Founded during events surrounding the March 2018 Game Developers Conference, the flat organization has grown to over a thousand members across more than 20 international chapters.

In Australia, where the industry is smaller, Game Workers Unite wants to include esports professionals and marketing staff as well.

They also seek to show the emphasize the humans and conditions behind the making of games and have argued that, allied with consumers, workers can fight business practices that concern gamers, such as gambling-based gameplay mechanics.

Membership was about 600 by November 2018,[1] and in the thousands across over 20 international chapters by mid-2019,[5] including cities such as Los Angeles, Montreal, San Francisco, and Vancouver.

[2] The group keeps its members' employers private, has no official membership count, and does not announce its nascent campaigns,[5] though at least 12 were in progress as of late 2018.

[2] Game Workers Unite's protest badges and pamphlets became quickly visible at developer expositions worldwide.

The group saw the breadth and volume of roles in the games industry as posing potential difficulty for a single union strategy.

[9] Game Workers Unite's other actions have included social media campaigns to fire CEOs presiding over layoffs, such as Activision's Bobby Kotick and ArenaNet's Mike O'Brien.

Their four goals are ending unpaid overtime, bettering diversity and inclusion, educating and promoting targeted workers, and establishing steady and fair wages.