Most of the Overwatch 2 development team has formed the second wall-to-wall union under Blizzard since the World of Warcraft team voted to organize in July 2024.
Per Kotaku, almost 200 Overwatch 2 developers — pretty much everyone who isn’t a supervisor or part of the management team — have joined the Communications Workers of America (CWA) as Overwatch Gamemakers Guild-CWA.
“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 said in a press release. “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.”
Microsoft and the CWA announced a labor neutrality agreement back in 2022 to assure organizing employees that the higher-ups wouldn’t interfere in unionizing efforts. Since then, employees at Microsoft-owned studios like Bethesda and Raven Software have formed unions seeking to protect workers.
That hasn’t stopped Microsoft from laying off hundreds of workers across various studios in the years since, and one Overwatch Gamemakers Guild member, Blizzard test analyst Simon Hedrick, told Kotaku the laying off of 1,900 members of Microsoft’s gaming division in January of 2024 was “the biggest issue” since he was hired in 2022.
“Up to that moment I’d been really happy in what I was doing,” said Hedrick, who added that some of the catalysts for organization included Microsoft’s acquisition of Blizzard just months before the aforementioned layoffs, issues with pay and work-from-home policies, and the desire for formal protections for stuff like crunch, time off, and severance pay for workers impacted by layoffs.
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