The video game industry is brutal. Now it’s unionizing.

1,900 Blizzard workers have ratified a contract with protections around job security, remote work, wages, and the right to bargain over AI.Mother Jones illustration; Getty

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“Folks were asking us questions like ‘How do I get involved in unions? Is there anything I can do to help?’,” said Paul Cox, a senior designer on World of Warcraft, recounting the excitement at BlizzCon, the video game developer Blizzard Entertainment’s annual Southern California gaming convention, which took place just over a week ago and drew tens of thousands of attendees, as well as 12.5 million online viewers. 

Since 2024, Blizzard Entertainment workers—first those working on quality assurance in Albany,New York, and Austin, Texas, then the team behind World of Warcraft, unionized one after another, including staff working on story development, technology, and ultra-high-profile games like Overwatch and Diablo.

Blizzard—and Microsoft, now its owner—eventually recognized some 1,900 unionized workers, striking a 2022 labor neutrality agreement with the Communications Workers of America.

Despite the extraordinary popularity of Blizzard’s games, and the anticipation with which landmark releases like World of Warcraft: Forever—and high-profile games from other studios, like Grand Theft Auto VI—are received, game developers work in a notoriously demanding and insecure sector, regularly putting in 100-hour work weeks in the crunch periods leading up to release only to face sweeping layoffs after games hit the market. Franchises like World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto can earn billions for the studios and parent companies behind them, but the teams who make the games are often painfully aware of how little trickles down to them—executive salaries in the gaming world can be severalhundred times greater than those of the median staff member.

Blizzard workers are among those having a rough ride. In July, Microsoft laid off 1,600 workers from its Xbox division. While these cuts didn’t have a major impacton workers at Blizzard Entertainment, it was yet another example of budget cuts amid the strugglesthat came with several massive mergers on the heels of revenue growth early in the Covid pandemic. 1,600 more staff are expected to be laid off throughout the rest of the fiscal year—cuts, according to the company’s July announcement, that would likely affect Blizzard. On Tuesday, Xbox laid off 268 staff as part of Xbox CEO Asha Sharma’s “reset” campaign.

The 1,900 workers who have now ratified a contract with Blizzard won protections around job security, remote work, wage increases, and the right to continuously bargain over AI usage in the workplace, a point of serious urgency in an industry eager to incorporate the technology, often with an eye to cost-cutting.

Such contracts look vital to many workers in an industry where—in another recent example—Electronic Arts, the company behind game series like MaddenNFL and The Sims, has eliminated more than a thousand positions over the past three years, touting AI as a path to quicken development timelines; Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and investment firms including Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners completed their acquisition of the company last month, highlighting both the value of the industry to global investors and the likelihood of a even more severe private equity squeeze. A coalition of six European video games unions collectively protested AI, toxic workplaces, and mass layoffs in December.

But the two years it took to get to that point were difficult, in part because Blizzard changed its bargaining chair multiple times.

“It felt like nine months, maybe even a year, where we didn’t really get much done,” Cox said. One of those chairs, Crystal Carey, was later sworn in as President Trump’s NLRB general counsel in January.

Mobilizers in each union ramped up their activity with on-campus rallies and union events. “There were seven units who were actively bargaining at the same time. There were seven different bargaining tables, and we were all trying to get bargaining dates,” said Alison Veneto, a senior editor in story and franchise development at Blizzard. “We all started to work together, show up at each other’s rallies.” 

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On the week of August 9, the seven unions bargaining at the time merged for what Veneto called an “in-person mega bargaining session” consisting of “70 hours of bargaining over five days.” 

Mahreen Fatima, a senior environment artist on Diablo who has been part of mobilization and organizing committees of the game’s staff, described that week of negotiations as “emotionally charged.”

“Throughout the entire process of unionizing and bargaining for this contract, we’ve always stayed conscious of the fact that we are doing precedent-setting,” Fatima said. “Because the people who come after us, they’re just going to build off of this.”

While workers don’t know for sure why bargaining moved so quickly in August, Fatima, Cox, and Veneto said they think the looming September date of BlizzCon was a factor. The event garnered positive coverage for the company, reportedly the top-performing studio at Microsoft’s Xbox division—rather than coverage of unions holding rallies outside the convention.

The workers at Blizzard didn’t win everything they demanded, but among their most valuable victories was a guarantee of impact bargaining, allowing workers to bargain with the company on AI use as the technology evolves for the duration of the contract—at least four years. 

“Maybe StarCraft [another Blizzard franchise] will be unionizing very soon,” said Fatima, with clear enthusiasm for being able to discuss potential new members. “If they unionize, they’ll get to join us in our contract. They don’t have to go through this two-year-long bargaining process by themselves.”

During BlizzCon weekend, Cox said attendees asked union members how to get involved and help other workers. Members pointed people toward fellow workers at Bethesda, where at least 62 staff were reportedly cut during Microsoft’s July layoffs, and Grand Theft AutopublishersRockstar Games, which is in an ongoing trial with 23 former workers who allege that they were fired last October in retaliation for engaging in union activity (Rockstar claims that the former employees were dismissed over publicly discussing confidential company information online,and denies that the union drive figured in).

“We would really like to see this contract extended throughout the video game industry and for other studios to look at what Blizzard has done and follow suit,” Veneto said.