Blizzard's World of Warcraft team is forming a labor union, Bloomberg reported. Like many other gaming industry unions, the roughly 500 workers will join the Communications Workers of America. The new union will be “wall-to-wall,” meaning it will cover the entire development team, not just one department like QA, and will include both a large team in Irvine, California, and a smaller team in Massachusetts. The guild will be called the “World of Warcraft Game Makers Guild” (WoWGG).

The WoWGG will likely become the second largest game workers' union in the United States, after Activision's 600-member QA union, which was formed in March.

World of Warcraft senior producer Samuel Cooper told IGN that efforts to organize the World of Warcraft team in earnest following reports of Blizzard's scandalous “frat boy” culture begun in late 2021, he said. After Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard last year, the effort gained further ground due to Microsoft's neutral policy toward gaming unions.

“This isn't an attack on the leaders of ‘World of Warcraft,’ or like, 'We don't like those guys. ' We just want to make sure that our voices are heard and that at some point we don't end up with numbers on a spreadsheet. Because the higher up you go, the more likely it is that those people have never met any of us, and none of the names mean anything to them.”

The new “World of Warcraft” union follows a similar “one-wall” union formed last week at Bethesda Game Studios, also owned by Microsoft. While Microsoft's official neutral stance toward labor unions in its games division grew out of its efforts to gain regulatory approval for its acquisition of Activision Blizzard, the large team of studios under the Microsoft umbrella is clearly fertile ground for union organizing.

In addition to the approximately 500 members of the “World of Warcraft” team, a second QA union under the CWA has been formed in Texas, consisting of approximately 60 people working on games such as “Diablo” and “Hearthstone.”

The next step for both unions is contract negotiations, which will take considerable time. Organized labor leaders have said they want to focus on pay equity, remote work, and workplace equity.