Following on the heels of Friday’s wall-to-wall union at Bethesda Games Studios, over 500 workers on World of Warcraft have unionized under the Communications Workers of America (CWA). Like Bethesda’s union, the World of Warcraft Game Makers Guild spans departments, including engineers, designers, artists, QA testers and more, in what the Guild calls “ the largest wall-to-wall union at a Microsoft-owned studio.”
“The decision by workers on World of Warcraft to form a union marks a key inflection point in the broader movement for video game worker organizing industry-wide,” said Tom Smith, Senior Director of Organizing at CWA, in a press release. “This victory, built on years of foundation work since the launch of the Game Workers Unite movement at GDC, reflects a deeply rooted commitment to change. Unionizing one of the most successful games ever signifies the rising power of worker solidarity across the industry.”
Alongside the WoW Game Makers Guild, 60 Blizzard QA workers in Austin also formed a union today. Microsoft, parent company of Activision Blizzard, signed a labor neutrality agreement with the CWA in 2022, agreeing not to stand in the way of organizing workers. That agreement went into effect 60 days after the finalization of Microsoft’s purchase of Activision Blizzard, which was completed in 2023.
Pretty promptly, Microsoft laid off over 2,000 people from its gaming division in January 2024. Closures of four Bethesda studios followed in May. Most recently, the FTC–which tried to block Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard in 2022– sent a letter to the US Court of Appeals accusing the company of “exactly the sort of consumer harm from the merger the FTC has alleged,” following Microsoft’s Game Pass price hike in early July. Microsoft responded by calling the FTC’s claims “misleading.”
While it’s easy to read both these unions as direct responses to all of that, the WoW Game Makers Guild makes specific mention of the walkouts and protests at Blizzard in 2021, which followed the company’s response to California’s sexual harassment and discrimination lawsuit against the company. The press release calls today’s unionization “a significant milestone in [that] journey.”
It rules to see more unions in the games industry, especially interdisciplinary ones. Finding commonality with your colleagues across differences, and using those commonalities to change your workplace, is one of the best things about unions (ask me how I know!). If you haven’t experienced that for yourself yet, there’s never been a better time.
