It’s a busy week for union organisers at Activision Blizzard. Yesterday, in conjunction with the Communications Workers of America (CWA), a group of over 100 developers that work on Hearthstone and the mobile only strategy game Warcraft Rumble voted “strongly in favor of wall-to-wall union representation.” This comes after around 400 Blizzard platform and technology workers voted to unionise, also with the CWA.
The union is made up of numerous roles such as quality assurance testers, artists, designers, software engineers, and producers, having been particularly inspired by World of Warcraft devs that voted to unionise last July. Organising committee member and game designer Dominic Calkosz said in a statement, “My coworkers, as individuals, have voiced many concerns over the years, but it is easy for any company to ignore individuals. We chose to organise in pursuit of a collective voice and a force of solidarity that the industry cannot ignore.”
Not that there’s ever a bad time to form a union, but you can easily understand why these devs are putting in the work to do so right now. From entire, massive game cancellations, to sweeping layoffs at Microsoft, to policy changes that might as well be more layoffs, it is not a secure time to be a game developer right now. Big solidarity to the newly unionised workers.
Also worth mentioning as part of ongoing internal tensions at Microsoft is its offering of its Azure cloud services to the Israeli Ministry of Defense as the country’s military enacts its invasion of Gaza. The contracts related to these specific services were recently cancelled, but Xbox remains a target of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement. For more on how the game industry remains connected to this ongoing issue, you can check out this piece from Edwin where he spoke with various game devs and tech workers about it.
