Magic: The Gathering Arena workers at developer Wizards of the Coast are unionizing, the group, called United Wizards of the Coast, announced Monday. The union is under Communications Workers of America, and covers more than 100 workers at the company. Workers told Aftermath that union efforts have been underway for a few months to a year in different phases, but recent changes at the company sparked the latest push, including return to office mandates and questions around AI.
United Wizards of the Coast notified the company Monday morning and is filing a petition for a vote with the National Labor Relations Board. Game designers, artists, producers, engineers, and others who work on Magic: The Gathering Arena are included in the union.
"Over time, communication [with management] has broken down a bit," digital product manager Rogue Kessler told Aftermath. "We've started to get defensive attitudes from leadership, much more 'it's our way or the highway.' That's what pushed a lot of us into union organizing, because we don't have another viable mechanism for redress."
United Wizards of the Coast is looking to address protections around layoffs, remote work, and generative AI, as well as sustainable workloads and policies around crunch, career progression, and the removal of a policy that allows Hasbro (which owns Wizards of the Coast) ownership of creative materials made by employees of the company—even what's done outside work hours. Both Kessler and Valentine Powell, a senior software engineer and organizing committee member, cited generative AI and return to office mandates as important issues.
Powell told Aftermath that they were hired with the promise they would be able to continue to work remotely. Now, they're being asked to move to Seattle within the next two years. "Somebody at Hasbro basically was like, 'Hey, you have to come back to the office,'" Powell said. "And nobody at Wizards of the Coast can do anything about it."
Kessler said Powell's situation is "very common" on the Magic: The Gathering Arena team. "We've expanded the team a lot," Kessler said. "We've grown the Arena team by an order of magnitude, and a tremendous portion of the people we've hired have been remote. We've gone where the talent is, looked beyond the immediate Seattle area to find the best and the brightest to make this game. And now that we've been using those people's labor for years, all of a sudden, you're not allowed to be remote anymore. The circumstances under which you were hired are being changed out from under you."
The union is asking Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast to voluntarily recognize the union and to ensure neutrality in the union election. The deadline for that recognition, the group wrote in a letter to management, is May 1, International Workers Day. (United Wizards of the Coast said it would withdraw its petition to the NLRB should the company voluntarily recognize the union.)
United Wizards of the Coast, Kessler and Powell said, is asking players and fans to support the union. "We are asking our fans to use their voices to be vocal in support of our union and help us call on Hasbro and Wizards to be a high road employer, which means voluntarily recognizing our union, committing to not union bust, and to engage with us in good faith."
Powell added: "I believe that leadership will listen to [players] if they speak up."
