Blizzard’s ‘Overwatch 2’ Team Has Unionized: “Our industry is at such a turning point.”
The video game industry is, definitely, at a turning point. With the volatile market, numerous layoffs and the wider use of AI, the developers, actual humans, are facing potential issues in the future, and when workers are faced with potential issues, they tend to react.
Unionization is a big thing in the United States, where the labor market is quite liberal, and even more in the video game industry, where unionized workers are not that common as in other fields.
This is why the news we are going to report on here is so big, as well as important, as it could potentially influence the future of the industry and its people in a positive way.
“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. Our industry is at such a turning point,” UI artist Sadie Boyd said. “I really think with the announcement of our union on Overwatch…I know that will light some fires.”
So, what exactly is she talking about? Well, you might not have known, but about 200 people from Blizzard’s Overwatch 2 team have officially unionized, as has been revealed recently.
“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. 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 CWA officially confirmed.
In case you were wondering, this is a big moment for both the workers themselves, as well as the industry as a whole. Unionizing helps protect workers’ rights and in a volatile market where people have to fear for their jobs, unionization could potentially help.
Why did this happen? Well, the fact that Microsoft fired almost 2,000 people back in 2024 ignited the spark that led to the final decision. “The biggest issue was the layoffs at the beginning of 2024. Up to that moment I’d been really happy in what I was doing,” Simon Hedrick, a test analyst at Blizzard, told the press.
The situation changed drastically as people simply disappeared from their jobs and the merger had a very negative impact of the human side of game development. In a volatile market, people fear for their jobs, but it wasn’t just the layoffs that pushed them to make this decision.
As reported, other reasons include pay disparities, work-from-home restrictions, and wanting codified protections around things like crunch, time off, and severance in the event of layoffs.
With 2025 being a big year for the game, it seems that it will also be a big year behind the screens, as the developers have, as it seems, finally decided to take things into their own hands. We only hope that more developers will follow suit and that this move will have a positive influence on the industry overall.
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