number of potential members remaining. Both also worried that the company could lean more on AI and contractors to fill the gaps, with the former worker saying that the company had increased its use of both prior to the layoffs.
The unit member said that the company has “a habit of doing layoffs right after a successful event.” IGN previously laid off staff before The Game Awards in 2022 and after what the Guild called on Instagram “two incredibly successful live events, IGN Live and SDCC [San Diego Comic Con]” in August 2025, the latter of which affected 12% of the Guild’s bargaining unit. In January 2026, Ziff Davis, of which IGN Entertainment is a subsidiary, laid off five CNET workers who were members of the Ziff Davis Creators Guild shortly after CES.
The union was also front of Guild members’ minds during Summer Game Fest itself, with the Guild bringing its demands for pay increases to keep up with inflation to the event. Guild members wrote several messages in chalk demanding “fair wages” and “fair pay” on late Friday night, prior to the start of IGN Live. They wrote the messages across the street from the venue, both so that leadership, according to the unit member, “wouldn’t wash them away (rip), but also because parking for the event was across the street, so every guest would see them as they arrived.”
IGN workers who arrived early at the venue saw the messages still up at around 6:15am on Saturday, but noticed they were gone by the event’s 8am call time. The unit member said that “we are pretty sure they were removed at leadership’s request. We did confirm that the workers who some of us spotted doing the erasing were indeed venue employees, and the timing makes sense as to when leadership showed up in the mornings and wanting to get them gone before union members showed up.”
Ziff Davis did not reply to a request for comment in time for publishing.
Guild members rewrote the messages late Saturday night, this time encircling the venue itself. Those messages were also erased, with the unit member saying, “For the first set it looked like they had used brooms to sweep it away, and for the second set, some of us saw the cleaners using water jugs with hoses.” The unit member says the Guild wrote about 100 messages between the two nights.
In addition to the chalk messages, some Guild members also wore shirts with the union’s logo during IGN Live on Sunday, including while on camera. They also passed out fliers with QR codes to encourage attendees to write letters to IGN management regarding the union’s demands. 436 letters have been sent as of this writing, which the unit member called “pretty crazy.”
The IGN Creators Guild formed in February 2024 under the News Guild. In August 2025, frustrated by multiple layoffs leaving remaining staff with more work, Guild members resolved to “stop picking up the slack,” a union tactic known as work-to-rule. The Guild also had a lunchout in April, and has been encouraging readers to support its contract fight on social media.
The unit member said that none of the Guild’s Summer Game Fest actions “received any sort of reaction from leadership. They were very good at pretending to ignore them.” They also noted that “there’s still been no response from the company on our most recent [contract] proposals as of yet. We haven’t heard from them since mid-May.”
