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Blizzard Workers Win Historic Union Contract
- colechristensen 7d agoBig corporate gaming studios get my full support for unionizing, those people need collective bargaining. I am a skeptic of many unionizing efforts, but not this one.
- xorgun 8d ago[flagged]
- tomhow 7d agoAlmost every comment I can see from this account is a brief, snarky swipe, lacking any substance nor even a period at the end of the sentence, which is a hallmark of low-effort participation. It's honestly hard to know if these comments are human written or bot generated, so, in the absence of any redeeming qualities, the account is now banned.
- tstrimple 7d agoIf only there were some sort of moderation on this site. Surely there's nothing that non-moderators can do. So it feels weird when a mod complains about shit like this which appears everywhere. If only you were willing and able do something about it. Meanwhile people like me are rate limited for daring to question the lack of and uneven "moderation" on this site.
- owebmaster 7d agoThere's no moderation but you feel the need to post more, not less? Sounds conflicting.
- ViktorRay 7d agoThere were times on this site where I saw some pretty bad comments that hadn’t been moderated. I emailed the mods at hn@ycombinator.com to let them know about those bad comments and the moderators were always super nice and helpful in response to me.
- tstrimple 6d agoThis is in response to a literal moderator on the site complaining about comments on the site. Why would I need to email anyone? The moderator is already involved and just wringing their hands.
- ViktorRay 6d agoBut the moderator wasn’t just wringing their hands. The moderator banned the account. He even said so at the end of that comment.
- xorgun 5d ago[dead]
- deleted 7d ago[deleted]
- marcus_holmes 7d agoAbout time tbh. I don't work in game dev, in part because of the horrorshow of game dev management.
- tstrimple 7d agoWould be crazy to work for a company where you had confidence that like half your colleagues would be "laid off" after successfully delivering a project.
- genxy 7d agoI'd never ship then, consciously or not.
- dmix 7d agoYou'd fit right in then
- sidewndr46 7d agoDuke Nukem Forever sounds like your kind of game?
- genxy 7d agoI am applying work on GTA
- underlipton 7d ago[flagged]
- georgemcbay 7d agoAlas Hacker News posters see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed trillionaires.
- incr_me 7d agoI've always heard "millionaires" (the quote was always apocryphal, anyways), and that belief is much less delusional than the belief that we're part of the proletariat, that class of workers who have nothing to lose but their chains. The vast majority of people here have lots to lose. These Blizzard workers, however miserable they are, have always had a staggering lot to lose, more than the proletariat could ever dream of possessing.
- mplanchard 7d agoUh, do you think that the labor class is defined by utter poverty or something? The labor class is defined by having to work for their livelihood, which most of us still do, even if we have a mortgage or a nice 401(k) or whatever.
- globalnode 7d agodefine livelihood, it involves a standard and cost of living that is different for different people
- tekla 7d agoI'm going to guess that you want this to include SV/SF people as part of the labor class. This is a joke to the labor class and they are making fun of you
- hackable_sand 7d agoYou are most definitely not getting a seat at the campfire.
- aliasxneo 7d agoUse to be a huge Blizzard fan back in the day. Can't get behind basically anything they are doing today. Time will tell if something like this just reinforces whatever is broken or results in real improvement. I'm cynical on the matter.
- riffraff 7d agoI remember when Warcraft 3 came out and a news outlet mentioned something on the lines of "gamers' trust in Blizzard borders on religious faith" and it sounded true. It's unbelievable how far from that trust and love they have fallen.
- tekla 7d agoDoes Blizzard plan on releasing a good game soon?
- beanjuiceII 7d agodefinitely not now
- tstrimple 7d agoOverwatch had so much promise. I could have seen an Arcane style series featuring characters. But no. I'm not expecting anything good from them again.
- NekkoDroid 7d agoOverwatch (as a game and as a franchise) was just straight up killed by Bobby Kotick (intentionally, and slightly unintentionally by Jeff Kaplan wanting to still build Project Titan). Since OW2 under MS its been back to being a fine game.
