Third time’s the charm, as Blizzard story team is unionising

Over the past five years, more and more teams within game companies are unionising. But more specifically, those working for Activision Blizzard are voting to unionise more often. Back in 2022, Raven Software, a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard who since 2011 have either been the lead or support developer for Call of Duty games, not only voted to unionise but also won that fight too. In other gaming companies, Sega and the Communications Workers of America (CWA) came to an agreement in a world first that will protect those working for Sega of America.

With so many layoffs happening, especially within Microsoft itself, it’s no wonder that folks working at Activision Blizzard (which Microsoft acquired back in 2023) would want to unionise and protect their jobs. This is also the third team within Blizzard to unionise, as the first team to unionise were the World of Warcraft dev team in July of last year, and the second team was the Overwatch 2 dev team in May of this year. And now, the entire Story and Franchise Development (SFD) team is forming a union with the help of CWA.

In a statement from the CWA Union, they announced that the SFD team voted strongly in favour of union representation, with Microsoft recognising the union. In the statement, Bucky Fisk, a principle editor at Blizzard, stated how Blizzard has been “a place where people could build their careers and stay for decades, but that stability’s been fading”, but now that there’s a union for the SFD team, they’re “able to preserve what makes this place special”.

When it comes to the SFD team, they do almost everything that comes with showcasing a narrative, even in things such as trailers and promotional videos for all of Blizzard’s franchises. Included in the team are also franchise archival workers and historians. According to the statement, they’re now the first “in-house cinematic, animation and narrative studio to form a union in the North American game industry”. The SFD team will join almost 3,000 other workers at Microsoft-owned studios who have unionised with the CWA.

President Jason Justice from Local 9510 CWA – the specific union looking after those in Orange County, Los Angeles, representing members from telecommunication companies AT&T and Verizon, to SEGA of America – stated that CWA is “excited to have them [SFD team] join our union family”. Adding that unionising is “another powerful step toward ensuring that every worker at Blizzard and Microsoft has a seat at the table to shape the conditions under which their art is made”.

Having more and more people know their worth and organising a union is amazing to see. Especially, as stated earlier, with so many companies deciding that layoffs will fix the company (most of the time it doesn’t, as in the world of politics, a lot of government agencies in the USA are scrambling to rehire federal workers that were hit in the DOGE layoffs), seeing people protect their jobs by unionising is important. Hopefully, more and more studios realise their power and begin unionising too.