Unionizing the Video Game Industry

Paris Marx: Taylor, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Taylor Welling: Thank you so much for having me. PM: Very excited to have you on the show. And Kathryn, welcome to you. Kathryn Friesen: Thanks! So happy to be here. PM: I'm excited to speak with both of you. Obviously you've both recently formed unions at your respective workplaces, but before we dig into all that, I was hoping you could tell us a bit about what it's like to do the work that you do in the games industry. So, maybe Taylor, we'll start with you? TW: Sure. So as a producer, that term is a little bit different from studio to studio, but at BGS, that basically is just a project manager. It's a lot of coordinating of people and tasks. So if artists and designers and programmers, if they're the cogs in the machine, our producers are the grease in the machine. PM: Cool. I love that. And what sort of things have you been working on recently, if you're allowed to tell us that? TW: For a good chunk of time, I was working on Starfield and the upcoming DLCs, and I'm also working on The Elder Scrolls VI. PM: And Kathryn, what about you? KF: So I'm a quest designer on World of Warcraft, which means I make the game mechanics and a little bit of story. Quest design is kind of a traditional game designer role where we wear so many hats and touch so many parts of WOW Edit, which is our engine, our tool. And lately I have been feature point on an endgame faction feature called Theater Troupe in The War Within. And it's been going! PM: That's awesome. And so when you say quest designer, does that mean putting together the mechanics within the game itself for how a quest is going to work? Or is that also designing the idea of the quest, too? KF: You got it. All of that. We own a quest line as a piece of content, and a lot of other people come in and work with us on those quest lines. There are people who start in the world before us, making it look amazing and everything like that, but then we're responsible for getting it functional and telling the story and stuff like that — along with, again, all of our coworkers. PM: Of course, of course, it's a collaborative team effort, I'm sure. There are such big teams working on video games, especially these large ones these days, that it's certainly not just about you guys. And of course, that also speaks to why you're forming a union and why you have hundreds of members in your unions . And so in July, it was announced that both Bethesda Game Studios and the World of Warcraft team within Blizzard had formed unions. So I'm wondering, from both of you: What was the motivation in your teams to want to pursue unionization? What was driving that? TW: Well, I think there are a lot of different reasons . For every person that's in a union, we all have our own individual motivations, but I think you can look at the industry and see the things that are happening in terms of crunch and burnout and in equality in pay, and there's lots of those reasons. I know at Bethesda, something that was a big deal for a lot of our members was wanting to protect the things that are good. Bethesda has been around for a while. The people at Bethesda, a lot of folks have been there for 15, 20, 30 years, because it's a generally a really good place to work. And we're in a place now where, due to changes in ownership, there isn't protection of those things. And the only way we can protect the things that are important to us is to unionize, get those into a contract, and make sure that those things stay safe. PM: That makes perfect sense. And of course, the change in ownership is the acquisition of Microsoft in 2021 of ZeniMax Studios, which is the parent company of Bethesda. And Kathryn, what about you? KF: Taylor said it very well. Honestly, people work for Blizzard for decades. I've only been here two-and-a-half years now, but there are people on the team who have been here the whole time. There are people who've been here 18 years, 20 years. There are people who've been here five years. The tenure goes a long way, and they're marked by five years, you get a sword, 10 years, you get a shield. It's a big deal and that's a lot of institutional knowledge that people have working here. And so a lot of us want to just keep Blizzard, Blizzard. We want to keep what's already existing about the company that we love and a union does that for us. It allows us to enshrine those things and also to work towards better working conditions for all of us. A lot of people have individual reasons, but things that we've heard consistently through our organizing from talking to every single person at the company are things like better pay. Irvine, California; Boston, Massachusetts; and Austin, Texas are very expensive places to live, and we're not paid to live in those locations. So that's kind of everyone's number one concern, but there are more, especially as layoffs rack our industry yet again \[laughs sarcastically\]. PM: Of course. And we'll talk about some of those bigger, industry-wide trends that you're both mentioning. It's interesting to hear that you get a sword and a shield working at Blizzard. In another time in my life, I was looking at doing a PhD in Finland because I heard that when you get a PhD there, they give you a sword. Maybe I just should have gone and worked at Blizzard. KF: That is so cool. PM: I found that interesting. But very cool. Hopefully, you will get your sword and shield in the future; I hope that for you. Can