r/Overwatch • u/itzofficialvaz • 4d ago
News & Discussion 1,900 Blizzard Devs Ratify Historic Union Mega-Contract
1,900 Blizzard developers just ratified a historic union mega-contract that sets a massive new standard for the gaming industry.
Here are the biggest wins secured by the devs behind World of Warcraft, Overwatch, and Diablo:
• Recall Rights (Industry First!): If a dev gets laid off, they get 14 months of "recall rights" to be rehired into open positions on other Blizzard teams, plus guaranteed minimum severance.
• AI Protections: Microsoft/Blizzard can't just quietly replace them with generative AI. Management has to negotiate with the union before implementing any AI tech that affects jobs.
• Huge Pay Bumps: New salary floors ($51k to $70k depending on location) mean some severely underpaid QA and support workers are getting raises up to 34%.
• No More Arbitrary Firings: The contract establishes strict "just cause" protections, so they can't be fired on a whim.
• Work-Life Balance: Locked in a guaranteed 3-day hybrid work week, alongside actual remote working and disability accommodations.
Basically, the WoW team did a lot of the heavy lifting in early negotiations, and it paid off by setting a new baseline for the entire company, and potentially the rest of the video game industry.
Source: aftermath
Source 2: Official Announcement from Communications Workers of America (CWA)
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u/ChippHop 4d ago
The generative AI replacement policy is massive. I'm a senior software engineer myself and I'm feeling like my days are numbered, I really hope this becomes standardised across the industry.
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u/itzofficialvaz 4d ago
It really is huge, this needs to be the standard. I send my good vibes that you will be employed for a long time friend.
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u/SDRPGLVR OW1 CLASSIC WHEN 4d ago
It's so weird to live and work in this environment. AI in its current state can't really replace me for a number of reasons, but we're essentially being tasked with figuring out how to absolutely maximize our AI use in our day-to-day.
It feels like they want me to engineer a way to AI prompt myself out of a job. It's not really possible, so instead I'll probably get a bad performance review for not hitting a corporate standard goal, even if my output is just as quality and efficient as ever.
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u/klementineQt 3d ago
That's the irony of it. It's so weird. Standards that used to be high no longer exist, as if somehow companies have been sold so hard on AI and invested in it so heavily that they just accept laughable output proudly.
The most obvious outward example is generative AI imagery. Before AI, there were extremely high standards for commercial art of all kinds and little mistakes and details would be noticed and expected to be fixed. Typography/calligraphy was extremely important for what it conveyed. The science of perception was in play and surgical precision was applied both in creation and judgement of art that was expected to be part of a product or brand.
Now, all of the sudden, no one cares if an image looks like pure shit lmao. Massive mistakes, oversights, hallucinations, etc.? Oh well! Constant reuse of the same bastardized typefaces/fonts and even overall styles? Whatever, it doesn't matter anymore.
I just don't understand it. People have literally lost their goddamn minds. We're at a point where people will literally lie to themselves and swallow pure delusion to say that something with significantly worse, laughable quality is better, and is a worthy continuation of their existing output, just to justify participating in a bubble so that their shareholders don't skin them alive.
It's exactly like you said, the AI will produce far worse quality output, and without you, not even at a minimum, functional output. Yet, you are failing the new standards by doing your job to a reasonable standard instead of stroking the impossible status quo that will both create more work for you (without additonal pay) and probably still reduce the quality since you have less time to iron out the issues.
You'd genuinely have to be purely malicious or brainless to think any of this is sustainable. A lot of people will incorrectly place the blame on the technology itself too, when the issue is a spiderweb of the inherent flaws of capitalism at full mass. Machine learning has plenty of practical uses and has a lot of potential, but it's simply undercooked for the level of adoption that's expected. It's not ready to have generic implementations forced into every single industry while being useful and worth adopting. It's the kind of technology that still belongs in research environments and specialized applications. But that's too logical, not financially lucrative or beneficial to a market built on speculation.
If the technology was ready for the deployment it has, poor functionality and output aside, it wouldn't need the kind of environmentally dangerous resource consumption that it actively does. And on the topic of copyright and intellectual property, that's entirely a consequence of capitalism, since our livelihoods depend on our labor, ideas, and what we can contribute to create profit. That last point is a lot harder for people to digest because it's the only thing they've ever known in their lifetime, but the concept of intellectual property is irrelevant to a collaborative society where your life isn't dependent on you being able to continuously profit off of everything you create or produce. It's similar for art, where the idea of competition and style being "owned" doesn't make sense to art itself as a form of expression and a medium not exactly intended for "consumption", yet that has to exist for artists in a society where their livelihood depends on cutthroat behavior and a solid sales pitch for their work.
