Blizzard’s Overwatch 2 team has unionized. The wall-to-wall union–referred to as the Overwatch Gamemakers Guild–includes nearly 200 developers, ranging from artists and QA testers to writers and engineers. It is the second union to form at the company since last July, when the team behind Blizzard’s hit MMO World of Warcraft successfully formed a union of its own. The Communications Workers of America (CWA) announced the union in a press release shared with Kotaku earlier today, writing that “an overwhelming majority of workers” supported the initiative.
“Game developers behind Activision Blizzard’s hit franchise Overwatch have joined the Communications Workers of America (CWA), becoming the latest group of video game workers at Microsoft-owned studios to form a wall-to-wall union,” the CWA wrote. “A neutral arbitrator confirmed today that an overwhelming majority of workers have either signed a union authorization card or indicated that they wanted union representation via an online portal.”
With the Overwatch 2 team’s unionization, the number of unionized game developers working at Microsoft now exceeds 2,000 employees. However, the Overwatch Gamemakers Guild now has to bargain for its first contract–a process that Microsoft has been accused of dragging out.
According to Simon Hedrick, a test analyst at Blizzard, the layoffs at the beginning of 2024 were largely what motivated the team to unionize. Hedrick told Kotaku that “Up to that moment I’d been really happy in what I was doing.” Hedrick of course refers to the sweeping layoffs by Microsoft last January, in which the tech giant cut over 1,900 people from its 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.
In addition to the looming threat of layoffs, the Overwatch 2 team also cited pay disparities, work-from-home restrictions, and wanting certain protections–such as freedom from crunch and guaranteed severance packages–as contributing factors to their unionization. According to Kotaku, Blizzard employees have repeatedly stressed that “improving their working conditions can also lead to better games,” while layoffs and uncompetitive pay makes them worse.
Blizzard UI Artist Sadie Boyd also weighed in on the decision to unionize, telling Kotaku “We’re not just a number on an Excel sheet. We want to make games but we can’t do it without a sense of security.”