The nearly 200 developers behind Overwatch 2 at Blizzard Entertainment have unionised. This is the second Blizzard team to unionise in the last year, after over 500 World of Warcraft developers formed the studio’s largest union in last July.
The developers have joined the Communications Workers of America (CWA) union, the largest media and comms labour union in the United States, with approximately 700,000 members nationwide. In a press release, CWA said, “the Overwatch Gamemakers Guild-CWA (OWGG-CWA) is a wall-to-wall unit that includes game developers across all disciplines, including design, production, engineering, art, sound, and quality assurance”.
The press release quotes senior test analyst and organising committee member Foster Elmendorf as saying, “after a long history of layoffs, crunch and subpart working conditions in the global video game industry, my coworkers and I are thrilled to be joining the broader union effort to organise our industry for the better, which has been long overdue”.
Over 2,600 workers at Microsoft-owned studios have now formed a union with CWA. At Blizzard, union movements have been emerging amidst tumultuous times at Blizzard, including sexual harassment lawsuits, Microsoft’s acquisition of the publisher in 2023 and the significant layoffs in early 2024 that followed.
Unions in game development have long struggled, despite various exploitative labour practices like crunch, precarious job security and unsafe working conditions that the media have well documented. There are some indications this is slowly beginning to change, however. In 2022, Game Workers Unite (GWU) became the first ever Australian game development union and there has been recent union action also at Sega, IGN, and a SAG-AFTRA strike to protect the rights of videogame actors, voice actors, and performers has been in place since July last year.
Organising committee member and senior test analyst Jess Castillo says in the press release that “unionising is about having a seat at the table so that we can work with leadership to build better, more sustainable working conditions… when we are supported and thriving, we can deliver the best possible experiences to our players, which is what brought all of us here in the first place”.
About the Author
Cass Barkman
she/they
Cass is a lecturer in Media and Communications at The University of Melbourne with a personal/academic love for experimental narrative videogames, complex cinema and having a little nap.
