Blizzard Entertainment's Team 5—responsible for the development of Hearthstone—is unionizing. A group of around 100 workers voted yes to representation with the Communications Workers of America under CWA Local 9510. It's the third union to go public at Blizzard this week, following two new units composed of Blizzard Entertainment's Battle.net workers.
The Hearthstone union includes people from many different roles across the game's development, including artists, gameplay designers, and quality assurance testers. Microsoft has recognized the union after workers voted earlier this week; Microsoft and CWA's neutrality agreement, which was signed in 2022 ahead of Microsoft's $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard and prevented the company from interfering in union efforts, expired on Monday. Several unions formed under Activision Blizzard before the neutrality agreement was signed, but they faced what workers called union-busting—attempts to shut down union efforts. Since the signing, workers have voted to unionize across the company; there are at least seven separate union groups at Blizzard Entertainment alone.
Hearthstone workers made a big push to unionize their own department about three months ago, senior 2D artist Uriah Voth told Aftermath. The deadline for the neutrality agreement's expiration was a big motivator to get the union finalized, workers said.
"One important moment was learning about the neutrality agreement and its deadline, and seeing the union busting that is and has happened at other very large companies," senior game designer Dominic Calkosz said. "Being owned now by Microsoft has always been a looming question of, will things change? How will things change? How should we be prepared or react to those changes? Knowing there is a date where this powerful option of forming a union may become significantly more difficult was a wake up call to me that, alright, we should start moving now."
Carol Blean, Hearthstone test analyst, told Aftermath that the agreement allowed the Hearthstone workers to openly talk about the union. "You [usually] have to be very hushed about it. You [usually] have to be very secretive," she said. "Fear hasn't been looming as much, because we have been very open about it, very supported, and everyone has been very respectful."
She continued: "We all share common struggles, so it's easy to keep supporting each other, not just in the product that we create, but in our own choices."
Workers don't know how things will change for unionizing at Microsoft game studios now that the neutrality agreement has expired. The unions that exist now, including Team 5's, are past the major hurdle of an election and recognition from the company, but neutrality agreements typically don't extend to the next steps of union effort, negotiating for a contract. Now, the Hearthstone union’s organizing committee will poll the group to determine what the most important issues are for staff to guide them in bargaining a contract. So far, just two of the many unions under Microsoft and Activision Blizzard have completed negotiations, Raven Software and ZeniMax QA workers. Both groups were in negotiations for years.
Voth said that layoff protections are something that motivated him to get involved in the union. He's been at Blizzard Entertainment for two and a half years and has experienced three rounds of layoffs that impacted Hearthstone team members. "It was just this every six month cadence of experiencing this traumatic event," he said. "I looked into the union stuff, and I know that we can't fully stop layoffs from happening, but just the feeling that we need to have some say in these massive decisions that are affecting all of us."
It didn't feel like leadership was listening, the workers said—a union is a collective voice they can't ignore. "I cannot face everything by myself," Blean said. "We all share the same struggles." She described the "passion tax" that people often take when coming to jobs at places like Blizzard, because they're often dream jobs. But these companies, at the end of the day, are still corporations. "We're looking for just treatment," Blean said. "And right now, we don't have much of a say. That's what we're looking for."
Calkosz listed a number of things the union is interested in negotiating over, including layoff protections like improved severance packages and recall rights, reduced wage gaps, more support for work from home, formal protections for remote workers, accountability for harassment, and protections or limitations on AI usage.
"More generally, being able to preserve the good things that we have and being prepared to push back against future unfair treatment," Calkosz said. "Over the months and years, there will be things that upper leadership may have done that they choose not to do because they know we have solidarity now."
The workers said they're very grateful for the unions that came before them at Blizzard. Members of the organizing committees across unions meet weekly to talk and share information. "We were trying to get this done by the end of the neutrality agreement, and it was really because of the work that other unions had done before us," Voth said. "They were able to help us figure out how to best strategize and get the message out to our team."
Union influence is apparent even outside of that coordination–simply existing is a motivating factor. "It has been tremendously helpful for members of our team, of our unit, to see other teams at Blizzard union and make steps toward the contract and other things that they want," Calkosz said. "It's very difficult to take the first step or take that leap. Just knowing there are others already paving that way, and ready for solidarity with our team as well, has been motivating for a lot of people."
He continued: "It's been a little scary to not know how the company might react or retaliate. It helps a ton that other Blizzard teams and other developers have paved the way for us, but a bit of fear is still there. It's helped to remind myself that for [the company] to retaliate would be wrong, and so for us to obey in advance would be wrong. The other Blizzard developers helped pave the way for us. I hope we can help pave the way for other companies, especially being such a visible triple A studio."
