The entire World of Warcraft development team has unionized at Blizzard Entertainment, the Communications Worker's of America (CWA) announced today, bringing over 500 developers into the new wall-to-wall union at the studio.
The new union, formed under the name Wow Gamemaker's Guild, is the first wall-to-wall union at Blizzard Entertainment. This comes after ZeniMax, another Microsoft-owned studio formed its first wall-to-wall union at Bethesda Games Studios last week.
We're the World of Warcraft Gamemakers Guild: the first wall-to-wall union at Blizzard! We're thrilled to include WoW's QA, Art, Sound, Design, Engineering and Production voices for a democratized workplace. At this crucial moment in games, we stand together as one. For Azeroth! pic.twitter.com/ieewW5KFuI
— WoW Gamemaker's Guild (@WoWGG_CWA) July 24, 2024
"We're the World of Warcraft Gamemakers Guild: the first wall-to-wall union at Blizzard," the new union announced today via X. "We're thrilled to include WoW's QA, Art, Sound, Design, Engineering, and Production voices for a democratized workplace. At this crucial moment in games, we stand together as one. For Azeroth!"
During the Microsoft acquisition of Activision Blizzard, the tech giant reached a Labor Neutrality Agreement with the Communications Workers of America, which would allow employees at the newly acquired studios to "freely and fairly make a choice about union representation." This was then spread to another Microsoft-owned studio, ZeniMax.
According to CODE-CWA, "over 1,750 video game workers at Microsoft" have now unionized thanks to this neutrality agreement.
While the WoW Gamemaker's Guild isn't the first union at Blizzard since the acquisition, it's the first inter-disciplinary guild at the studio. Earlier this year, about 600 QA workers unionized at the developer, while Activision Blizzard studio Raven Software's QA team formed the first union at a major US game publisher, the Game Worker's Alliance, back in 2022.
