Jae C Hong/AP
Worker in a division of Activision Blizzard, the major video game company behind popular franchises such as Call of Duty, Overwatchand Candy Crushhave voted to join the Communication Workers of America.
The unionized employees are 28 quality assurance testers at Raven Software, an Activision Blizzard subsidiary. The final vote count was 19 yes votes, 3 no votes. While the vote directly affects only a small number of workers, the push for unionization is being watched by many in the gaming and tech industries.
“It’s a beautiful day to organize,” said Jessica Gonzalez, former Activision employee and organizer, who livestreamed a watch party with the vote count Twitter Sections. “We will celebrate and prepare to sign a contract.”
“We respect and believe in the right of all employees to choose whether to support or vote for a union,” Activision Blizzard spokesman Kelvin Liu said in an emailed statement. “We believe that an important decision that will impact the entire Raven Software studio of approximately 350 employees should not be made by 19 Raven employees.”
Microsoft announced in January it would buy Activision Blizzard in a nearly $70 billion deal pending federal approval. Microsoft, the maker of Xbox, hopes to leverage Activision Blizzard’s characteristics to get into mobile gaming and better position itself in the future.
Also in January, Raven QA employees announced that they would form the Game Workers Alliance union with the Communications Workers of America (many of NPR’s broadcast technicians are also members of the CWA).
By this time, workers had organized several strikes and temporary work stoppages in protest at the layoffs. Workers say they have been frustrated for years, citing a lack of communication from management, low wages and long hours, especially just before a product launch.
Labor organization organizers also point to the ways in which Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick mishandled numerous allegations of sexual misconduct in the workplace. The company has faced a number of federal and state lawsuits alleging that company employees have been sexually harassed and that female employees have been discriminated against.
“Our goal is to make Activision Blizzard a model for the industry, and we will remain focused on eliminating harassment and discrimination in our workplace,” Kotick said in a statement in March after a court settled the amount of $18 million between the company and the United States Equal Opportunity Commission.
The company has also looked more extensively at working conditions.
Activision Blizzard initially attempted to prevent the vote in the first place by dividing the QA staff into various departments within Raven Software and arguing to the National Labor Relations Board that the QA staff were not qualified as a negotiating entity. (Brian Raffel, Raven Software’s studio head, said at the time that the reorganization of the QA staff had been in the works since 2021 and was part of a broader plan to “bring studio QA more into the development process”).
The NLRB sided with the QA workers and allowed the vote.
Just moments before the vote, the NLRB announced that one of its regional offices found allegations justified that the company had violated the National Labor Relations Act by threatening employees who attempted to organize by using its social Media guidelines enforced.
“These claims are false,” said Activision Blizzard spokesman Liu in a statement. “Employees are allowed and willing to speak freely about these workplace issues without retaliation, and our social media policy expressly includes employees’ NLRA rights.”
Workers in video game companies seem increasingly willing to organize in their workplace. In 2019, Riot Games workers went on strike and protested what they described as forced arbitration and sexism. Earlier this year, workers at small indie studio Vodeo became the first North American video game company to form a union.