The quality assurance department of Raven software, a Wisconsin based call of duty developer, voted to form a union, which may have a significant impact on its parent company Activision Blizzard and may have a chain reaction to the acquisition of Activision by Microsoft and the entire video game industry.
Raven QA began to join the Union in January last year, and about one-third of the team was dismissed in early December 2021. The team hit by layoffs is mainly responsible for testing the free mobile game “call of Duty: Theater”, which is reported to bring $5.2 million to Activision Blizzard every day in 2021.
Layoffs also occurred after months of salary increases. Many of the affected workers were asked to relocate to Raven’s hometown of Madison, Wisconsin., No financial assistance from Raven or Activision Blizzard.
Therefore, on December 6, 2021, 60 employees of Raven participated in the strike. Subsequently, the strike was resolved on January 22, announcing that the QA team intended to form a trade union.
The union vote was held on Monday morning and passed a mail vote submitted at the office of the National Industrial Relations Commission in Milwaukee, with 19 votes to 3. The new union operates in the name of the game workers’ Union and will now negotiate contracts with Activision Blizzard.
This marks the second major trade union movement of North American video game companies (the first seems to be vodeo games in December 2021) and the first time in the high budget and high-profile industry often mentioned in the baseball term “AAA”
Activision Blizzard has opposed unionization from the beginning through internal employee memos and a petition for failure at NLRB. In response to today’s vote, a representative of the company expressed regret in an interview with the Washington Post. He said that “an important decision that will affect the whole Raven software studio of about 350 people should not be made by 19 Raven employees.”
This is likely to be an earthquake in the U.S. video game industry, especially QA related events. Game testing is usually considered a one-time job on site and is usually outsourced to contractors or temporary workers, although it is of overall importance to production.
Activision Blizzard and raven software are just famous examples of local problems. If Raven’s QA team can compete and win with the parent company worth billions of dollars, it may be the spark of extensive trade union movement across North America.
In addition, the Raven software dispute is an example of Activision Blizzard’s problems. If Microsoft finally buys the company, Microsoft will be forced to face these problems.
When the $68.7 billion acquisition was announced in January, it immediately became the largest acquisition in Microsoft’s history and will enable Microsoft to control some of the most eye-catching franchises and development studios in the field of game development in the United States.
The deal is currently under antitrust review by the Federal Trade Commission and has reached the level that Microsoft’s Brad Smith recently called “the beginning of the middle”
Raven’s success in joining the union is not the worst thing that can happen here. In fact, this is a long process. If Raven QA is not at the helm here, it may be another department of more than a dozen other developers. In the past four years, there have been enough union discussions in game development and related fields. The question is when and where, not whether.
The current problem is that Raven has become another example of the deep-rooted dysfunction at the core of Activision Blizzard when dealing with an untenable situation. This includes multiple sexual harassment lawsuits, one of which was settled for $18 million in March, and Blizzard’s gradual “brain drain”, which makes many of its franchises in poor condition. If the acquisition is ultimately successful, Microsoft may need to do a lot of work to repair Activision Blizzard, if it is worth doing.