260
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

More than 500 developers at Blizzard Entertainment who work on World of Warcraft have voted to form a union. The World of Warcraft GameMakers Guild, formed with the assistance of the Communication Workers of America (CWA), is composed of employees across every department, including designers, engineers, artists, producers, and more. Together, they have formed the largest wall-to-wall union — or a union inclusive of multiple departments and disciplines — at Microsoft.

This news comes less than a week after the formation of the Bethesda Game Studios union, which, at the time of the announcement, was itself the largest wall-to-wall Microsoft union.

The World of Warcraft GameMakers Guild is made up of over 500 members across Blizzard offices in California and Massachusetts. Despite its size — it is the second largest union at Microsoft overall behind Activision’s 600-member QA union — Cox said that Microsoft’s labor neutrality agreement helped get the organization ball rolling.

Interdisciplinary unions like Blizzard’s are relatively rare, especially in the video game industry, as each department has different needs and goals. Up until this point, the majority of unionization efforts in the video game industry have been spearheaded by QA workers who have traditionally been among the least paid and least protected employees.

The first union at Activision Blizzard was made up of QA workers, as was the first union at Microsoft’s game studios. In addition to the World of Warcraft GameMakers Guild, yet another new union made up of QA workers at Blizzard’s Austin, Texas, office has also formed. The Blizzard Quality Assurance United-CWA is a 60-person unit including QA testers for games like Diablo, Hearthstone, and other Blizzard games.

top 6 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[-] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago

metzen is back, blizzard is unionizing, world soul saga releasing, and kotick gone. life is good.

[-] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago
[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

They’re just rehashing old expansions now because they became so creatively bankrupt that they begged Chris Metzen to come back and write more stories.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

World of Warcraft 2 announced. World of Warcraft to be canceled (this is joke... I hope)

[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

It doesn’t need to be called World of Warcraft 2, but they really do need to rewrite the entire engine from scratch.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

It's very unlikely it's actually that bad. As someone that's actually done multiple full rewrites of some fairly large software projects ... incremental refactors could've got it done without completely shutting down new feature development for years.

this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2024
260 points (98.1% liked)

Technology

57904 readers
6647 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS