What began as a trickle has turned into an avalanche. Workers on Diablo are the latest arm of Blizzard to unionize, with Communications Workers of America (CWA) – which helped other Microsoft-owned studios unionize – saying that over 450 developers across multiple disciplines voted in favor of unionizing. It’s been a long time coming, though layoffs certainly sped up the process.
The Diablo team joins the World of Warcraft team, the Overwatch team, the Story and Franchise Development team, and numerous other studios across Microsoft totaling out to thousands of unionized workers, a direct result of the union neutrality deal Microsoft struck with CWA in 2022 when it was facing regulatory scrutiny over its $68.7 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard. We’ve come a long way since small units at Raven and Blizzard Albany fended off Activision Blizzard’s pre-acquisition attempts at union busting in 2022 and 2023, and not a moment too soon: Microsoft’s penchant for mass layoffs has cut some teams to the bone and left others warily counting down the days until their heads land on the chopping block. This new union, workers hope, will act as a bulwark.
“After the [late 2023 Microsoft-Activision Blizzard] merger, CWA was able to come onto the campus for the first time, and the room that they held their first group event ... was in the building where the Unannounced Survival Game development team was being housed,” Kelly Yeo, game producer on Diablo IV and early member of the union organizing committee, told Aftermath. “A week to the day after that event [in early 2024], the entire project was canceled, and hundreds of people from that building were laid off. So that was a really radicalizing moment for me."
That really lit a fire for me of 'We should do something.'
“I was a long-term remote employee living in New York, and I just happened to be on campus the week CWA was there,” Skye Hoefling, senior software engineer II and fellow Diablo union OG, told Aftermath. “The next week, the layoffs happened. The person I was moving in with worked on Battle.net, and they lost their job. ... That really lit a fire for me of 'We should do something.'”
More rounds of layoffs, regrettably, followed in 2024 and 2025, bringing the tally up to over 3,000 across Microsoft’s gaming division since the beginning of 2024. July’s layoffs, especially, sealed the deal for some Diablo team members.
"[Recent layoffs] did actually galvanize a lot of people,” said Yeo. “There are some people that we had been speaking to that were very on the fence about it, and that was sort of a catalyst for them – or I guess the last straw. It feels like every time it happens, the noose tightens a little more for anybody left behind.”
While the Diablo team emerged from last month’s bloodletting relatively unscathed, union members view now as a time to secure and enshrine every available protection in a contract. Some of this will be based on the experiences of other Microsoft unions. Recent layoffs, which led to the cancellation of an unannounced Zenimax MMO, served as a test of the Zenimax QA union’s newly won contract.
"It sucks to see how [QA] basically had to test their contract and layoff protections almost immediately after negotiating their contract,” said Yeo, “but it is good to see in action that we have tangible proof: They've definitely improved layoff procedures and severance and things like that. … For other units, they were able to negotiate – immediately after they've gotten notifications of the layoffs and who is being let go – to save some jobs or make a case for saving jobs for people who are essential. Obviously the ideal is that we'd be able to save all jobs, but they were at least given a chance."
Diablo union organizers plan to survey members and assemble a list of high-priority concerns ahead of contract negotiations, but based on preliminary conversations with prospective members, they can already hazard a few guesses as to what they’ll be arm-wrestling management over at the bargaining table: pay equity, AI, crediting, and remote work.
We know that Microsoft and Blizzard make a lot of money. They can absolutely afford to pay us more.
Disputes over pay are as old as time itself – which money is famously the same thing as – but Blizzard employees have long been faced with a unique dilemma: Prestige often comes with a pay cut relative to what a similar skillset might command at other game studios or tech companies.
"When you look even just at other gaming studios, pretty much anybody you talk to, if they talk to somebody else that's in their equivalent position or maybe a title below them, their compensation is vastly different,” Ryan Claudy, who helped organize Blizzard Albany’s union before moving into production and sharing his knowledge with the Diablo team, told Aftermath. “We know that Microsoft and Blizzard make a lot of money. They can absolutely afford to pay us more."
Claudy pointed to what he calls the “passion tax.” Game workers, he said, often get paid less than their tech industry counterparts because they’re passionate about what they do, and passion can be taken advantage of. Microsoft is a tech company, making discrepancies all the more arbitrary.
"With the acquisition, I was initially excited because I know that Microsoft is top of the industry when it comes to healthcare and all that sort of stuff,” Claudy said. “But the way integration has worked, there are certain things that we get that are granted to all Microsoft employees, but not everything. There's different things that those of us under Activision and Blizzard and King don't get, that others do get. So I think that would be one of the first things we bring to the table: 'Hey, treat us equitably with everybody else you already employ.'"
AI is another potential locus of conflict, especially considering how tyrannically AI-obsessed Microsoft has become in recent years. Yeo said that in their experience, AI has certainly found its way into Blizzard’s development pipeline over time, but so far, it’s yet to worm its tendrils around the final game.
