More than 500 Activision Blizzard employees have formed a union with the Communications Workers of America, just days after a union was formed at Bethesda Game Studios. Both studios have been acquired by Microsoft in recent years, benefiting from a labor neutrality agreement at the company. At Blizzard, the unionization push has resulted in two separate units, one consisting of World of Warcraft developers and one made up of QA testers.
The larger of the two units is being called the World of Warcraft Game Makers Guild. It’s what’s known as a wall-to-wall union, meaning everyone on the World of Warcraft team is covered by its agreement regardless of their title or duties. In contrast, the second union formed simultaneously consists solely of QA testers including teams working on Diablo.
“There aren’t a lot of games as big, successful, long-standing, and celebrated as World of Warcraft, and the place Blizzard occupies in this industry has a lot of influence,” senior producer on World of Warcraft Samuel Cooper tells Inverse. “We hope we inspire other workers to organize and win a voice at the table.”
In 2022, Microsoft entered into a labor neutrality agreement with CWA, which protects workers’ ability to unionize without interference from the company. Under the agreement, workers are free to communicate about union formation and are provided with an online platform to streamline any union vote. That online platform was used in the vote to form the World of Warcraft union, in which 300 employees voted in favor and 18 voted against. The World of Warcraft union became the largest wall-to-wall union at Microsoft just a week after Bethesda’s 241-person union first claimed the title.
Cooper says that among the issues that workers are eager to negotiate, wages are a high priority.
“Irvine and Boston are not cheap places to live and work,” Cooper says. “Members have opinions on the bonus structure, wages themselves, a distinction between cost-of-living and merit increases, and more, and we'll rely on member surveys to make sure we prioritize the right things when bargaining for compensation.”
“We continue to support our employees’ right to choose how they are represented in the workplace, and we will engage in good faith negotiations with the CWA as we work towards a collective bargaining agreement,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in an email.
The smooth process of union recognition in this case is a stark contrast to the first union formed at Activision Blizzard, which was also the first union at any U.S. game developer. In 2022, QA workers at Raven Software voted to form the Game Workers Alliance under the CWA. In that case, union elections were overseen by the National Labor Relations Board and only came after a month-long strike following an earlier round of layoffs.
Now that the World of Warcraft team has voted to form its union, it will begin negotiations with Blizzard Entertainment management on the specifics of its contract. While the details are yet to be worked out, the genesis of Blizzard’s unionization efforts does point to some protection workers may be fighting for. In 2021, Blizzard was sued by California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing, which alleged that sexual harassment and discrimination were rampant. Activision Blizzard settled the suit for $54 million last year, but the lawsuit and the response from management helped spur employees to first walk out then begin working to form a union.
The games industry has also been going through a wave of layoffs for the past few years, including 1,900 at Activision Blizzard in 2024. At the same time, employees at many studios are being asked to return to in-office work after years of remote options that began during the lockdown of 2021. It’s highly likely that Blizzard’s newly unionized workers will seek protections around layoffs and remote work as well.
The World of Warcraft Game Makers Guild is the only wall-to-wall union at Activision Blizzard, but it’s not the largest union at the company overall. This March, around 600 QA testers unionized at Activision, becoming the largest union of game developers in the U.S. The latest unions bring the total of unionized game workers at Microsoft to more than 1,700.
According to the CWA, the new unions at Blizzard are expected to galvanize workers at other studios to begin organizing efforts of their own.
“Unionizing one of the most successful games ever signifies the rising power of worker solidarity across the industry, from AAA studios like Sega and Bethesda to indie developers,” Tom Smith, senior director of organizing at CWA said. “What seemed impossible six years ago is now a reality, and this is just the beginning.”
