Image: Activision Blizzard / Kotaku / Yevgenij_D (Shutterstock)
Developers at Boston-based game studio Proletariat announced Tuesday plans to unionize. If successful, around 60 employees there working on World of Warcraft’s new Dragonflight expansion would join the growing ranks of organized labor at parent company Activision Blizzard and beyond.
The group, dubbed the Proletariat Workers Alliance, is unionizing with the Communications Workers of America and says it supports an overwhelming majority of the studio’s qualified staff. While it has petitioned the National Labor Relations Board for a union election, it is also asking Activision Blizzard to voluntarily recognize the union to break with Call of Duty publishers’ attempts to delay and sabotage similar efforts at its other studios.
“Everyone in the video game industry knows Activision Blizzard’s reputation for creating a hostile work environment. When we heard earlier this year that Blizzard was planning to acquire Proletariat, we started discussing how we could protect the amazing culture we’ve created here. said Dustin Yost, a software engineer at the studio, in a press release. “By forming a union and negotiating a contract, we can ensure that we can continue to do our best and create innovative experiences at the frontier of game development.”
The Proletariat Workers Alliance would be unique among gaming unions in that it represents all of the studio’s non-management employees and not just quality assurance employees like at Raven Software, Blizzard Albany and the unionization efforts currently running at Microsoft’s Bethesda studios. Proletariat developers list flexible PTO, optional remote work, no mandatory overtime and policies promoting diversity, equality and inclusion among the demands they plan to negotiate at the negotiating table if the union campaign is successful.
Activision Blizzard did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether it would voluntarily recognize the union or seek to fight it, as it has made prior efforts within the company. The publisher recently attempted to block the Blizzard Albany union, arguing that allowing only QA to unionize would harm the development of games like Diablo IV. Ultimately, the NLRB didn’t buy it, but in the case of Proletariat, those concerns would be moot anyway, since a studio-wide vote is exactly what workers are asking for.
Proletariat was founded in 2012 by former developers of Zynga, Insomniac Games, and Harmonix, and was funded by venture capital and investments from companies like Take-Two. The most famous release before joining Blizzard was Spellbreak, a free-to-play magic shooter that came out in 2020. The game was discontinued last June, however, and Proletariat was taken on to work on World of Warcraft over the following month.
“At Proletariat, we’ve always emphasized taking care of each other as people, and we’re committed to preserving the best of our studio,” said James Van Nuland, an Associate Games Producer at Proletariat, today. “We hang together.”