Throughout the mid-2010s, Gonzalez spent months workinggruelling, 14-hour overnight shifts at Activision Blizzard’s offices in LosAngeles as a quality assurance tester, combing the video game developer’sshooter game for glitches while trying to stay awake.
“It is dystopian,” said Gonzalez, 29. “It really isexhausting sometimes, because you feel like you’re pouring from an empty cup.”
Gonzalez and other quality assurance testers were“crunching,” a term in the video game industry for prolonged stretches ofintense work before a game’s release. Employees are often given shifts of up to12-14 hours each day, with only one or two days off each month, all in the nameof meeting a deadline to ship the title to players.
Discontent over working conditions at video game companieshas been growing for years, driven by anger about the crunch periodsexperienced by Gonzalez, as well as by poor pay, temporary contracts and sexualharassment in the workplace.
Now some game workers are considering unionisation, whichwould have been unimaginable a few years ago. Their interest has also beenfueled partly by low unemployment rates, which have led workers to believe theyhave more leverage over their employers, as well as a lawsuit last year thatthrust Activision’s problems with sexual misconduct and gender discriminationinto the open,
About 20 quality assurance workers at Raven Software, asubsidiary of Activision, will vote on whether to unionise Monday. Ifsuccessful, the Raven workers would form the Game Workers Alliance, the firstunion at a major North American video game publisher. Although it is a smallgroup, it would be a symbolic victory for organisers who think gaming industryworkers are ready for unions.
“It’s going to be the spark that ignites the rest of theindustry, I believe,” said Gonzalez, who formed ABetterABK, the activist groupof Activision workers who have been pushing for the company to improve itsculture after the lawsuit in July. Gonzalez quit Activision last year and nowworks at the Communications Workers of America, the union that has been helpingRaven organise.
Activision, which has about 10,000 employees around theworld, has challenged whether the quality assurance workers can unionisewithout all the 230 employees at Raven taking part. Kelvin Liu, a spokespersonfor the company, said it thinks “everyone in our studio should have a say in thisimportant decision.”
Workers in the gaming industry often hear from those outsidethe industry that conditions cannot be so bad because they are making moneyplaying games. But to Blake Lotter, another former Activision quality assuranceworker, who crunched during development of “Call of Duty: Cold War” in 2020,clicking through the game for up to 14 hours straight while chugging energydrinks to stay alert was mind-numbing.
“You could really like food, any kind of food, but if youonly eat that same food for months to a year on end, you’re going to start tohate it,” he said. “It’s going to feel like work or a punishment.” (Liu saidthe company was creating a “flexible workplace culture where our teams are ableto balance their work with their personal needs.”)
In other countries, like Australia and the United Kingdom,it is common for game workers to be unionised. But in North America, unionshave not yet caught on among game studios.
But in 2018, a group of game developers formed anorganisation called Game Workers Unite, which created local chapters toencourage unionisation efforts in various cities. The year after, dozens ofworkers at Riot Games walked out to protest the company’s handling of lawsuitsaccusing it of having a sexist and toxic culture. Female employees later won$100 million in a settlement over gender discrimination. Large game studioslike Ubisoft have faced lawsuits and activists demanding improvements.
Workers at a small studio called Vodeo Games formed thefirst gaming union in North America in December. Outside the Game Awards thatmonth in Los Angeles, a glitzy show of industry executives, developers andcelebrities, a handful of picketers drummed up attention for a rapidly growinglabour group, the Game Workers of Southern California.
In April, contract workers at BioWare, a Canadiandevelopment studio, said they would form a union. Around the same time, anemployee at Nintendo filed a charge against the company with the National LaborRelations Board, accusing Nintendo of firing them because they “joined orsupported a labour organisation.”
The news prompted renewed attention to Nintendo’s treatmentof its employees, particularly quality assurance workers, who are often ontemporary contracts and relegated to the bottom of the totem pole atdevelopment studios, causing many to feel like second-class citizens.
In a statement, Nintendo said the employee had been firedfor disclosing confidential information and that the company was “fullycommitted to providing a welcoming and supportive work environment.”
It all adds up to an environment in which gaming employeesare more willing to speak out about perceived injustices and more curious aboutcollective organising than ever before, especially as they watch labourcampaigns at companies like Amazon, Apple and Starbucks.
“I would frame this time as one of real experimentation,where game workers are exploring their options in what seems to be quite anopen-minded way,” said Johanna Weststar, an associate professor at WesternUniversity in Ontario who studies labour in the game industry.
Weststar attributed part of the interest in activism ingaming to campaigns led by unions like CWA, which have found the gamingindustry to be a “massive, untapped market.” Monday’s vote is “low-hangingfruit” for union activity, she said, because it is affecting a small group oftemporary workers who are the most likely to want to organise.
“It will be more telling or more formative when a largerstudio with a more permanent and more stable workforce, when they actuallyunionise,” Weststar said.
The vote Monday comes months after employees at Raven, theWisconsin studio that helps develop Activision’s flagship “Call of Duty” game,walked out of work in protest after the company ended about a dozen Ravenquality assurance workers’ contracts, which the workers said was abrupt andunfair. After the workers announced their intent to unionise in January,Activision, which is being acquired by Microsoft for $70 billion, said it wouldnot voluntarily recognize the group.
Soon after, the company said it would disperse the qualityassurance workers across various departments at the Raven studio. It also saidit would convert more than 1,000 temporary quality assurance contractors atActivision to full-time status and give them a pay raise, to $20 an hour, andmore benefits. Activision said the unionising workers would not be affected,because federal labour law prevented them from inducing workers to vote againsta union by increasing pay or benefits before an election. (CWA rejected thisassertion.)
Activision also argued to the NLRB that because Ravenquality assurance workers had been spread across the studio, they were nolonger a bargaining unit, and that all Raven studio workers should be eligibleto vote. The board rejected those claims and told workers to mail in theirballots, which will be counted Monday. If a majority are in favour, the workerswill unionise, pending objections over the voting process.
Workers at Activision and elsewhere will be watchingclosely. Already, they say, they are seeing the benefits — like the payincreases — of pressuring their employer to improve.
“Those things only happened because of how hard we’ve beenpushing and how much pressure there has been on upper management,” said JijiSaari, an Activision quality assurance worker in Minneapolis. “We know we can’tget complacent or lose too much steam.”
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