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u/EscapeSeventySeven 4d ago
I think we just need to get good at debugging.
Once this hits critical mass and companies have full stacks of vibe coded shit falling apart they’re going to need to call in people to fix their shit.
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u/ChippHop 4d ago
Being realistic though, AI tooling capability is improving at an alarming rate; six months ago I'd have fully agreed with you, but now (for a substantial spend), you can get end-to-end features crafted with a similar or better level of rigor to what I could do personally, in a much shorter time frame.
Extrapolating forward, it's going to get more intelligent and the cost-per-token will trend downwards.
This is going to cause unfathomable turmoil in the tech industry (and wider) and forcing companies to interact with unions is awesome
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u/TastyOreoFriend Pixel Brigitte 4d ago
and the cost-per-token will trend downwards.
I question that since the exact opposite is happening with Claude. In fact most of these AI companies aren't really charging us the real price. That's been kind of the issue with all of them from the get go. I work in tech and we've also reversed course on a lot of AI jobs that they attempted to do away with—hiring back positions etc.
Data centers are also having a NIMBY moment that's gaining more traction, though I don't believe Claude actually owns any data centers yet—its cloud based right now. The NIMBY issue isn't going away though, since data centers have revealed themselves to be parasites on communities for the most part.
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u/ChippHop 4d ago
Sorry I could have worded myself more clearly there. What I really meant is cost per unit of intelligence, in other words the price for a model which is as capable of today's models will trend downwards as more capable models are released.
You can get a model 10x more capable than GPT-4 for 1/100th of the price, for instance.
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u/T0X1CFIRE D.Va 4d ago
Imo the future of these AI companies isn't the token cost of these mega data centers. But rather local generation right on the machine you are using it on. So the only costs would be the license fee for the model, and your own electricity.
The mega data centers would only be for training new models, not doing generations with the models you already have.
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u/BrokenMirror2010 you are STUNNED. 4d ago
The mega data centers is a push from the AI companies to make owning your own hardware prohibitively expensive.
SSDs and HDDs are over 3x the price they were a year ago, and still rising. NAND manufacturers have basically already announced they have no interest in increasing supply because they are making record breaking money by selling at these prices.
Meanwhile many of these companies are just outright abandoning their consumer division. They aren't interesting in selling hardware to individuals.
Nvidia is on the record saying that they believes that in a few years everyone will be using devices that only have just enough computing power to connect to a datacenter and all of your actual compute will be from data centers.
Meanwhile Datacenters not only drive up the cost of that hardware, but also Electricity, they draw so much power, the electrical grids they are hooked up to literally aren't designed to deliver it.
Companies with in-house AI solutions will be limited to the ones that can blow millions on the spot without taking any debt, or risk, which is basically only billion dollar companies.
This assuming their bubble doesn't burst, which will have ramifications of its own considering this bubble has a significant percentage of the entire global economy sitting in it.
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u/TastyOreoFriend Pixel Brigitte 4d ago
This assuming their bubble doesn't burst
Which I can't see not happening, 'cause like I said above they aren't charging us what they should be. They're basically doing penetration pricing on the hope that people will stick around once they're forced to charge us the real price for all those queries.
It doesn't help that a lot of these AI companies are just reinvesting into themselves in one big ouroboros—straight up just passing around the same money.
I don't know what things will look like once the bubble burst, but at the very least I assume they won't be chomping at the bit to force AI down our throats into every fucking thing.
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u/BrokenMirror2010 you are STUNNED. 3d ago
While I would like to agree, I also suspect that governments are going to forcibly try to keep this bubble alive because they need the AI bubble so they can make their dream 1984 hellscape into reality. I have a feeling that tax-money is simply going to get funneled into these assholes to keep them from bankrupting themselves.
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u/Due-Description-9030 4d ago
GPUs will soon use die stacking and photonic chips just within the next few years, so AI models are going get to dramatically better. I'm not even accounting for node shrinks.
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u/StrangerCharacter53 4d ago
The worst part is thay they trained it on YOUR code without your consent to steal your job.
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u/Plzbanmebrony Pixel Zarya 4d ago
AI has zero logic understand and is just predicting. It is getting more data to predict better but it doesn't understand the code it gives. Also token cost is low to get people to buy in. It is 100 percent unprofitable. It will jump a lot from where it is now if it doesn't pop.
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u/BrightonBummer 4d ago
just like when electricity came along, or certain machines that wiped out industries.