you both talk to me about the process of unionizing a workplace like this? Obviously, like I was talking about, there are hundreds of members in your respective unions. And one of the things that is really important about them, I think, or really notable about them is that they're what's called wall-to-wall unions as well, where it's not just one distinct type of employee at the company, but is actually many different roles that are part of this union. So can you talk to me about having a wall-to-wall union, but also what it looks like to bring people along and to get to this point where you were both celebrating the formation of these unions in July? TW: I would say that the union organizing process... I would just summarize it as a bunch of conversations. We started a conversation with a handful of organizers with our peers at ZWU, ZeniMax Workers Union. They are the QA union at ZeniMax. And so we talked with them, learned a lot from them about how to unionize, and then it was just a lot of the organizing committee having one-on-one conversations with everybody who works at our studio and finding out what's important to them, and letting them know that we're doing this thing, that it's real, and letting them know what you can actually expect from a union. KF: It is mostly talking to your coworkers, which is something you already do. You already talk to your coworkers. You already air grievances over the lunch table about the state of the industry, and concerns you have about the company, and things like that. But now it's a little more focused, and you and your coworkers, the further you go into it, the more you're like: You have to be organized about how you're organizing, so that you're not all talking to the same person five times. It's a lot of one-on-one conversations. Something I will say is that our start was incredibly democratic, and the whole process has been very democratic. When we run into bumps in the road or things that we want to tackle, everyone stops, and we take a vote, and we talk through everyone's responses, and then we take a second vote, and we want to be sure that everyone is heard, even as we're going through the organizing process. We want to make those decisions together, and it feels good. TW: I'd love to echo that. I personally am a non-hierarchical person, and I just loved working with my fellow organizing committee members. Everything that we were doing was non-hierarchical. Nobody was in charge of anything. We had some people who owned this or that, but it was just a matter of where people fit, and people just did what they could, where they could, when they could, and it got done. KF: The same for us. People would take charge of particular tasks as they could, but then if they needed to, they handed them off to somebody else, and we kept moving. PM: At what point in that process, when you're talking to your coworkers, when you're getting more people on board, at what point do people start to liaise with the Communication Workers of America, who were assisting in this process? What does that look like? KF: The campaign for the WOW GameMakers Guild has been going on for a very long time. It started very, very quiet and has ramped up a lot in the past year-ish. I joined the organizing committee in January of this year, but I'm told that our organizing committee reached out to CWA pretty early on. CWA, their part in this process is helping train us to do those conversations — how to talk to your coworkers about these issues to keep yourself safe and your coworkers safe in doing this, in the process and the legality of it, and how to be respectful about it, and how to stay organized as you're organizing. So they stood up the organizing committee and then we have to do the work. CWA cannot talk to every single one of our 50-some-odd coworkers. So that's how they operate in this process, is kind of a guide at the beginning there. TW: At BGS, it was a different story. We had a comparatively pretty quick unionizing effort. We started organizing in November of 2023, and our US locales were certified by July of 2024. And then our Montreal was officially certified by August of 2024. So we were real quick, and our first conversations were with ZWU at the beginning of November. And I think within a week we had contacted CWA, had a rep who was telling us what to do. We took the online course that CODE-CWA offers on how to have these conversations, what your rights are, and how to get your organizing committee together and working. KF: I just want to say: We were watching y'all move so fast. We were rooting for y'all, and I know y'all were rooting for us because we had some back-and-forth conversations. It was so cool because we were in the process of doing our vote, and we were like: Are they going to beat us? And y'all did! Y'all unionized on a Friday, and then we unionized the next Wednesday or something, or won our votes, rather. But yeah, kudos to y'all — it was amazing. TW: Thank you so much. It was really cool. So, you guys started your online voting portal process before us, but due to some technicalities, ours was shorter. So it's really cool that we were able to go public within the same week — that was really exciting. KF: It was so much fun. I'm so glad y'all were able to do that. TW: Thank you \[laughs\]. PM: I love this so much. It's so cool hearing about that process and how it all worked, and how it was distinct for both companies and groups of workers as you went toward unionization. And so funny that the final