Blizzard Workers Win Historic Union Contract
latimes.com
latimes.com
The Gamespot one is really poorly written. Not sure if it's AI bad or human bad. An example:
> Laid-off union members will also get an additional four weeks of pay–regardless of how long they worked at the company–hybrid schedules that allow them to work from home, and formal systems to settle disputes within the workplace.
Laid off workers get to utilize hybrid schedules?
Bethesda used to make great games, but the last great game they made was Skyrim in 2011, they unionized in 2022, and just recently they had some big layoffs.
CD Projekt made the highly acclaimed Witcher 3 in 2015, Cyberpunk disappointed on it's release in 2020, although it's reviews are mixed. CD Projekt unionized in 2023.
Blizzard have been in decline for a long time, they mostly focus on maintaining the cash cows games WoW and hearthstone. Although Diablo has is mostly well regarded(ignoring immortal). They haven't made any new ambitious game for a while. Their last attempt at making something ambitious was Titan, a cancelled MMO that they worked on for 6 years and supposedly spent $80 million on, cancelled in 2013.
The decline seems to begin well before the unionization, so I wouldn't say it's causal, it's more of a symptom of the company no longer being a place that can foster high functioning teams, where people feel like they are valued and working on something important.
Although actually…Rockstar didn’t become unionized until most of GTA 6 had already been completed. So I guess we’ll find out when their next game comes out.
They might also have unionized due to the bad conditions while developing GTA 6, which could also lead to it being a bad game. Who knows though.
I doubt that any of us will still be alive at the time when GTA 7 releases - at least when looking at the trajectory of GTA release dates ;)
It ultimately will come down to if it can retain talent and don't do a soft reset every project.
Actually, quite the opposite - in a free market, labor is free to organize in any way they want. If they have enough leverage over the employer, they'll succeed.
The anti-free market part is the regulatory quagmire that the US has in place for organized labor.
I think that's the thing that most people take umbrage with.
I don't know for sure, but I've heard from knowledgeable folks that it is more effective in Europe.
Unions need some external extra incentive, like the state forcing them to exist or subsidizing the cost of organizing, to exist long term.
In a vacuum, no. If the most profitable approach means involves maintaining an "all star" cast to keep the best team happy, then everything works out. That's the athlete/celebrity model.
But current dynamics has games divorced from quality to generate the most profit, and companies work to minimize expenses instead, via the assembly line approach. Devaluing labor to maximize money makes unions inevitable.
I don't like any of that, but they do make money.
As for good games, the last one was warcraft 3 maybe
I think calling WC3 the last good game is immoderately scornful though.
I regret the time I spent playing WoW, but it was category defining and a cultural phenomenon.
StarCraft 2 was excellent, perhaps to this day the best RTS ever made.
Diablo 3 was highly regarded.
Diablo 3 I played extensively, yet I felt somewhat disgusted by the end of it.
But it's a product of that time. If I think about the games I played recently, nothing holds except Warcraft 3 with the custom maps.
I have little time so I play only what I consider "top" for my taste and drop everything else, even in the "good" category. Due to that my last few years have been games that last me hundreds and hundreds of hours with high satisfaction, or shorter games with high satisfaction.
Either way, I would never play diablo 3 the same amount of time I did back in the day, the only reason I played was because of the friends I had
The rest you've mentioned were bangers in their own ways however.
Lol, Diablo 2 was the last good Diablo (it has a great remaster now btw).
If anything to unionization seems correlated simply to how long a company has been around.
There aren't many studios that have managed long term repeated success.
The best contenders would be:
Nintendo EPD, Nintendo's internal studio. ~40 years of sustained high quality games.
FromSoftware is also about 40 years old, although didn't really see breakout success until Demon's Souls in 2009.
Naughty Dog, founded in 1989, released Crash Bandicoot in 1996, and have continuously maintained a high bar.
Rockstar is 27 years old and makes great games, though it's been about 6 years since they released a game. Also I believe they have recently begun to unionize.
Valve is also worth a mention, they never really dropped the bar in terms of quality, they just lost interest in making games because they make so much money from Steam.
Care to provide counterexamples?
In order for that to happen, a game studio that is currently producing highly acclaimed games would have to unionize. All of your examples seem to be of studios that are past their peak... Does unionizing turn that around? Seems like no, but what does?
Anyway, Acclaim Games shut down in 2004, and again in 2010. There's a new Acclaim as of 2025, so maybe there's a chance highly Acclaimed games will come out, but I don't think they're unionized, and it might just all be vapor and puffery.
From what I've seen, success and following decline are directly related. Once a studio becomes successful, they start to attract the sort of people (especially in leading positions) who are great at selling themselves but not much else, and the studio founders haven't learned yet to separate the chaff from the wheat. And then after a while suddenly the company is full of 'mercenaries' which only care about their own carreer advancement but not about the games they create.
Walking the game theory backward, if the team was executing successfully and productively and everyone is getting paid fat bonuses then I don't think there is much motivation to get political in the workplace.
Only after the soul has been completely extracted from a company/team does this process seem to occur.
I wonder how many examples there actually are of the people in the trenches doing the actual work getting a 'fat bonus'.
