From Zero to a Wave of Contracts: How Game Unions Took Hold at Microsoft

In January 2023, about 300 quality-assurance testers at ZeniMax, the Microsoft-owned parent of Bethesda, formed a union. It took them more than two years to win a contract. By the autumn of 2026, that first deal had become a pattern: union contracts at ZeniMax, Raven Software and two groups at Blizzard, all signed with Microsoft.

At the same time, a different kind of union is trying to organise everyone else. United Videogame Workers-CWA, launched at the Game Developers Conference in March 2025, lets any games worker in the United States or Canada join directly, whether they have a job or not.

Together they mark the biggest change in North American game labour in decades.

The Microsoft model

The contracts all trace back to a neutrality agreement between Microsoft and the Communications Workers of America (CWA), under which the company agreed not to oppose workers who want to unionise. Since 2024, thousands of Microsoft game workers have joined CWA under it; by July 2025, CWA counted more than 2,000.

Here is how the contracts arrived:

• ZeniMax QA: the union formed in January 2023 with more than 300 testers in Maryland and Texas. A tentative agreement came on June 5, 2025, and members ratified it that summer, the first union contract at a Microsoft game studio. It included across-the-board raises, job upgrades and job-security measures.
• Raven Software: workers at the Call of Duty support studio ratified their contract in August 2025.
• Blizzard QA: more than 60 quality-assurance workers ratified a three-year deal in early 2026, the third Microsoft contract, with guaranteed raises, rules on AI use, proper crediting, disability accommodations, limits on excessive overtime and layoff protections including recall rights.
• Blizzard (wider): in September 2026, about 1,900 Blizzard workers, the makers of World of Warcraft and Diablo, won their first contracts, which include recall rights and guaranteed severance for laid-off staff.

One union for everyone

UVW-CWA, Local 9433, works differently. It is a direct-join union, not tied to any employer, open to contractors, freelancers and people between jobs. Its launch petition asked studios to give notice before layoffs, extend healthcare for laid-off workers, give workers a say over the use of generative AI and adopt more sustainable growth plans. CWA president Claude Cummings Jr. said game workers had faced "endless cycles of layoffs and rehiring".

A union without a single employer cannot bargain a contract in the usual way. Instead, UVW-CWA campaigns on standards for the whole industry. At its one-year mark at the 2026 GDC Festival of Gaming in San Francisco, members marched to promote a Game Workers' Bill of Rights, launched a campaign asking studios to refuse warrantless immigration searches at work, and announced a virtual Game Workers Conference for May 22 and 23, 2026.

How much support is there?

More than most people expect. In GDC's 2026 State of the Game Industry survey, released in January, 82% of US-based respondents said they supported unionising game workers, with only 5% opposed. 10% said they were already members of an industry-wide union such as UVW-CWA, 2% belonged to a company union and 62% said they were interested in joining one.

Support was highest among people with the least security: 88% of those laid off in the past two years and 87% of those earning under $200,000 a year. No respondent aged 18 to 24 opposed unions at all. We look at the rest of that survey in our GDC 2026 survey story.

Why it matters

Contracts at Microsoft matter beyond Microsoft, because they show what a games union contract actually contains: recall rights, severance, overtime limits, AI rules and credits. Those are now written down, and workers elsewhere can point to them.

For Korean readers, the contrast with home is instructive. Korea's game unions, such as Nexon's Starting Point and Neople's branch, have fought mostly over pay and bonuses; the North American contracts put more weight on job security and AI. We covered Korea's biggest dispute in our Neople strike story.

WGC's take: the neutrality deal made Microsoft the test case, and the test has passed: studios kept shipping games while contracts were signed. The open question is whether any other big publisher will sign a similar agreement, or whether UVW-CWA's industry-wide approach becomes the main route for everyone else.