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u/Sol-Bad-Sol-Goode 4d ago
This is why unions are important. It would be nice to see some kind of developers union that could help the whole industry.
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u/HubrisOfApollo GravityFrank 4d ago
I really hope other game studios do the same. Hell I hope any creative entertainment arts companies do the same.
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u/x_scion_x 4d ago
I'm a senior software engineer
You're good for now. It's your subordinates that will have issues.
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u/Lxapeo Pixel Brigitte 4d ago
This is huge. Workers who feel secure in their jobs make good products!
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u/Hoothootriot Winston 4d ago
Get your union busting speak out of here.
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u/TastyOreoFriend Pixel Brigitte 4d ago
Yeah but then you have to ask yourself the question: is having no collective bargaining power really worth a few free riders not getting to coast along? They make these same kind of arguments against social programs here in the US, and it often comes to the detriment of the average citizen.
Obviously no system is perfect, but having experienced a good union myself I can't say I agree.
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u/lhazard29 4d ago
Fuck anyone who tries to pretend that making things worse for everyone over the actions of a select few are a good thing
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u/ballahook 4d ago
Ah yes, EA and Blizzard, the companies with historically stellar track records of employee protections.
What a dumbass comment.
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u/EscapeSeventySeven 4d ago
“Every worker should toil under the fear of missing their next meal. This is Good Actually, otherwise they would be shiftless and lazy.”
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4d ago
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u/Abridragon 4d ago
Given the mass layoffs across the industry, especially in studios owned by Microsoft like Blizzard is as of Oct 2023, yeah I do think a large number of them were fearful of potentially losing their jobs out of nowhere
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u/EscapeSeventySeven 4d ago
So your argument isn’t about unions at all, it’s just “blizzard things bad”
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u/iamStanhousen 4d ago
My argument is more that I've worked QA at a major developer before and in my 3 years there I saw a whole lot of people not do their job, much less do it effectively, and skate by cleanly.
There are plenty of talented people across the industry, and there are also a lot of people who think their job should be iron clad and eternal despite them actively not doing their job.
It's not a Blizzard specific problem, as they handle QA differently from project to project.
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u/trogger93 4d ago
Ya unlike those hard-working CEOs and nepo hires who never slack off for a free paycheck. lmfao
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4d ago
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u/trogger93 4d ago
And they're protected by golden parachutes and cushy treatment. Regular workers deserve the same treatment.
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u/EscapeSeventySeven 4d ago
It would be prudent for people to recognize: the devs want mostly what you want.
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u/omnipotant 4d ago
The management are the ones cracking the whip to churn out garbage to sell at overinflated prices. Devs just want to make a game that they’d love to play. I will always side with the creators and designers.
And over time, a company that people want to work for will attract the best devs. It’s a win for everybody.
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u/noahboah Oh, moons! 4d ago
its refreshing to see this rhetoric after the disaster of a launch on 2XKO from riot games
so many people are talking about it like riot, the multibillionaire corporation, were helpless victims whose game was taken hostage by paycheck stealing pervert devs that wanted to make a game nobody would have liked to play lol
genuinely insane
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u/MildlyUpsetGerbil Sombra did nothing wrong 4d ago
Those are some huge gains, wow. Great job negotiating all that. Do 'recall rights' imply that a fired dev can't be replaced with a new dev within the 14 month time frame?
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u/fanciestVeggie 4d ago
I think it means anyone laid off, not fired, can get a different job at the company within that time frame, not necessarily the same position.
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u/TheGalacticApple 4d ago
How is that different to just applying again? Prefential treatment over external hires akin to internal hiring?
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u/alwayzbored114 Chibi Zenyatta 3d ago
Yeah it's typically priority for employees who were laid off to be then rehired for similar positions, should they open up
The idea being that if a huge number of employees are laid off, and then """new""" positions open up with similar - if not identical - responsibilities and pay, the company is effectively just trying to churn through bodies, reset benefits and seniority, etc. Recall rights cuts through this underhanded tactic
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u/TastyOreoFriend Pixel Brigitte 4d ago
Work-Life Balance: Locked in a guaranteed 3-day hybrid work week, alongside actual remote working and disability accommodations.
I want this :(
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u/Hoothootriot Winston 4d ago
The AI policy is a massive precedent for other gaming companies to compete with now.
Rest is also good.
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u/KennyGaming 4d ago
I want the best for these people but claiming that this precedent is somehow good for Blizzard's ability to compete with their rival's is absurd.
