Video Game Workers Win First Contract at Microsoft-Owned Blizzard
Blizzard workers rallied outside the company’s Irvine, California, headquarters in August as part of the push for a first contract. Photo: Orange County Labor Federation
Workers who make some of the world’s most popular video games, including World of Warcraft and Diablo, won their first union contracts in early September, in an important step forward for organizing in the tech industry.
The 1,900 workers are employed by Blizzard, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2023 in the largest deal ever in the video game industry.
Their new Communications Workers (CWA) contracts include recall rights and guaranteed severance packages for laid-off workers—significant wins, since tech and video game workers have seen waves of layoffs in the last few years.
Workers on various Activision Blizzard teams have voted to join CWA since 2022. It started with quality assurance testers at Raven Software—when Raven abruptly laid off a dozen testers in December 2021, they went on strike and launched a union drive.
Soon after the Raven workers voted the union in, Microsoft signed a neutrality agreement with CWA, pledging to remain neutral in organizing campaigns and to allow workers and union representatives to communicate openly. In exchange, the union agreed to support the software giant’s purchase of Activision Blizzard, which was facing antitrust scrutiny.
Activision Blizzard had also faced employee walkouts and a lawsuit by the California Civil Rights Department in 2021 over claims of misconduct and discrimination against women and a “frat boy” company culture.
Next to unionize were quality assurance testers at Blizzard’s offices in Albany, New York, and Austin, Texas. A wall-to-wall unit of 500 World of Warcraft workers unionized in 2024, followed by units of 200 game developers at Overwatch, 160 members of Blizzard’s story and franchise team, and 450 Diablo designers, engineers, artists, and support staff in 2025.
RECALL RIGHTS
Blizzard workers won the right to be recalled for 14 months after being laid off. This right extends to any open positions they are qualified for across the 1,900-worker Blizzard bargaining units. The contracts have separate expiration dates but the same terms across all these units. (The Raven workers, who are part of Activision, already bargained a separate contract.)
“We know we are at the start of a labor movement in video games and tech at large,” said Mahreen Fatima, a senior environment artist on Diablo. “So it weighed heavily on us to make sure we set a strong precedent.”
CWA has organized 4,000 video game workers at Microsoft, and has another 550 members in its industry-wide United Video Game Workers affiliate. The latter is a pre-majority union: it allows video game workers to directly join before winning a union election, a model CWA has employed in organizing public sector and higher education workers in Southern states. Another 100 game developers behind Magic: The Gathering Arena voted to join CWA in June.
In a survey of U.S. video game workers by the Game Developers Conference early this year, 82 percent of respondents supported unionizing. Organizers hope that the protections and job security provisions won at Blizzard will convince more game workers to organize.
At Blizzard, laid-off workers will get a minimum of four weeks’ severance plus an additional week for every six months’ tenure, up to 39 weeks. The contract also includes just cause protections, a grievance procedure, and a three-day in-office hybrid workweek. And the union fought hard to put other existing benefits and policies in writing, from weather-related policies to money Blizzard workers are given to spend on the company’s games—all now enforceable through the contract.
Blizzard workers also won language that requires the company to discuss, evaluate, and bargain over the impact of artificial intelligence on their work. “Now we have a seat at the table to be part of the conversation when it comes to A.I. implementation,” said Fatima. “The contract gives us the ability to critically think about how it’s going to impact our workflow, our skill sets, the quality of our product, our teams.”
The union won a guarantee that existing remote workers, like Fatima, can continue working remotely, which prevents them from being forced to potentially move across the country to keep their job. Remote workers make up around one-fourth of the workforce covered under the new contract.
The contract also includes protections against outsourcing—a Blizzard worker can’t be laid off unless the company has let go any contractor hired in the last year doing a similar job, and a laid-off Blizzard worker can’t be replaced by a contractor for another year. Successorship language in the agreement requires a purchasing company to recognize the union contract if Microsoft decides to sell off the unionized Blizzard units.
And in a win that links a new group of workers to one of the labor movement’s oldest traditions, the Blizzard contract includes a paid holiday on May 1, International Workers’ Day.
JOB SECURITY A TOP ISSUE
Job security is a major issue for workers throughout the tech industry. Shortly after Microsoft bought Activision Blizzard for $75 billion in 2023, it announced in January 2024 that it was laying off 1,900 workers in its gaming division—9 percent of the workforce.
