They started with flyers. World of Warcraft Activision Blizzard developers have decided to unionize and have been preparing to do so since their $69 billion acquisition by Microsoft, which has pledged to abide by a labor neutrality agreement that will take effect 60 days after the acquisition closes, allowing workers to negotiate collectively without fear.
Even with the agreement, developers were nervous about even expressing interest in the union, says Paul Cox, a senior designer at Quest who served on the union’s organizing committee. “Before[the agreement]we had a lot of people who said, ‘We’re interested, but we’re worried about retaliation. We’re scared of having our name in there somewhere,'” he adds.
That fear is not unfounded: Before the Microsoft acquisition, when the company was still under the leadership of Activision Blizzard, unionized quality assurance workers at the Albany, New York, studio accused management of engaging in union-busting tactics. According to one quality assurance tester who WIRED spoke to at the time, management was hostile to their efforts, dragging employees into “voluntary meetings” and “spreading misleading or false information about the union and the unionization process in internal Slack channels.”
On July 24, Microsoft voluntarily World of Warcraft The Developers Guild is a full union of over 500 employees across multiple departments, an achievement long unthinkable in the video game industry. It is a first for Activision Blizzard due to its size and the breadth of departments involved. The QA testers in Albany eventually unionized, but it was a relatively small group.
of Warcraft The developers are following in the footsteps of another Microsoft company, Bethesda Game Studios, which formed the first major studio’s union across its 241-person team, which Microsoft also voluntarily recognized.
“It wasn’t until after the Microsoft acquisition that the ball started to roll down hill,” Cox says of the union effort. “Not having to fear retaliation really helped.”
It also helps to reach out to as many coworkers as possible. “When you’re trying to talk to people about a union, you can only really do that one-on-one,” Cox says. To that end, organizers set up tents on company grounds so people could stop by and get information. Being able to be openly present in spaces that people might pass by on their way to lunch, for example, made that process faster and easier.
Activision Blizzard did not respond to a request for comment before publication.
Cox said he and his colleagues had previously found it difficult to communicate with other employees because of the secrecy of organizing. World of Warcraft The QA group was already working on unionizing. Once they found out about each other, they joined forces. When it came to deciding who should be in the union, Cox says it all came down to a very simple idea:
“The game creators were important,” he says. “The people without whom the game couldn’t be made.” Whether that was writers, sound designers or producers, “we tried really hard to make sure that everyone was in the same group as much as possible.”