- weberer 7d agoI hear they may be re-re-re-releasing WoW Classic again.
- sidewndr46 7d agoHaven't they done this with the "Season" model they've moved to?
- mister_mort 7d agoThe Starcraft site is clearly doing some sort of intentional glitch out ARG, and the rumour going around is that they are doing some sort of singleplayer shooter set in that universe. https://www.tweaktown.com/news/113435/blizzards-next-starcraft-game-to-be-revealed-in-days-as-official-site-glitches-with-secret-messages/index.html https://www.tweaktown.com/news/113435/blizzards-next-starcra...
- 7d ago
- brailsafe 7d agoSpectacular. Many people have been disappointed with moves by Blizz in the last 5-10 years and anything that improves livability for those that make what used to be great games is a huge win
- ChrisArchitect 7d agoUnion release: https://cwa-union.org/news/releases/blizzard-entertainment-workers-ratify-historic-video-game-contracts-cwa https://cwa-union.org/news/releases/blizzard-entertainment-w... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49627164 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49627164)
- globalnode 7d agoin australia workers seem to have more rights. they have industry awards that specify minimum wage and safety conditions etc, they have the legal right to strike and the legal right for union/collective bargaining if they choose it, aka freedom of association. when i look at employment conditions in the US, it boggles my mind how workers there basically have zero safety net. its an extreme example of giving all the power to the employer.
- polski-g 7d agoAmericans trade higher worker income for decreased protections.
- shoo 7d agoIs that actually true though? Maybe Americans get higher incomes because US companies structurally sell to larger markets than Australian companies, so - at least for those roles with scale / leverage - the role is more productive & the absolute value that the employee can extract is high, even if the proportion of the overall value extracted by the worker is similar to or lower than the proportion extracted by an Australian worker. Maybe if Americans had stronger unions, perhaps American workers could benefit from both higher incomes - due to the increased scale & opportunities of the US market - & increased protections relative to Australian workers. Another thing that is quite different between the US & Australia is that in the US, the public is generally a lot more trusting of business over government. US business interests have a long history of influencing US public opinion- there's examples of stuff like business interest groups creating educational materials & getting them into schools, so kids learn early about the wonders of capitalism & free markets. It's unsurprising that you might not find unions so popular in such an environment. A book that details quite a lot of that history is Kerryn Higgs' book Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet [1]. [1] https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/3683/Collision-CourseEndless-Growth-on-a-Finite-Planet https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/3683/Collision-CourseEndle...
- polski-g 7d agoThey would not. If its harder to fire people, then there would be less employee turnover, which is where all the income growth comes from.
- WatchDog 7d agoAre there any unionized game studios that continue to produce highly acclaimed games? Bethesda used to make great games, but the last great game they made was Skyrim in 2011, they unionized in 2022, and just recently they had some big layoffs. CD Projekt made the highly acclaimed Witcher 3 in 2015, Cyberpunk disappointed on it's release in 2020, although it's reviews are mixed. CD Projekt unionized in 2023. Blizzard have been in decline for a long time, they mostly focus on maintaining the cash cows games WoW and hearthstone. Although Diablo has is mostly well regarded(ignoring immortal). They haven't made any new ambitious game for a while. Their last attempt at making something ambitious was Titan, a cancelled MMO that they worked on for 6 years and supposedly spent $80 million on, cancelled in 2013. The decline seems to begin well before the unionization, so I wouldn't say it's causal, it's more of a symptom of the company no longer being a place that can foster high functioning teams, where people feel like they are valued and working on something important.
- ViktorRay 7d agoI guess we will find out when GTA 6 comes out as Rockstar has become unionized. Although actually…Rockstar didn’t become unionized until most of GTA 6 had already been completed. So I guess we’ll find out when their next game comes out.