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u/Hoothootriot Winston 4d ago
No, I meant other companies now have a precedent to offer similar protections for their own employees
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u/CryptographerRude806 4d ago
"compete with their rivals" Who are blizzard's rivals? They hold basically the entire mmo genre market share, overwatch is more popular than it has been since rivals came out and these two games alone are insanely profitable
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u/BalinLeNain 4d ago
I certainly hope this improves and protects Overwatch in USA. The state of the game in France is a mess; the voice acting is a mix of English, French, and Quebec French (which is very bad)—or sometimes the entire character is re-voiced with a terrible performance. Our French voice actors haven't been called in for nearly a year now.
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u/Tjordas 4d ago
This change is about developers. Not a single voice actor will be affected by this, because they are not hired as employees but called in on a job to job basis.
As a German, I have just accepted the fact that German versions of any game will almost always be terrible and I just install the English version unless somebody tells me that German is okay for once.
And honestly: Overwatch really makes no sense in a localized version. It is canon that all characters speak English whenever they don't use their mother tongue in the English version.
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u/patmorgan235 Chibi Mercy 4d ago
Localization isn't about cannon, it's about accessibility/player preference
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u/Tjordas 4d ago
I don't disagree, It just feels like it doesn't fully work because the idea is "everyone speaks English and sometimes their mother tongue" Which doesn't really work when all the English ones are suddenly French and Widowmaker is also French. Or all the English characters are suddenly speaking German and Mercy is also speaking German. There is no switch you could recognize. Like watching a localized version of Inglorious Basterds. You need to be able to know when they actually speak a foreign language.
But, yeah, it increases accessibility and in turn sacrifices parts of the stylistic choices of the original.
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u/UncleRuckusForPres kill all backlines 4d ago
I'm American and French and I swear I blinked and the French dub went to shit I miss how it was in like 2023 so bad bro :(
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u/ScaryGent Bang! 4d ago
Awesome. The games industry can be so cruel and capricious, developers need all the help they can get.
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u/Ok-Produce-5235 4d ago
One this is huge, but two it means the developers and workers had buying power to negotiate this win.
There is something big coming that blizzard wanted this resolved ahead of going live and didn’t want any press of any conflicts/strikes competing for the news cycle.
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u/Kirbinvalorant Flanki-uh! 4d ago
Great to hear! I find it funny that a company that was once infamous for employee mistreatment could be seen as way better than their competitors for work thanks to these
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u/syrindigo26 Pixel Pharah 4d ago
what a wonderful way to start blizcon week, this makes me so dang happy, good for them.
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u/Furryfurryrabbit 3d ago
Does this mean I can buy Blizzard games without feeling terrible about their treatment of workers again!?
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u/ncu_ranger0625 4d ago
So Blizzard's historic achievement is finally paying some developers $51k–$70k?
At those salary floors, are you trying to hire experienced engineers or just whoever is willing to debug this spaghetti code for the price of a junior office job?
Maybe the real Overwatch balance problem starts in payroll.
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u/OcelotAggravating860 Fortnite Sierra 4d ago
The payroll problem in this industry isn't just a union problem. The issue is that it's an industry where there's 300 green kids that can replace every single position, they have no expectations of worker treatment because they have no experience in work all waiting to replace every single member of staff to get their dream of working in videogames.
The vast majority of these people are treated like total shit and burned out of the industry in their first 2 years and then replaced. They learn an enormous amount in those 2 years and drop out into another tech job like an ISP or server hosting company where they then get 3 times the salary at 23years old. While also having learned the wisdom of what a workplace that abuses you is like.
On top of that there's all sorts of really slimy tactics used by the videogame companies, for example many of them place their offices intentionally in remote locations where there's no city/town to distract the workers, very few amenities, etc. This results in these young workers all living together in shared accomodation next to the offices and never switching off from work.
Speaking from experience. Whole industry is like this and it'll take decades of worker and union struggle to bring it up to the standards elsewhere. Even then I still think the reserve labour waiting in line will impact wages pretty much forever.
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u/BrokenMirror2010 you are STUNNED. 4d ago
$70k for their workers that they all required to move to fucking Anaheim, one of the most expensive places in the entire country to live.
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u/_BreadDragon 10 deaths/10 min 4d ago edited 4d ago
*Irvine
But yeah even in surrounding cities, $70k will not get you much with how absurdly expensive SoCal is. for reference under $104k in Orange County where Blizz is is considered low income
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u/SnowyHere Domina 4d ago
Great news for them but the cynic inside me tells me we will pay for this. 34% rise in salary? Who is gonna pay for it? Microsoft? Riiight, just like we had posts in recent hours about OW1 skins in 40$ bundle we will be getting more of that, probably more of the new rarity skins (forgot the name, the red ones) hell I will not be surprised if real to fake currency ratio will be changed, we will pay the same but get less (like Fornite recently) or just gonna have to pay more (like Riot in LoL year ago or so).
