Videos games are an expensive hobby, often demanding a great deal of trust whenever you buy a new one. Buying a game winds up being a number of things. A purchase is a gamble. It’s an encouragement. It’s a participation in exploitation. And it’s a conversation with the many people who brought you the game.

The game industry is not exactly known for valuing workers. Big studios are rife with soul-destroying crunch and end-of-project layoffs.

French studio Motion Twin, developer of the Castlevania-inspired roguelike Dead Cells, is trying something different: Workers own and manage the company. There is no boss.

Former Overwatch pro and coach Thomas "Morte" Kerbusch has partnered with sports labour attorney Ellen Zavian to push towards unionising, according to a report from Liz Mullen in Sports Business Journal. Meanwhile, the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive pro scene is also forming a players association, thanks to the efforts of Scott "SirScoots" Smith, a longtime esports veteran who competed in his youth and later became a team owner and esports broadcaster.

As more and more money has flooded into the esports industry, player rights have been a hot topic across multiple games. Careers in esports can be extremely short, making it all the more important to ensure that players receive their fair share of the profits their work generates.

With that in mind, Riot Games, producer of League of Legends and proprietor of the wildly popular League Championship Series, recently announced a plan to create and fund a player's association, a group that will perform many of the functions associated with a union and will be the first of its kind in esports.