“[Generative AI] is starting to creep in a lot,” said Yeo. “I can only speak for art, where in the visual development stage, if people don't feel like they have concept art support, they'll just toss things into Stable Diffusion or whatever and then do mood boards and stuff and give that to the teams to give them guidance.”
They added, however, that various materials posted to internal channels make it seem like management is “signaling that they want to use or integrate more [AI] into the pipelines in the future,” which is why it’s important for the union to take a stand now.
"There is definitely a growing concern across most of the artists like 'Is this going to replace us?'” said Yeo. “And speaking to Zenimax workers, they were able to negotiate for better guidelines around AI usage that focuses on using it as a tool and not a replacement – and also that it's not used to harm workers, and if it does harm workers, that the people creating the tools can be held accountable."
"A topic among card signers is [whether] we're going to be required to use AI and ethical concerns with it,” said Hoefling.
[Generative AI] is starting to creep in a lot.
Currently, Microsoft is facing scrutiny from within and without for one of the least ethical uses of AI imaginable: Facilitating Israel’s genocide in Gaza via Azure Cloud and generative AI-powered surveillance tech. No Azure For Apartheid, a movement made up of current and former Microsoft employees, has repeatedly protested these military contracts, recently leading to arrests and firings. On the gaming side of things, unionized workers at Arkane, a Microsoft-owned studio, have aligned themselves with No Azure For Apartheid and demanded that Microsoft cease being an “accomplice of a genocide.”
On this front, it’s still early days for the Diablo union, which has yet to discuss Microsoft’s involvement with Israel as a committee. However, organizers recognize the cause as worthy, and they hope to bring it forward in the future.
"It would be a discussion we would have once we've certified the rest of our unit to discuss ... if we're able to support the larger movements across Microsoft,” said Yeo. “But it's definitely something we'd be interested in talking to other units about, because I feel pretty strongly about it, and honestly [it's] insane if people don't."
"I've been following it in the news and watching the [protests] that happened in Redmond,” said Hoefling. “It makes me think about, once we formalize, if we were to do something like that in [the Diablo team], having everything certified protects us where we can do something like that."
In the nearer term, Diablo team members just want to be able to keep doing their jobs – and, if push comes to an unceremonious shove out the door, to at least have something to show for it all.
"You have to be here for a certain number of months to be credited on games, and many people that worked on Diablo IV are not credited on the base game," said Hoefling. "We all got credited on the expansion, and one of my coworkers was, like, one day under. But we were all there."
"I also want to point out that after the January layoffs, because of the policy where if you have left the team six months prior to launch, you would be moved to 'special thanks' instead of your actual position ... [many], from directors to associates, are all lumped under 'special thanks,'" said Yeo. “They didn't have any control over being laid off."
Crediting more people wouldn’t even be difficult.
“It costs nothing,” said Yeo.
This is also why remote work – an ongoing battle at Activision Blizzard that has resulted in walkouts over what employees view as “soft layoffs” – remains a hot topic: There is a world in which Blizzard makes it easier for employees to do good work, as opposed to more difficult, and it’s imminently achievable. The Diablo team is already spread out, with Irvine and Albany as its primary locations. Blizzard also has offices in Austin and Boston, as well as multiple studios in Asia. As a result, cramming everyone into a single space is an impossible pipe dream. Moreover, the alternative has already proven itself to be viable.
"Blizzard has showcased it, and the whole industry has showcased it, that remote work works,” said Claudy. “I think it's limiting the company [to force people to work out of offices] because during the pandemic you could hire anybody from anywhere. They didn't have to leave; they didn't have to move. Your talent pool is suddenly way bigger. ... There's no real argument against remote work, except the control part, where now they know where you are and what you're doing."
There's no real argument against remote work, except the control part, where now they know where you are and what you're doing.
Distance and difficult-to-come-by work-from-home exemptions certainly haven’t prevented workers on the Warcraft, Overwatch, and now Diablo teams from banding together.
"We're all learning and growing together and sharing knowledge in a way that I think is super helpful for community building,” said Yeo, “because teams at Blizzard tend to be very siloed; I kind of joke and say that it's like five studios in a trench coat. Breaking down those walls and fostering that sense of community and knowledge sharing has been very helpful."
Ultimately, that’s the element of this unionization wave that has Diablo union organizers feeling most hopeful: Where once they only had numbers, now they have strength.
"I've never been involved with any community-based anything, really. I'm kind of a loner,” said Yeo. “Getting to know and build this community has been the greatest reward for me in this process – getting to know people that I would never work with in such a large studio."
“This union is so important to me,” said Hoefling. “The community we have built on [the Diablo team] just by organizing alone. There are so many people here now that get to go and just talk to each other and meet other people that we didn't have an opportunity to before.”
