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(Image credit: Blizzard Entertainment)
In case you missed the news, World of Warcraft’s development team—which is approximately 500 members strong—formed a unionlate last month, attached to the Communication Workers of America (CWA).
It all comes as somewhat of a milestone ending to a vicious 3-year saga, starting with harrowing reports ofharassment, sexual misconduct, and abuseatActivision-Blizzard that led to several employees simply leaving in 2021.
In 2022, Activision-Blizzard settled an$18 million sexual harassment lawsuitwith the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. A year later, itsettled a seperate California civil rights suitfor $54 million, with an extra $47 million being funnelled to help employees, though the settlement concluded “no widespread harassment or recurring pattern or practice of gender harassment”.
Cooper also reaffirmed his previous statements from anIGN reportthat the waves of 2021 departures helped plant the seed that would grow into the current union: “There was this series of walkouts … The way that was able to come together so quickly without any prior laying of groundwork really became a proof of concept. We knew we could do that. We could make big changes together, and we knew we had a lot of shared values to rally around.”
While Kotick claimed not to be against unions, Activision has a pretty visible history of anti-union behaviour—afternot recognising a QA union at Raven Software in 2022, the US Labor Relations Board later found that a series of raises were withheld from the team asretaliation for the attempt to unionise.
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This fraught relationship between the CWA and Blizzard’s owners is less of an issue now that Blizzard is under the Microsoft umbrella, however, according to Cooper: “We’ve had CWA representatives and members from other video game unions like Sega and ZeniMax on the campus, talking to folks.”
That’s not to say the transition to Microsoft was painless for everyone, even those at Blizzard—a rash of layoffs followed the purchase, with1,900 spread across Xbox and Blizzard itself, leaving many Blizzard employees reeling as they’donly just started at the company. Similarly, Microsoft would later shut down four studios includingTango Gameworks and Arkane Austin, a move which—considering Hi-Fi Rush’s genuine popularity—gave rise to a wave of borderlineexistential dreadamong the industry.
Mind, that’s in the context ofhistoric layoffsindustry-wide—though it’s also in the context of Microsoftspending $68.7 billion dollarson buying a shiny new company. These things, as they typically are, are complicated messes. Hopefully, however, Blizzard’s newly-formed union will effectively protect those remaining from a similar fate.
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