World of Warcraft‘s Developers Just Made a Huge Leap Forward For Video Game Unionization

Blizzard employees have formed a massively multiplayer union in the name of making World of Warcraft safer and more equitable to work on.

According to a new report from Game Developer, The Communications Workers of America (CWA) has just confirmed over 500 employees at Blizzard Entertainment have formed a “wall-to-wall” union calling itself the World of Warcraft Game Makers Guild(or ‘WoWGG-CWA’, for short). Comprising over 500 members making up the entire team that develops the legendary MMORPG, including designers, engineers, artists, QA testers, and more, was formed alongside a separate, 60-person united of QA testers at Blizzard’s operations in Austin, Texas, marking another major development in the ongoing push for unionization in the video games industry. As the article states, WoWGG-CWA was able to organize due to a “seismic Labor Neutrality Agreement struck in 2022.” That same agreement allowed nearly 250 workers at Bethesda Game Studios, the developers of Fallout and Starfield now also owned by Microsoft after its landmark acquisition of Activision-Blizzard, earlier this week. “We organized not just for ourselves, but also our fellow employees who make the game with us. By ensuring we’re all treated fairly in our own workplace, we can focus ourselves on our shared passion: making great video games. Our union effort predates the recent layoffs, but witnessing them firsthand only served to solidify how important this effort is for the entire gaming industry,” Blizzard senior software engineer Kevin Vigue said in a statement about the union’s formation. “With our union contract, we can have a voice to minimize the impact of future layoffs and ensure we retain talent and knowledge whenever possible. While the team’s voice will determine what we bargain for, we’ve also had numerous conversations with each other in the past few months. We suspect our top bargaining items will include layoff protections, improved work from home policies, transparency around performance and promotions, and pay adjustments to align with the expensive areas we live.”  The move comes not just as part of the video game industry’s wider labor movement, but in the wake of an ongoing swathe of devastating layoffs in the gaming industry. As of June alone, 10,000 people have already been laid off across the industry–including nearly 2,000 people at Activision-Blizzard at the start of the year. Generally poor treatment from employers is nothing new in the entertainment industry as the unslakable appetites of the content beast will attest. With any luck, these new video game unions will prove to be equally successful as the ones’ representing writers and actors last year–as unionization efforts across the entertainment industry seek to protect rank-and-file workers creating the games, movies, and television shows we love from sudden mass layoffs, the encroachment of A.I., and more. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
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