- SkiFire13 7d agoRemember that correlation != causation. They might also have unionized due to the bad conditions while developing GTA 6, which could also lead to it being a bad game. Who knows though.
- flohofwoe 7d ago> So I guess we’ll find out when their next game comes out. I doubt that any of us will still be alive at the time when GTA 7 releases - at least when looking at the trajectory of GTA release dates ;)
- Camus134 7d agoCyberpunk may have had a bad launch, but in 2026 it is a great game, and worth playing. One of the best games I've played in years.
- strictnein 7d agoMight be a better article on this: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2026-09-09/blizzard-video-game-workers-ratify-union-contract https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/20... The Gamespot one is really poorly written. Not sure if it's AI bad or human bad. An example: > Laid-off union members will also get an additional four weeks of pay–regardless of how long they worked at the company–hybrid schedules that allow them to work from home, and formal systems to settle disputes within the workplace. Laid off workers get to utilize hybrid schedules?
- dwattttt 7d agoThey can choose to work their allotted 0 hours any time of the day they choose. Has to be at home though, mandatory "do not work" from home orders apply.
- bentt 7d agoThis is probably the beginning of the end for Blizzard as an identifiable company. MSFT will just absorb WoW, Overwatch, and Diablo and spin up new internal studios to support them rather than have their feet held to the fire by a union. They did it with Halo. Of course, it produced garbage, but that never stopped Microsoft.
- guywithahat 7d ago[flagged]
- paimapi 7d ago> To be fair unions also produce garbage; would love to see some sources for this particularly in tech/video-game land that are much less laden with decades-old, corporate-collusive union bosses like there are in auto-manufacturing (the regular anti-union punching bags) :)
- guywithahat 7d agoIt is the central thesis of unions; unions represent workers, not the product. When you do more for workers (ie making it harder to let them go, striking, increasing benefits, etc) this comes at the cost of the product. But that's just a thought experiment. There's also a mountain of evidence showing unions hurt the product (here's a study on increased recalls with higher union participation: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1287/mnsc.2021.4082 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1287/mnsc.2021.4082) and that they hurt innovation (here's a study on innovation, showing a reduction in patent quality https://scholarworks.utrgv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=fin_fac https://scholarworks.utrgv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...). Unions care about workers at the expense of product, management cares about product at the expense of workers. They are at opposite ends.
- paimapi 7d agoin your first cited study, product recalls are an incredibly bad indicator of unions decreasing product quality. if you're trying to minimize labor getting more of the share while preserving existing profit, you reduce overhead elsewhere - ie the quality of material you source, the machinery you purchase, etc. that's a management decision. you could just as easily seek marginally less profit and continue as you were, with your existing vendors, but that's not how management ever works in your second cited study, the only measurement for 'innovation' is 'quantity of patents.' it has nothing to do with quality and if you know anything about how banal patents tend to be, there's an inverse correlation between quantity of patents and true innovation a couple easily Googled one-off, low-quality studies doesn't prove a point and neither does a thought experiment. I could just as easily point to the numerous examples of union shops making very specific, artisanal products of stellar quality like union-made Red Wings
- ffsm8 7d agoIt's interesting to observe that there seemingly is a very high relationship with groups of people producing garbage and seeking extra protection through other means to "level the playing field" aka force everyone to be on their level.
- guywithahat 7d agoThis is my immediate thought too; feels like the final nail on the coffin for Blizzard. Unions exist to benefit workers at the expense of product, and if they're already not producing leading class games then not being able to fire low performers isn't going to help
- Melatonic 7d agoThis is really needed right now. I suspect with studios adopting AI en masse for software development and the creative side of things the studios that unionise and/or treat their real workers well will come out on top. We need studios filled with talented and passionate people who aren't worried about getting laid off next week and not making rent.
- silisili 7d agoThe time to unionize was 15 years ago. But the majority didn't want to because they got theirs and screw everyone else. Now with downsizing and AI knocking at the door, funny how willing everyone is to unionize.