This July, Microsoft announced it would be laying off another 3,200 workers in gaming. Half of the layoffs were immediate, including hundreds of CWA members at Bethesda, ZeniMax, and other studios. In August,workers and allies held “Save Our Devs” rallies across the U.S. and Canada to protest the layoffs and demand fair first contracts for Microsoft video game workers. CWA and Microsoft are now bargaining over the effects of these layoffs. The other 1,600 layoffs are expected by the end of 2027.
The sense that Blizzard workers were now a part of a bigger company with a more ruthless economic logic was one motivation behind the union effort. “Being in a union stops you from being treated like a line in an Excel sheet,” said Paul Cox, a senior content designer at World of Warcraft who’s been with Blizzard for 19 years. “We are in a giant corporation, and there is no way that anybody who makes decisions knows everybody in the company.”
After years of robust hiring, the entire tech sector has been hit with waves of mass layoffs since 2022. The tracker website layoffs.fyi estimates that tech companies have announced 100,000 layoffs in 2026 alone.
For years, tech workers were in such demand that employers vied to offer the most appealing benefits and work environment. However, “these days, a position in tech looks like a regular job,” wrote the Wall Street Journal last year. “Workers are contending with the constant fear of layoffs, longer hours, and an ever-growing list of responsibilities for the same pay.” The rapid development of artificial intelligence has only intensified workers’ concerns about being replaced.
At Google, 4,700 workers have signed a petition supporting guaranteed severance packages and buyouts before involuntary layoffs. The Alphabet Workers Union, another CWA affiliate, has also organized T-shirt days and mass email actions as part of its “Googlers for Job Security” campaign, launched last year in response to rounds of mass layoffs even as the company remains immensely profitable.
The campaign takes credit for Google’s offer of voluntary exit packages to 70,000 employees—something no other big tech company has done—and is pushing for these buyouts to be offered across the company.
RED SHIRT DAYS
Blizzard has four U.S. offices, in Austin, Boston, Irvine, and Albany, New York, each with hundreds of workers. The neutrality agreement gave the union access to the facilities.
“Because of the neutrality agreement, we were able to set up tables in the courtyard,” said Alison Veneto, a senior editor on the Blizzard Story and Franchise Team who works in the Irvine office. “Everybody moves through there to go from one building to the other, or to go to lunch. So the union was always quite visible.”
Blizzard workers embraced the CWA tradition of wearing red on Thursdays, adopted in memory of a striking telephone company worker killed on a picket line in 1989. “The cafeteria would be a sea of red T-shirts,” said Veneto. “You would go into in-person meetings with management and everyone would be wearing their red shirts.”
Since these video game workers spend much of their time in front of computer screens, workers showed their support digitally by changing their Zoom backgrounds and Slack profile photos to echo the union’s message.
While the workers at Blizzard are on separate teams, they’re all in a large general chat on Slack, a communications platform used to coordinate work within and across teams. There they could post messages of support for the union and the bargaining team en masse.
“People would put forward in company chats why unionizing mattered to them,” said Veneto. “That’s why it felt personal—the union doesn’t feel like a third-person entity.”
These tactics also helped engage remote workers. “We tried to make as many avenues as possible to include remote workers—we don’t want them to feel excluded,” said Fatima, who works remotely from Seattle. The organizing committee arranged union info sessions for remote workers, and put Outlook invites onto everyone’s work calendar so they couldn’t miss it.
PATTERN BARGAINING
At first the different Blizzard bargaining units were negotiating separately with Microsoft, although the bargaining committees were in communication with each other.
As they pushed for first contracts, workers organized numerous marches across Blizzard’s Irvine campus with members from all the bargaining units. They held sign-making parties in view of executive offices, and a sit-in on the executive floor.
But gradually, workers recognized that the World of Warcraft unit, the largest, would set the standard—so the union started to focus its mobilization efforts there. In the end, Microsoft agreed to a union proposal to extend the terms it had agreed to with the World of Warcraft unit to other Blizzard workers.
One factor that likely weighed on management was the possibility of disruptive action at BlizzCon—the annual convention to promote Blizzard’s games, which draws 40,000 attendees to the Anaheim Convention Center. This year’s convention was held September 11-13, just days after the union agreement was reached.
For more information on the Blizzard contract, see “After Years Of Company Stalling, Blizzard Workers Win Mega-Contract That Applies To All Unionized Teams” atAftermath.
