Blizzard’s World of Warcraft Team Unionizes, Becomes One of Biggest Videogame Unions in US
Yesterday, the World of Warcraft development team at Blizzard, made up of over 500 workers, officially voted to unionize. In the process, they’ve become one of North America’s biggest “wall-to-wall” videogame unions, meaning it encompasses the full development team regardless of their division, including artists, programmers, designers, QA testers, and more. By contrast, many other recent videogame industry unionization efforts have been on a division basis, such as with Activision Quality Assurance United-CWA.
The union, titled the World of Warcraft Gamer Makers Guild (WoWGG), is part of the larger Communications Workers of America (CWA), which has been pushing for unionization efforts in videogames for some time. Most of those in WoWGG are based in Irving, CA, with a smaller team in Massachusetts. Additionally, a second union, Texas Blizzard QA United, was formed of roughly 60 Activision Blizzard QA workers based in Austin, Texas. Both unions have now been officially recognized under Microsoft’s labor neutrality agreement with the CWA, which went into effect in June 2022.
In an interview with IGN, World of Warcraft senior producer Samuel Cooper explained the importance of being able to organize without fear of reprisal: “We had a lot of folks who, rightly or wrongly, felt fearful before. There are legal protections for organizing, but it can still be scary to have that change…We had CWA folks on campus for weeks on end, right in the middle, next to the big bronze orc. I think that really made people feel like it’s not scary. I know they’re not allowed to retaliate, but now I have confidence that they’re not going to retaliate.”
Part of the impetus for organizing at the company was the 2021 gender discrimination lawsuit levied at Activision Blizzard by the state of California, which detailed cases of sexual harassment and toxic culture at the company, leading to walkouts from many on the World of Warcraft team. Cooper further explained to IGN that serious organizing efforts began near the end of 2021 and that part of what got him interested was the idea of having “a more democratized way of representing employees in the workplace.”
The last few years have seen a rise in union activity in the North American videogame industry, with workers at Sega of America recently ratifying a contract for another wall-to-wall union and multiple groups under Microsoft taking action, such as Bethesda Game Studios, which unionized earlier this week.
Considering longstanding and widespread issues with crunch and toxic work culture at many videogame companies, this rise in labor organization could potentially give developers the tools to minimize these circumstances and create healthier work environments while giving themselves leverage against shareholders’ whims. Going forward, the unionization of this massive team at Blizzard could serve as a point of inspiration for other developers hoping to do the same. Considering the constant spate of headlines about videogame layoffs we’ve been seeing for the last year, it’s nice to get a little bit of good news for once.