E.g. the idea that unionization might not be a bad idea usually starts with teams not getting any bonuses after they created a highly successful game, and instead the company preventing such 'problems' by firing most of the team right before a game ships.
There's also RenTech, which allows employees to invest in their private fund that pays out 40% annually.
So to answer your question: not many, especially not in games.
Just like laws in reality are the to protect the average Joe from an abusive employer, unions are similarly a strength in numbers approach to being treated better.
It seems unionisation is one way people slam the breaks on companies that don't treat them fairly for the effort they are expected to put in. Your evidence seems to indicate the companies had plenty of chances to ask "why are people unhappy" before their employees unionised
You have cause and effect ass-backwards
Even if you are not unionized you benefit from other people being unionized in your profession/area.
It's unbelievable how far from that trust and love they have fallen.
Maybe Americans get higher incomes because US companies structurally sell to larger markets than Australian companies, so - at least for those roles with scale / leverage - the role is more productive & the absolute value that the employee can extract is high, even if the proportion of the overall value extracted by the worker is similar to or lower than the proportion extracted by an Australian worker.
Maybe if Americans had stronger unions, perhaps American workers could benefit from both higher incomes - due to the increased scale & opportunities of the US market - & increased protections relative to Australian workers.
Another thing that is quite different between the US & Australia is that in the US, the public is generally a lot more trusting of business over government. US business interests have a long history of influencing US public opinion- there's examples of stuff like business interest groups creating educational materials & getting them into schools, so kids learn early about the wonders of capitalism & free markets. It's unsurprising that you might not find unions so popular in such an environment. A book that details quite a lot of that history is Kerryn Higgs' book Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet [1].
[1] https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/3683/Collision-CourseEndle...
There's also ridiculous rules that many of them have adopted. My favorite example is that in my state a teacher was awarded the "Teacher of the Year" award, which is a pretty prestigious award, and requires you to be nominated by your students. Before the next school year she was fired because they had to make some cuts and the union had set it up so it was a Last In-First Out arrangement. So the teacher of the year was let go as that was her first or second year teaching. The teachers union prioritized its older members at the cost of that school losing their best teacher.
American unions are very different, in my experience, from what I saw from the European companies I've worked for. Those employee unions seemed solely focused on the people working at the company and did a good job representing their interests and solely their interests. If that's how unions in the US functioned, many people would have a much different opinion of them.
What kind of boggles my mind is that people online think they have an understanding of almost every part of American society because of what they read online or saw in the news. I wouldn't for the slightest second think I would have a clue about the working conditions in Australia, nor would I think I have the ability to read stuff online and get an actual understanding of it.
The most glaring example of this were all the people who came here for the world cup, afraid of all the crime and all that nonsense, and realized that living in America is actually pretty fucking great.
> its an extreme example of giving all the power to the employer
And yet, we make the most money, which seems to kind of go against that idea. If all the power was with the employer, you'd expect low wages, not high ones.
Apologies if that was a harsh response, it's just tiresome reading all of these foreign online "experts" on American society.
I get that this is HN and most people here haven’t worked the bottom-of-the-barrel retail jobs that this applies to, but there is very little difference in take home pay for this income regime after accounting for necessary expenses such as housing, transportation, and food; in some cases EU take home is even higher. https://boundlesshq.com/blog/us-vs-europe-employment-costs-s...
Like, sure, if you want to larp as a low income oligarch the US is the best place to do that. Otherwise, you’re going to be regularly crying after 10 hour shifts because you’re in the red each month after necessary expenses. Most people would like tech talent fall into the latter category out of schadenfreude or profit motive.
Tech needs to unionize.
What's disingenuous is comparing government mandated minimums and acting like that has any reflection on what the situation is for the vast majority of people. In addition, plenty of states and localities have their own requirements for PTO, sick pay, etc. You act as if the US is some homogenous place.
> I get that this is HN and most people here haven’t worked the bottom-of-the-barrel retail jobs
I worked 50+ hours a week while pursuing my CompSci degree. The place I worked was officially commission based (Circuit City) so it didn't matter how many hours they put me on the schedule. I was frequently working 9am - 9pm retail shifts. My easy shifts were 10am-9pm or 12-9:30. Life is hard, but somehow I managed to get my degree while working that schedule for years. My favorite thing was when we did entire store inventories. It was required to be there, but we didn't get paid. Was it legal? Who knows!
I wish I had the pay and benefits that every single major big box store provides now. It would have been glorious. $15-$20 an hour to start, plus full benefits, PTO, sick days, paid breaks(!), etc etc? Heck, quite a few would have helped pay for my tuition too!
> Tech needs to unionize.
There is no job sector in the US that needs unions less than tech. I'm not sure how you can go from talking about "hard" retail jobs to the absolute cushy profession we enjoy. Sitting around in a comfortable office or working from home, poking at a keyboard, attending meetings, stock awards, ridiculously high pay for the amount of effort it requires - the list goes on and on.
Now with downsizing and AI knocking at the door, funny how willing everyone is to unionize.
https://www.tweaktown.com/news/113435/blizzards-next-starcra...
(The site also seems to indicate the new game's plot takes place about 75 years after the end of SC2.)