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The team of nearly 200 Activision Blizzard developers behind the Overwatch franchise has unionized. Formed under the Communications Workers of America (CWA), the Overwatch Gamemakers Guild is the latest wall-to-wall Blizzard union to be recognized by parent company Microsoft since the World of Warcraft development team announced its own union last July.
The CWA announced on Friday that “an overwhelming majority of workers have either signed a union authorization card or indicated that they wanted union representation.” The Overwatch union unit includes game developers across production, engineering, design, art, sound, and quality assurance, pushing for job security, salary, and layoff protection improvements.
“After a long history of layoffs, crunch, and subpar working conditions in the global video game industry, my coworkers and I are thrilled to be joining the broader union effort to organize our industry for the better, which has been long overdue,” organizing committee member Foster Elmendorf said in the CWA’s statement.
The CWA says that over 2,600 workers at Microsoft-owned gaming studios have now joined its ranks, including a union formed by 600 quality assurance workers employed at Activision in March 2024. These strings of unionization efforts follow a labor neutrality agreement that was signed between the CWA and Microsoft in 2022 that made it easier for staffers at subsidiaries like Activision Blizzard to organize.
