By 6 p.m. Sunday, the union had already run out of the colorful pins representing each bargaining unit—all 7,000 of them—as people kept coming up to congratulate them. When members had already packed up, people were still on the convention floor, talking and trading the pins.

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“Folks were asking us questions like ‘How do I get involved in unions? Is there anything I can do to help?’,” said Paul Cox, a senior designer on World of Warcraft, recounting the excitement at BlizzCon, the video game developer Blizzard Entertainment’s annual Southern California gaming convention, which took place just over a week ago and drew tens of thousands of attendees, as well as 12.5 million online viewers.

Since 2024, Blizzard Entertainment workers—first those working on quality assurance in Albany, New York, and Austin, Texas, then the team behind World of Warcraft, unionized one after another, including staff working on story development, technology, and ultra-high-profile games like Overwatch and Diablo.

Blizzard—and Microsoft, now its owner—eventually recognized some 1,900 unionized workers, striking a 2022 labor neutrality agreement with the Communications Workers of America.

Despite the extraordinary popularity of Blizzard’s games, and the anticipation with which landmark releases like World of Warcraft: Forever—and high-profile games from other studios, like Grand Theft Auto VI—are received, game developers work in a notoriously demanding and insecure sector, regularly putting in 100-hour work weeks in the crunch periods leading up to release only to face sweeping layoffs after........

© Mother Jones