In spite of the major releases and announcements that have punctuated 2026 so far, the overall attitude in the gaming sector, business-wise, is a bit more mixed. Costs are rising on both the production and consumer ends of the equation, and as the gains from the COVID-era gaming booms slide back to pre-2020 levels, layoffs have been mounting at an alarming rate in studios and publishers both large and small. It’s in this tumultuous period that unions have become very important for those working in the industry, and why the latest victory by Blizzard Workers Union is so heartening.
Today, the collective union units working under Blizzard, as well as its parent company Microsoft, successfully ratified a new contract after about two years of nonstop bargaining. This new contract will extend a myriad of era-necessitated protections to Blizzard’s workers, as well as strengthen the unions’ bargaining power by condensing the disparate units into several cohesive wholes.
The Union Scored Layoff Protections for 1,900 Workers
Where previously all of Blizzard’s employees were loosely organized into an array of smaller unions based on their positions in the company, this new contract unites the unions into three specialized sectors:...
