Blizzard’s Overwatch Team Has Unionized: “We’re Not Just A Number On An Excel Sheet”

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The group responsible for creating Overwatch 2 at Blizzard has joined together to form a union, known as the Overwatch Gamemakers Guild. This extensive union consists of approximately 200 members, encompassing artists, QA testers, writers, and engineers. This is the second union to emerge at the company since last July, following the successful formation of a union by the team behind World of Warcraft, another popular Blizzard production. The Communications Workers of America (CWA) revealed this news in a press release they shared with Kotaku today, stating that a significant majority of workers backed the unionization effort.

The developers responsible for the popular Overwatch franchise under Activision Blizzard have now become members of the Communications Workers of America (CWA). This makes them the most recent team of game creators at Microsoft-owned studios to establish a company-wide union. Today, it was confirmed by a neutral arbitrator that the majority of workers either signed a union authorization card or expressed their desire for union representation through an online platform.

The formation of a union among the team of Overwatch 2 has increased the number of game developers at Microsoft who are part of a labor union to over 2,000 employees. Yet, this newly established Overwatch Gamemakers Guild faces the challenge of negotiating its first contract, a process that some critics claim Microsoft is delaying unnecessarily.

As reported by Simon Hedrick, a test analyst at Blizzard, the mass layoffs that occurred at the start of 2024 served as the primary reason for the team’s decision to form a union. In an interview with Kotaku, Hedrick expressed that prior to these layoffs, he had been very content with his work. Notably, these layoffs were part of Microsoft’s significant downsizing in January 2023, which resulted in over 1,900 employees being let go from the tech giant’s video game division, including Blizzard president Mike Ybarra.

“People were gone out of nowhere and there was nothing we could do about it,” Hedrick told Kotaku.

Beyond the impending risk of job cuts, the Overwatch 2 team mentioned several issues such as wage disparities, limitations on remote work, and demands for specific safeguards like freedom from overtime and guaranteed severance benefits as reasons behind their decision to unionize. As reported by Kotaku, employees at Blizzard have consistently emphasized that improving working conditions could result in better games, whereas layoffs and unfair compensation only diminish quality.

Saundi Boyd, a UI Artist at Blizzard, also expressed her thoughts on the unionization matter, stating to Kotaku, “We’re more than just numbers in a spreadsheet. We aspire to create games, yet we need a feeling of safety to do so effectively.

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2025-05-09 23:35