The developers behind World of Warcraft, one of the world’s biggest and longest-running MMORPGs, have officially unionized.
Earlier today, an official vote of over 500 eligible employees working on World of Warcraft was tallied and certified. With this, Blizzard Entertainment has its first ever “wall-to-wall” union, encompassing the entirety of a game development team instead of just one division, like QA. The union includes designers, engineers, producers, artists, QA testers, and other developers, most of whom are based in either Irvine, CA, or are part of a smaller team in Massachusetts. The group is called World of Warcraft Game Makers Guild, or WoWGG, and is a part of Communications Workers of America (CWA).
Additionally, a second group of Activision-Blizzard QA workers based in Austin, Texas have formed a separate union with Communications Workers of America, called Texas Blizzard QA United. The roughly 60 developers involved primarily work on Diablo, Hearthstone, and other games. Both unions concluded their votes today and have been officially recognized under Microsoft’s labor neutrality agreement and certified by an independent arbitrator.
Something need doing?
Speaking ahead of the election’s conclusion, World of Warcraft senior producer Samuel Cooper told me that organizing work on the WoW team began in earnest near the end of 2021 after a (since-settled) California lawsuit alleging instances of harassment, inequality, and bro culture at the company. In the weeks and months that followed, the company put out a series of statements, but in June 2021 Blizzard employees staged a walk-out demanding further action. Cooper tells me the walkout was the “spark” that eventually led to further organizing efforts and, now, WoWGG.
So why did it take three years? Organizing takes time, and 500 people is a lot.
“You can’t just fire off an email blast and then have a bunch of people swarm in,” Cooper says. “It’s mostly individual conversations between people who know and care about each other. It is gradual, but it’s also exponential. The more of those conversations you have, the more people there are having them.”
Cooper tells me he got involved in organizing in hopes of having “a more democratized way of representing employees in the workplace.” He later convinced senior quest designer Paul Cox to join in. Cox tells me he was frustrated that the voices of ground level employees weren’t being represented in Blizzard’s response to the California lawsuit, and he wanted to make sure they were taken into account.
“This isn’t an attack against our World of Warcraft leadership or something where we’re like, ‘We hate those guys.’” he said. “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.”
WoWGG’s initial “spark” and early organizing work took place while the company was still independent of Microsoft, but last year, it was acquired. As a result, Blizzard employees benefited from Microsoft’s prior commitment to labor neutrality, effectively allowing them to organize in the open without company interference.
Update 1:24pm PT: Microsoft has offered the following statement to Variety with regard to today’s unionization announcements: “We continue to support our employees’ right to choose how they are represented in the workplace, and we will engage in good faith negotiations with the CWA as we work towards a collective bargaining agreement.”
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Cooper adds that Microsoft has upheld its commitment with regards to Blizzard.
“We had a lot of folks who, rightly or wrongly, felt fearful before,” Cooper says. “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.”
Once they were able to organize openly, the WoW team’s efforts picked up speed throughout 2024. Cooper tells me the group was also emboldened by other game unions such as those at SEGA and fellow Microsoft unions at Zenimax and Activision, many of whom had representatives on the Blizzard campus speaking with employees. The group even had a friendly race with the unionizing employees at Bethesda Game Studios, who won a similar election last week. “In a friendly way, we were seeing who was going to squeak in there first,” Cooper says. “Never happier to be outrun. Huge congratulations to them.”
What’s worth fighting for
Cooper believes that WoWGG’s victory is part of a growing wave of industry unionization in recent years. He hopes their union can serve as inspiration to others, just as SEGA, Zenimax, and Activision inspired them. “Blizzard’s a big name. We make great games, we occupy a position in the industry that I think has a lot of influence. The ability to show folks a large, very successful, very long-standing game…is able to do this and able to do it with all of our development groups, not just design or production and design or production design, engineering and art, but quality assurance, too, brought in and treated correctly as full development partners. We hope that that’s the start of a paradigm shift across the industry.”
Though WoWGG is still a ways off from contract negotiations, Cox tells me that two big issues the union wants to put on the table are pay equity and work-from-home. On the latter, he says that most of the WoW team is required to be in office three days a week, and exceptions have been very, very limited. That’s been a huge issue for those who moved out of town during the pandemic, or bought houses, or who struggle to afford living in Irvine, CA. “We’ve lost some really great folks who have just been like, ‘I don’t want to come back into the office. I like the fact that I don’t have an hour and a half commute every day,’” Cox says.
Cooper adds, “Long-standing partners who I personally really relied on that we’ve had to figure out how to move forward without. It’s a huge topic for us. Ultimately, how these things shake out in bargaining, how we prioritize pay against promotion transparency, against layoff protections, against work-from-home and other concerns. That’ll really be up to our friends and teammates, our members, to survey, but those are big topics.”
Fundamentally, both Cooper and Cox tell me their desire to unionize comes out of a deep love for Blizzard and the work they do on World of Warcraft. Both of them have been at Blizzard for over 15 years, and feel invested in making it a better place to work for themselves and all their teammates.
“Another one of our organizing committee members said, ‘There’s a temptation when things get hard at a job to go look for a job where things are easier. But this is a tough industry, you can jump and you may experience some improvement for a while, but if you want a place to stay good, you’ve got to make the place good,’” Cooper explains. “Unionizing, I think, it’s going to make a difference for us. I think it’s going to make a difference for the company, a positive difference that’ll help us be more successful in all senses and take better care of our people. I think that’s going to ripple out to the industry, even the players. I’m excited for the future.”
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
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