Blizzard devs form a cross-department World of Warcraft union

Introducing the World of Warcraft GameMakers Guild

Activision Blizzard

More than 500 workers at Blizzard’s California and Massachusetts locations have voted to form a World of Warcraft union, the World of Warcraft GameMakers Guild, and it spans every department. Previous organization efforts at Activision only included quality assurance workers – the company’s lowest-paid workers who were often treated as expendable – making this the first cross-department union at Activision Blizzard, with employees from art, production, engineering, and more.

The Communication Workers of America helped workers at Blizzard organize, and the news comes less than a week after 250 workers at Bethesda organized their own cross-department union. Representatives of the WoW GameMakers Guild told The Verge that Microsoft’s labor neutrality played a role in making the union possible.

“We were able to come out into the open about it, and everybody was able to see that no retaliation was occurring,” Paul Cox, a senior quest designer for World of Warcraft, said.

He also said the desire to form such a union began growing after employees saw Activision Blizzard’s response to the 2021 harassment and discrimination cases.

“A lot of the early responses felt very corporate and didn’t feel like they reflected the values that, as a company, we said we upheld,” he said.

Kathryn Friesen, another WoW quest designer, said employees across both campus locations wanted to make good on Activision Blizzard’s promise that every voice mattered.

“You can tell just by talking to people how much they care about one another and the work that they do in the game,” Friesen said. “I think that that’s where [the effort] comes from, the desire to stand together to fight for collective bargaining rights at the table.”

“It is really, really great that we are a wall-to-wall union,” Freisen continued. “It’s a signal that QA is dev as well. I am especially excited for that signal to go out to the rest of the industry [and] I hope that we can win better workplace protections for everyone on the team.”