decisions, the final votes, arrived so close to one another. I love that so much. I mentioned earlier that these are wall-to-wall unions, and that seems quite unique. Usually what we've seen in the video games industry, especially in the United States — and I should say I'm in Montreal, so I love d seeing the unionization in Montreal as well — when we talk about a wall-to-wall union, usually we're talking about, as you're saying, quality assurance workers who have unionized at some of these video game companies, or much smaller groups of workers. Why is it so important that it's wall-to-wall and that it includes so many different roles within the organization? KF: This might be a surprise to some people in the industry, probably very few, but quality assurance is dev here at World of Warcraft. They sit in our rooms, their desks are next to our desks, we work with them every single day, and if you've been in the industry, you know how close that relationship is. The divide between QA and dev is completely false, and I'm very glad that our two unions can help signal that to the rest of the industry, loud and clear: that QA is dev, they've always been dev, and they should be treated like dev, and we all deserve to have a voice at that table together because they're our coworkers, they're not somewhere else and we never talk to them. They're here with us every day in the trenches. TW: Absolutely. I feel that so much, especially the experience of shipping Starfield, how much we were interacting with QA. They are a vital part of development. Unfortunately, the way that the structures at BGS and ZeniMax are, they are pretty separate from us. Honestly, it just slows things down, in my opinion, but having them unionize before us was so incredibly helpful. They created such a good example for us, not just in how to do it, but also in what we can expect. We could talk to our coworkers about like: Yeah, ZWU got this, and they don't even have a contract yet. And, this is what neutrality looks like. This is what they've experienced. In terms of having a wall-to-wall union, that's so incredibly important because unions basically operate off of strength in numbers, and when you have everybody together in one unit, then we can all stand up for each other, and we have more collective bargaining power when we're all working together. PM: That's so important, right? And it's so fantastic to see that it's happened for your two unions. Hopefully that sets the standard for us to start seeing them at so many other video games companies as well. Fingers crossed — I'm sure it's in the works, and we'll be hearing more good news in the future. That's not me speaking on insider information. It's just my hopes and dreams, you know. You were talking about having these discussions with your workers, and in moving toward the votes, how did the bosses and management at your companies respond to these unionization efforts, and ultimately, the successful votes that you had in order to certify your unions? TW: Well, I would say for us, the neutrality agreement between CWA and Microsoft had a big hand in that. I don't actually know what leaders at my company genuinely think about unionization because they are required to be neutral. If we were to go up to them and say: Hey, what do you think? They would have to say: I have to remain neutral; here's the link to Microsoft's labor standards. There's pros and cons to knowing and not knowing what they think, but the neutrality agreement was truly a game changer. KF: I'll say the same. Management here at Blizzard has been neutral. They've stepped back, and they've allowed us to organize and be and be very public with our campaign on campus, and in breakrooms and things. It's honestly been excellent, and I'm looking forward to bargaining with Microsoft and Blizzard because things have gone very well. PM: That's really great to hear. I wanted to ask you about that neutrality agreement as well because this is something that was announced in June of 2022, initially between Microsoft and the Communication Workers of America. The idea was that if the Activision Blizzard acquisition went through, then it would take effect 60 days after that, so Microsoft, as you're saying, would be neutral in any kind of unionization campaign. And then that was extended to ZeniMax Studios — which includes Bethesda — in May of 2024, if I have my dates correct. So I know at the time, there was some criticism of the CWA for doing this because Microsoft was buying this set of game studios under Activision Blizzard as part of this broader consolidation push, as it was buying up a lot of different studios. But we have seen results from that where based on what you're both saying, it seems like that has really helped some of the workers at these companies that are now owned by Microsoft to pursue unions like you have. I wonder what your reflections are on this neutrality agreement and the pros and cons of it. TW: Like I said, I see that neutrality agreement as truly a game changer. My personal politics? I don't love the idea of corporate consolidation, so I see that as maybe a negative thing just for commerce in general. But when it leads to something like this, where it's providing neutrality for so many people to unionize and get actual strength and power, that, to me, is so important. I think that there's so much potential for that net gain to be astronomical because we have neutrality for all of the folks at ABK, which , I don't know the exact numbers, but it