What you need to know
- Workers at Microsoft-owned Blizzard Entertainment who develop World of Warcraft’s expansions and updates are unionizing.
- The “wall to wall” union includes around 500 members of departments across art, engineering, production, sound, and more.
- This comes just days after around 240 employees at Microsoft’s Bethesda Game Studios in the U.S. also unionized.
- Microsoft has remained neutral in employee unionization efforts, a direct contrast to the approach most other big companies have taken.
More and more workers are unionizing, but nowhere so much as the game studios under Microsoft.
Practically the entire development team for World of Warcraft at Blizzard Entertainment is forming a union, as shared on Wednesday. This “wall to wall” union covers around 500 employees across multiple departments.
“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,” the team wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “At this crucial moment in games, we stand together as one. For Azeroth!”
Blizzard Entertainment became part of Microsoft Gaming and the larger Xbox organization following Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard King, which finalized in October 2023. Months after the acquisition closed, Microsoft laid off around 1,900 workers under Microsoft Gaming, most of them from Activision Blizzard King.
As part of Microsoft’s bid to acquire the company, it agreed to remain neutral in any employee unionization efforts, allowing union votes to proceed more easily than at most other companies.
Microsoft-owned studios are leading the charge for unionization in games
This comes just days after around 240 employees at Bethesda Game Studios’ three U.S-based offices also unionized, which came shortly after the initial unionization of Bethesda Game Studios’ Montreal office. Like with the WoW Gamemaker’s Guild, these unions are “wall to wall,” meaning they encompass multiple departments instead of just being limited to quality assurance workers.
These teams are joining the already-considerable unions under Microsoft that have been established over the last year, including the quality assurance teams at Activision Central Quality Assurance, Raven Software, Blizzard Albany, and ZeniMax Media.
Altogether, nearly 1,800 workers at Microsoft are now represented by a union. Microsoft has so far continued to negotiate in good faith with the unions, hiring some Starfield testers as full-time employees and agreeing to guidelines around the usage of AI in games. Microsoft is continuing to negotiate with these unions toward finalizing a full union contract, which will be the first of its kind under the tech giant.
I am personally quite thrilled to see this continue, and I am happy Microsoft has kept to its word about remaining neutral. With one big union after another coming, it’s hard to see this stopping anytime soon, and I expect we’ll be learning of further unions across other studios at Xbox in the near future.
This will hopefully serve as an example for workers outside of Microsoft, with employees at other companies filing for protection and banding together to ensure fair raises, opportunity, and more.
