Over 500 World of Warcraft devs at Blizzard have unionised, and they don't mind having lost the world's most worker-friendly race to Bethesda staff

Over 500 World of Warcraft developers at Blizzard have come together to form a union, narrowly missing out on pipping the Bethesda staff who did the same late last week to the post, but it's ok, there was never anything other than a a bit of "friendly" competition between the two.

This Blizzard union is called the WoW Gamemaker's Guild, or WoWGG, and has been formed in partnership with the Communications Workers of America, or CWA. The difference between this union and ones we've seen in the past is that's its a wall-to-wall union, meaning members stretch across multiple departments within the company, rather than a single portion of the company.

"We're the World of Warcraft Gamemakers Guild: the first wall-to-wall union at Blizzard," the organisation announced in a tweet, "We're thrilled to include WoW's QA, Art, Sound, Design, Engineering and Production voices for a democratized workplace. At this crucial moment in games, we stand together as one. For Azeroth!" “Blizzard's a big name," World of Warcraft senior producer Samuel Cooper told IGN regarding what the unionising workers hope this might mean for the industry going forwards, "We make great games, we occupy a position in the industry that I think has a lot of influence. The ability to show folks a large, very successful, very long-standing game...is able to do this and able to do it with all of our development groups, not just design or production and design or production design, engineering and art, but quality assurance, too, brought in and treated correctly as full development partners. We hope that that's the start of a paradigm shift across the industry.” https://x.com/WoWGG_CWA/status/1816194652539871269

He added that, while, there was a bit of fun competion going on between the Blizzard and Bethesda staff over their efforts to unionise, the WoW folks are more than fine having taken second place, saying: "In a friendly way, we were seeing who was going to squeak in there first. Never happier to be outrun. Huge congratulations to them."

Microsoft has given a statement to Variety about the unionisation: "We continue to support our employees’ right to choose how they are represented in the workplace, and we will engage in good faith negotiations with the CWA as we work towards a collective bargaining agreement."

The next step for the union will be contract negotiations with the company, which will decide which protections will be offered to employees.