Blizzard's World of Warcraft team has unionized

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The entire 500-person team will be covered by the union.

Blizzard's orc statue
(Image credit: Blizzard)

The World of Warcraft team at Blizzard is unionizing, reports Bloomberg. Like a number of other games industry unions, the approximately 500 workers are joining up with the Communication Workers of America. The new union will be "wall-to-wall," meaning it covers the entirety of the development team rather than just one division, like QA, and includes both the larger Irvine, California team and the smaller team in Massachusetts. It'll be called the World of Warcraft Game Makers Guild, or WoWGG.

It's likely that the WoWGG will be the second largest union of game workers in the United States, just after the 600-person QA workers union at Activision that formed in March.

"This isn't an attack against our World of Warcraft leadership or something where we're like, 'We hate those guys,'" said Cooper. "We just want to make sure that our voices are being heard and that at some point we don't end up as numbers on a spreadsheet. Because you go up high enough and these people have never met any of us, none of the names mean anything to them."

The new World of Warcraft union follows the similar "wall-to-wall" union formed last week at Bethesda Game Studios, also owned by Microsoft. Microsoft's officially neutral stance on unions at its gaming divisions—which came out of its effort to get regulatory approval for its Activision Blizzard acquisition—has clearly made the large teams at Microsoft-owned studios fertile grounds for labor organizing.

In addition to the approximately 500 members of the World of Warcraft team's union, a second QA union under CWA has formed in Texas of about 60 people who work on games including Diablo and Hearthstone.

Jonathan Bolding
Contributor

Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.