Above photo: Alex Castro / The Verge.
Over 500 employees have organized across multiple departments.
Creating the first wall-to-wall union of its kind at the studio.
More than 500 developers at Blizzard Entertainment who work on World of Warcraft have voted to form a union. The World of Warcraft GameMakers Guild, formed with the assistance of the Communication Workers of America (CWA), is composed of employees across every department, including designers, engineers, artists, producers, and more. Together, they have formed the largest wall-to-wall union — or a union inclusive of multiple departments and disciplines — at Microsoft.
This news comes less than a week after the formation of the Bethesda Game Studios union, which, at the time of the announcement, was itself the largest wall-to-wall Microsoft union.
In a statement emailed to The Verge, Microsoft spokesperson Delaney Simmons wrote, “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.”
These unions represent a major shift in video game union organization strategy, and The Verge spoke to two members of Blizzard’s organization committee about how this union came to be and the challenges of organizing such a large and comprehensive group.
Kathryn Friesen, a quest designer on the World of Warcraft team, spoke about how the impetus for the union came out of the desire to uphold one of Blizzard’s company values: “every voice matters.”
“You can tell just by talking to people how much they care about one another and the work that they do in the game,” Friesen said. “I think that that’s where [the unionization effort] comes from, the desire to stand together to fight for collective bargaining rights at the table.”
Paul Cox, senior quest designer and Blizzard veteran, agreed, saying that the company’s response to the state of California’s discrimination lawsuit spurred employee action. “A lot of the early responses felt very corporate and didn’t feel like they reflected the values that, as a company, we said we upheld,” Cox said.
As a result, employees at Blizzard took action with walkouts, which became the beginning of unionization efforts at the company.
The World of Warcraft GameMakers Guild is made up of over 500 members across Blizzard offices in California and Massachusetts. Despite its size — it is the second largest union at Microsoft overall behind Activision’s 600-member QA union — Cox said that Microsoft’s labor neutrality agreement helped get the organization ball rolling.
“We were able to come out into the open about it, and everybody was able to see that no retaliation was occurring,” he said.
With organization efforts out in the open, including CWA tents on Blizzard campuses, Friesen said that getting people across all the different departments was made simpler, too.
“Across departments, we had a lot of support,” she said. “I think we are actually well above 50 percent [union support] in each specific department.”
Interdisciplinary unions like Blizzard’s are relatively rare, especially in the video game industry, as each department has different needs and goals. Up until this point, the majority of unionization efforts in the video game industry have been spearheaded by QA workers who have traditionally been among the least paid and least protected employees.
The first union at Activision Blizzard was made up of QA workers, as was the first union at Microsoft’s game studios. In addition to the World of Warcraft GameMakers Guild, yet another new union made up of QA workers at Blizzard’s Austin, Texas, office has also formed. The Blizzard Quality Assurance United-CWA is a 60-person unit including QA testers for games like Diablo, Hearthstone, and other Blizzard games.
“It is really, really great that we are a wall-to-wall union. We’re all in it together, and it’s a signal that QA is dev as well. I am especially excited for that signal to go out to the rest of the industry,” Friesen said. “[QA employees] work with us every single day. Their desks are next to our desks. So, I hope that we can win better workplace protections for everyone on the team.”