The World of Warcraft team at Blizzard is unionizing, reports Bloomberg. Like a number of other games industry unions, the approximately 500 workers are joining up with the Communication Workers of America. The new union will be "wall-to-wall," meaning it covers the entirety of the development team rather than just one division, like QA, and includes both the larger Irvine, California team and the smaller team in Massachusetts. It'll be called the World of Warcraft Game Makers Guild, or WoWGG.
It's likely that the WoWGG will be the second largest union of game workers in the United States, just after the 600-person QA workers union at Activision that formed in March.
World of Warcraft senior producer Samuel Cooper told IGN that efforts to seriously organize the World of Warcraft team started in earnest in late 2021 following reports about Blizzard's scandalous 'frat boy' culture. The effort gained further ground after Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard last year due to Microsoft's neutral policy on gaming unions, which IGN reports allowed open organizing without interference.
"This isn't an attack against our World of Warcraft leadership or something where we're like, 'We hate those guys,'" said Cooper. "We just want to make sure that our voices are being heard and that at some point we don't end up as numbers on a spreadsheet. Because you go up high enough and these people have never met any of us, none of the names mean anything to them."
The new World of Warcraft union follows the similar "wall-to-wall" union formed last week at Bethesda Game Studios, also owned by Microsoft. Microsoft's officially neutral stance on unions at its gaming divisions—which came out of its effort to get regulatory approval for its Activision Blizzard acquisition—has clearly made the large teams at Microsoft-owned studios fertile grounds for labor organizing.
In addition to the approximately 500 members of the World of Warcraft team's union, a second QA union under CWA has formed in Texas of about 60 people who work on games including Diablo and Hearthstone.
The next step for both unions will be contract negotiations, which can take a significant amount of time. The leaders of the organizing workers say they hope to focus on pay equity, remote work, and workplace equity.
We're the World of Warcraft Gamemakers Guild: the first wall-to-wall union at Blizzard! We're thrilled to include WoW's QA, Art, Sound, Design, Engineering and Production voices for a democratized workplace. At this crucial moment in games, we stand together as one. For Azeroth! pic.twitter.com/ieewW5KFuIJuly 24, 2024
