Blizzard’s Diablo Workers Become The Latest Blizzard Team To Unionize

In a statement, the CWA said that Microsoft has recognized the union and that the newly unionized workers will be under CWA Local 9510 in Irvine, Calif., CWA Local 1118 in Albany, N.Y., and CWA Local 6215 in Austin, Texas. Kelly Yeo, a game producer on Diablo and organizing committee member, shared that “I am overjoyed that we have formed a union—this is just the first step for us joining a movement spreading across an industry that is tired of living in fear. We are ready to begin fighting for real change alongside our Diablo colleagues.” 

“My entire career as a developer has seen my peers and I paying the ‘passion tax’ for working in an industry that we love,” said senior software engineer and union member Nav Bhatti. “At some point you have to choose between fight or flight, and forming a union is us doing just that — standing our ground in the industry.”  It seems like more and more video game workers are choosing to fight in the form of unionization, especially those working under Microsoft. 

While 2025 is not the first time we’ve seen unions in the video game sector, the last few months have shown it might be a trend that’s here to stay. Just a few weeks ago, Blizzard’s Story and Development team voted overwhelmingly to unionize under the CWA. Months before that, in May, another Blizzard team, this time the one behind Overwatch 2, created a wall-to-wall union. It’s notable that several of these recent unionizations have been at Blizzard under Microsoft. This could be in part due to Microsoft’s labor neutrality agreement with the CWA, which requires the publisher to take a neutral stance regarding unionization, thus making it easier for workers to discuss union representation. 

However, leaving it at that risks overlooking the company’s history. Blizzard has been called out for union-busting practices in the past and went through a reckoning over its well-documented history as a toxic workplace. As for its parent company, Microsoft, several developers have referenced the studio’s frequent mass layoffs as an incentive to take action and organize, including some of the newly unionized Diablo developers. Senior software engineer II Syke Hoefling told Aftermath that, a week after CWA visited the Blizzard campus, “layoffs happened. The person I was moving in with worked on Battle.net, and they lost their job. … That really lit a fire for me of ‘We should do something.’” When considering these kinds of unstable conditions, it’s not hard to see why over 3,500 workers at Microsoft have organized under the CWA.