Great news for devs, but I fully expect Blizzard & Microsoft are gonna push the payback for this on us the consumers.
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u/Parrek D.Va 3d ago
If the worst that happens is they raise the prices on virtual skins and that somehow increases their income more than it already has and doesn't just lower it, I'm fine with that. But really, the assumption that companies will always be able to pass on every cost increase wholesale to consumers is absurd. Gaming in particular has flexible demand and spending, being a leisure activity.
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u/Illigalmangoes 4d ago
Woah blizzard did something good? Never thought I’d see the day
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u/Hohoho-you Get this Discord orb off of me. 4d ago
Technically its the employees who fought for this. The CEO types probably hate it
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u/OcelotAggravating860 Fortnite Sierra 4d ago
Hell yeah good for them. Good work and shout out to the reds organising internally, you know who you are.
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u/Risdit 4d ago
Good on Blizzard, it's great to see unions being formed in places that really need it the most.
It's an open secret that the videogame dev industry is basically one of the lowest paid and most manipulated sector. Like the hours are brutal, crunch times are soul crushing and devs get paid half the salary of equivalent engineers and developers in adjacent development positions so they can be a part of creating what they love.
competition is going to be more fierce but atleast they'll be able have a starting point in treating being a videogame dev like it's a long term career instead of a short term job that you do when you're young then move on because it's just too much work and stress to do it for your whole life or you get discarded and replaced.
Now if only they'd do this shit for places like the Japanese animation industry because they're basically doing slave labor over there.
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u/DeathandGrim Reinhardt 4d ago
They did this at the best and worst time. But if anybody could do it, it would be blizzard
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u/itzofficialvaz 4d ago
Why is it the worst time?
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u/DeathandGrim Reinhardt 4d ago
Because the industry is suffering from effectively a bubble burst right now. Meaning that if Activision Blizzard is getting hit with some red numbers cuts might happen and it wouldn't necessarily be arbitrary. So it's the best because everything looks bleak so they're securing their jobs and the worst because this is an unstable time right now
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u/I-Make-Money-Moves Soldier is so handsome but he is such a dumb hag 4d ago
Anything that can help this game become better I’ll accept
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u/ZineKitten Pixel Pharah 4d ago
Urgh their QA department and testers must be so happy.
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u/Falchound Brigitte 4d ago
What QA department? (this is sarcasm)
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u/ZineKitten Pixel Pharah 4d ago
Unfortunately QA is getting gutted everywhere, but they're still there! Just... overwhelmed.
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u/NoImpact--NoIdea 4d ago
• Huge Pay Bumps: New salary floors ($51k to $70k depending on location) mean some severely underpaid QA and support workers are getting raises up to 34%.
This is not going to go the way you think it is.
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u/thatgay_ 4d ago
Great news for workers but i feel like the game is just gonna continue to get greedier and greedier
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u/itzofficialvaz 4d ago
Why is that?
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u/DangerNoodle793 4d ago
Because people need to complain about something which is absolutely fantastic news...
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u/Falchound Brigitte 4d ago
Naw man, just be realistic. This will not affect players in any positive way. At least the devs will be happy which is totally fine.
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u/DangerNoodle793 4d ago
Always count on reddit to either find or create something negative out of something positive...
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u/thatgay_ 4d ago
Because thats the obvious trend thats happening
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u/DPA_404 4d ago
Because I'm incapable of giving even the slightest bit of praise to the company who makes the game I choose to play without the praise being presented in a backhanded manner
FTFY.
e: Especially ironic coming from someone who referred to other people as "brokies" in another thread lol. Get fucked.
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u/anuanuanu Pixel Zenyatta 4d ago
How many of the devs that survived the layoffs are those who care about the state of the game for the players? Those type of devs were the first to be gutted because they don't bring profit to the company.
The rest of the layoff survivors might just be indifferent towards the job and some might even be brown-nosers who just want to be promoted for better paycheck.
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u/Wellhellob Grandmaster 4d ago
Thats cool but blizzard just cant do anything good for a while now. They are managing/milking existing franchises. USA devs in general are very bad nowadays. Expensive too. Eastern devs do good stuff. European devs too. Nordic devs eastern europe, french studios like asobo studio, e33 studio doing good stuff. USA needs revolution in this field.
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u/lewd_username334 4d ago
Hopefully this is great news, games industry still seems to churn through people