It's a busy week for union organizers at Activision Blizzard. Yesterday, together with the Communications Workers of America (CWA), a group of more than 100 developers working on Hearthstone and mobile-only strategy game Warcraft Rumble voted “strongly in favor of full union representation.” This comes after approximately 400 Blizzard platform and technology employees voted to unionizealso with CWA.
The union is made up of many professionals such as quality testers, artists, designers, software engineers and producers who are particularly inspired by World of Warcraft developers who voted to unionize last July. Organizing committee member and game designer Dominik Kalkos said in a statement: “My colleagues, as individuals, have raised many concerns over the years, but it is easy for any company to ignore individuals. We decided to organize in search of a collective voice and the power of solidarity that the industry cannot ignore.”
It's not that this is a bad time to form a union, but you can easily understand why these developers are making efforts to form a union now. From complete, mass cancellations of gamesTo large-scale layoffs at MicrosoftTo policy changes It might as well be more layoffs, now is not the safest time to be a game developer. Great solidarity with the newly unionized workers.
As part of the ongoing internal tensions at Microsoft, it is also worth mentioning its offering of its Azure cloud services to the Israeli Ministry of Defense as the country's military invades the Gaza Strip. The contracts associated with these specific services were recently canceledbut Xbox remains a target of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.. To learn more about how the gaming industry is still involved with this ongoing issue, you can check out this is a piece from Edwin where he talked about it with various game developers and technical people.
