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Blizzard’s Overwatch 2 team has unionized. The wall-to-wall union–referred to as the Overwatch Gamemakers Guild–includes nearly 200 developers, ranging from artists and QA testers to writers and engineers. It is the second union to form at the company since last July, when the team behind Blizzard’s hit MMO World of Warcraft successfully formed a union of its own. The Communications Workers of America (CWA) announced the union in a press release shared with Kotaku earlier today, writing that “an overwhelming majority of workers” supported the initiative.
“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 wrote. “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.”
With the Overwatch 2 team’s unionization, the number of unionized game developers working at Microsoft now exceeds 2,000 employees. However, the Overwatch Gamemakers Guild now has to bargain for its first contract–a process that Microsoft has been accused of dragging out.
According to Simon Hedrick, a test analyst at Blizzard, the layoffs at
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