More than 450 Diablo developers at Blizzard Entertainment have voted to unionize with the Communications Workers of America (CWA). The union will represent employees across multiple disciplines including designers, engineers, artists and support staff. This comes after a slew of layoffs in the gaming division at Microsoft, Blizzard’s parent company, as well as across the industry at large.
The Diablo team isn’t the first to unionize at the tech giant. ZeniMax QA workers reached a union contract with Microsoft after two years of negotiations, and Blizzard’s Story and Franchise Development team voted to unionize earlier this month. Both are part of the CWA, which also helped the developers behind Overwatch unionize earlier this summer.
Kelly Yeo, a Diablo game producer and organizing committee member, said that the mass layoffs at Microsoft were a major motivating factor in the unionization. “With every subsequent round of mass layoffs, I’ve witnessed the dread in my coworkers grow stronger because it feels like no amount of hard work is enough to protect us,” she said. “This is just the first step for us joining a movement spreading across an industry that is tired of living in fear.”
CWA says that more than 3,500 Microsoft workers have organized with the union. Earlier this year, video game workers announced the formation of the United Videogame Workers-CWA, an industry-wide union for workers in the US and Canada.
