The Overwatch 2 team at Blizzard has unionized. That includes nearly 200 developers across disciplines ranging from art and testing to engineering and design. Basically anyone who doesn’t have someone else reporting to them. It’s the second wall-to-wall union at the storied game maker since the World of Warcraft team unionized last July.
“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 announced in a press release shared with Kotaku on Friday. “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.”
The Overwatch Gamemakers Guild-CWA is just the latest group to organize at a Microsoft-owned game studio since the tech giant entered into a labor neutrality agreement. The policy shift took frustrations that bubbled up with management back in 2021 and funneled them into an objective with assurances that company leaders wouldn’t interfere. Like unions at Bethesda Game Studios and Raven Software, the Overwatch Gamemakers Guild now has to bargain for its first contract, a process that Microsoft has been accused of slow-walking as negotiations with other internal game unions drag on for years.
“The biggest issue was the layoffs at the beginning of 2024,” Simon Hedrick, a test analyst at Blizzard, told Kotaku. “Up to that moment I’d been really happy in what I was doing.” He began as a long-time fan of World of Warcraft and started playing Overwatch from day one in 2016. In 2022 he was hired to work at Blizzard on quality assurance for the sequel’s versus modes and matchmaking.
Hedrick has had up to eight game clients running simultaneously to test for issues and keeps a Corgi plush (“a mascot of Irvine campus #blizzlife”) by his work desk. On Thursdays he meets colleagues in the Blizzard Irvine campus library to play Magic: The Gathering. When I asked him what he loves most about working there, his answer was the same as everyone else’s: the people.
When nearly 2,000 layoffs swept through Microsoft last year, including at Blizzard where a new game was canceled and several members of the Overwatch team were cut, it was a wake up call for Hedrick. “People were gone out of nowhere and there was nothing we could do about it,” he said. ‘What I want to protect most here is the people’
The post-merger shockwave—Microsoft had officially wrapped its acquisition of Activision Blizzard only months earlier—was one catalyst for the organizing effort at Blizzard’s Team 4, which was originally formed in the late 2000s to create the company’s planned MMO Titan, before the troubled project eventually morphed into Overwatch. Foster Elmendorf, a senior test analyst, was at Blizzard for all of it after joining the company back in 2004, a dream job he secured simply by applying online at the time.
He said other big drivers pushing the Overwatch team to unionize included pay disparities, work-from-home restrictions, and wanting codified protections around things like crunch, time off, and severance in the event of layoffs. Organizing Blizzard employees stress that improving their working conditions can also lead to better games, while the opposite—layoffs, forced resignations, and uncompetitive pay can make them worse.
Overwatch 2 staff were particularly upset last spring when changes to the company’s profit sharing program left them with zero bonuses for an entire year. “If [concessions] are given without organizing they can be taken away without it, too,” Elmendorf said.
He currently helps oversee testing for in-game cosmetics from the concept phase through implementation. He loves making games and wants developers to have a seat at the table, not just to protect their own interests but to make the games better, to prioritize fun and not just profit. “For a long time time I felt the video game industry needed more organizing,” he told Kotaku. He later added, “It’s been 20 years of asking for better pay and it hasn’t happened yet.”
2025 is an important year for Overwatch 2. Despite ditching much of its promised PVE content, the hero shooter rolled out some big-swing design initiatives, including a new mode called Stadium that incorporates MOBA elements like mid-match upgrades. Season 16 is currently underway and the team just announced a Street Fighter VI collaboration that all but transforms existing characters into Capcom fighters like Ryu and Chun-Li.
The effort to unionize the Overwatch team hasn’t just led by quality assurance testers. Other disciplines were also involved. UI artist Sadie Boyd became part of the push immediately after joining Blizzard last September, just as another round of layoffs was sweeping through Microsoft. She said someone posted a link to sign a union card in one of the Blizzard Slack channels, which she did immediately. After all, she’d already been part of a union drive at Prey and Redfall maker Arkane Austin before it had been shut down by Microsoft earlier in the year.
“We’re not just a number on an Excel sheet,” Boyd said. “We want to make games but we can’t do it without a sense of security.” Unionizing doesn’t make a studio immune to layoffs or being shuttered, but it’s the first step toward making companies have a discussion about those things with employees rather than just shadow-dropping them in an email full of platitudes. Boyd sees the Overwatch union as a tool for negotiating a range of issues, like if and how generative AI is used at Blizzard, as well as a possible source of inspiration to teams at other studios.
“Our industry is at such a turning point,” she said. “I really think with the announcement of our union on Overwatch…I know that will light some fires.”
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