feels massive. So a gajillion people now have neutrality, and then Zenimax, and I'm pretty sure it applies to all of Microsoft essentially. And so if we can get all of Microsoft's game studios unionized, and then all of Microsoft unionized, that's going to make a huge impact on tech and the games industry that could potentially spread outside of Microsoft and make this a sustainable place to work. KF: Over here, organizing for World of Warcraft, it was a shot in the arm to have that neutrality agreement. One of many shots in the arm in their various forms, but it was a help. A non-insignificant number of people suddenly felt that they could sign an authorization card, sign a yes vote for the union to happen. You can't buy that. It's nice to have that peace of mind, to know that I don't have to worry about risking my job or other things by agreeing to stand up with my own coworkers for collective bargaining power. I'm just excited to see what we can do industry-wide as each of these sibling studios pops up with their own unions and we can bind that network together. To just increase everything, make everything better across the board. PM: I love that so much. We've obviously heard these stories over the past few years of what workers at Amazon, or at Apple retail stores, or at Starbucks, or at so many other places have experienced as they have tried to unionize, and knowing that they were going to get this real pushback from the company, and that it was going to be really difficult. It must make it a bit easier for workers to come on board with union campaigns like yours and say: Okay, I know that Microsoft, or that Blizzard, or that Bethesda are not going to be coming after me, trying to threaten my job if I'm organizing and talking to my coworkers — that must be such a huge help. TW: Absolutely. It's helpful to organizing committee members. We feel confident that we can have conversations with our coworkers without it getting out and turning around to retaliation toward us. We can let our coworkers know: Hey, your job is safe, even if you do this, and it's not going to affect you negatively. It's just so incredibly important. And I think it's best for everyone involved because these companies who aren't neutral, they spend more money fighting organizing campaigns than they would if they just paid everyone effectively. It's not better for them to be not neutral; they just think it is and invest all this money into union busting. It's saving a lot of people a lot of energy and a lot of heartache, and it's better for everyone involved. KF: There are certainly pros and cons to having a neutrality agreement. As I'm sure you can imagine, it's a little harder to convince your coworkers that a union is necessary if they're not immediately seeing the retaliation or the negative, overbearing union busting stuff happening. You don't have a monster you're fighting. It's not obvious that there's a dragon in the next corridor; they're ready to eat you. The dragon is sitting on his hands and saying: No, go for it! It's a little harder to convince people to take up their swords and stand together on that sort of a front... however, I wouldn't want it any other way. I'd much rather us and the dragon work out how best to go forward together in managing this dungeon, because we all like working in dungeons with the dragons. PM: That makes perfect sense. But even though you don't have this company that's breathing down your neck and trying to retaliate, when you look at the broader trends in the industry, that helps you have a dragon — to use your metaphor — to present to people, right? Because we've seen these massive layoffs quite recently. What is it — 10,000 workers last year, over 11,000 already this year? And that includes 1,900 workers at Microsoft in the Microsoft games division that has been laid off, and of course, a number of ZeniMax studios that have been closed as a result of corporate actions. What do you make — certainly feel free to comment on what's been happening at Microsoft specifically — but also industry-wide, what you have been seeing with all these layoffs over the past couple of years, and what that means for workers like you who work in this industry and are seeing so many of your wider colleagues being wiped out from this? KF: I'm relatively new to this industry. I graduated college in 2021, and I've been here at Blizzard since, but I'm not unfamiliar. My previous boss, when I was in college working at a research lab as a game designer, he'd been through several layoffs because he was an industry veteran, and it's just normal. When a game finishes, we don't need the people who made it anymore — just lay 'em all off. It's a normal story. The last couple of years have been a little abnormal, honestly, and as you said, we had like 10,000 layoffs within the first few months of this year, which is more than last year already. It's concerning. And as Taylor mentioned earlier, it doesn't make a lot of sense. A union isn't a detriment to a company. The best thing we can do for our studios is to keep the talented people who make our games amazing. We do that by having the agency and power of a strong union. Something I mentioned before is the amount of institutional knowledge someone who's been at Blizzard Entertainment on World of Warcraft for 18-plus years has. We work in such a long-standing— it's been out for 20 years — game. There's so many little niche things that you have to know to be able to do this job. It's almost difficult to train somebody in that, so losing someone like that to a layoff is a crime. TW: And the issue of layoffs at BGS is especially sensitive, not because we have them a lot, but because they're so rare. For years and years, BGS didn't have any layoffs, and in these last couple of years, we are now affected by them, not to the extent as other studios, but still it's now become part of our reality. So within our very quick organizing campaign, we had two very close calls. We had the 1,900 people who lost their jobs in January within Xbox that got really close to us. And then in May, when Arkane Austin, Alpha Dog Games, Tango Gameworks, and Roundhouse all got closed — well, Roundhouse got absorbed. But still, that's really close and really scary. We have the protection of being a lean studio that's also consistently profitable, but that's still a really precarious place to be. Unionizing doesn't automatically protect you from layoffs. But it's like having a seatbelt. It's not protecting you from getting hurt, but it's a lot better to have a seatbelt than to be thrown from the car. KF: That's an excellent metaphor. The 1,900 in January, even though a lot of those were obviously not on the World of Warcraft team specifically, there are other teams at Blizzard who did lose people who work with us on our game, here or there, based on their job roles, who are now gone, and it's stressful. Losing even one person, even the few that we lost, had a significant impact on other people's workloads, and it just cascades. But beyond that, something I think you mentioned, Paris, earlier, when you asked the question is: We have friends in the wider industry. The industry is so small, and the morale hit of seeing scores of your friends losing their jobs is unmentionable. TW: And across the industry, it's so detrimental in so many ways. Kathryn touched on it: when companies lay off a big chunk of people, they don't change their expectations of your output. If they lay off 10 percent of your developers, they're not saying: Okay, the game can be 10 percent smaller. They're still expecting you to make the same things in the same amount of time with less resources. So everybody is stretched even further, and we're already burned out and crunching. For folks who are trying to enter the industry, it's impossible to find a job because you're competing with a bunch of people who already have experience. And also, if you're in a job that you're unhappy about, you can't do anything about it. You can't go find another job because everybody else is trying to get that job. And in a way, that's helping the cause for unionizing, because it's like: You can't go anywhere else, so you might as well make your current place better. KF: Yes, absolutely. PM: It makes perfect sense. As someone outside the industry, I can only imagine what it's like for both of you who work in it to be constantly seeing these headlines about layoffs and studio closures and things just not going well. When you talk to your friends in the wider industry, is there a growing discussion around unionization because of these layoffs and because of wider trends that you see in the industry? TW: Absolutely. I think my most consistent check-ins with my friends at other studios are layoffs. And I'm like: Hey, are you okay? Which is such a bummer, that my reminder about my correspondence is: Oh, layoffs. And then those conversations are always like: How's it affecting your organizing campaign? Because we have to do it, basically. KF: In one of my Discords, we split off one of our games industry channel. We split it into games industry and games news, because that channel had just become layoff story after layoff story. And then we were all like: Yeah, checked in with my friend at this studio, and they're gone. Or: I checked in with my friend at this studio; they're safe, but now they have to deal with three other people's workload. So, echoing what Taylor said, that's the talk right now: how do we get away from layoffs being the answer? PM: It sucks so much. On that point, when we talk about these issues — or however you want to put it — in the industry, I know that there's a lot of discussion around consolidation, looking at Microsoft and also at Sony, and how much they have bought over the past number of years to bring all these studios in-house, because it feels like that's what you needed to compete for a little while. But also, there are these broader discussions. Of course, I'm sure that you both will be familiar with this. World of Warcraft is a huge game. Starfield is a huge game. Elder Scrolls is massive. Just how the expectations for a lot of these games just keeps getting bigger and bigger, and the number of copies that you need to sell just gets so big. And the development cycles keep stretching — they're so, so long. We're talking about a new Grand Theft Auto game coming out next year, and I think it's over a decade since the last one came out. How do these broader trends in the industry make you reflect on what it means to work in the industry today, if there are particular issues that you're seeing? Obviously, it's a justification of corporate management to lay people off because of these things, but how these bigger trends affect the work that you do and whether some of that needs to be reigned in, or change needs to happen? TW: That's a really big question. So for me, the way that I, as a gamer, interact with games and play them, is I see them as a work of art. Even the technical component of it is a work of art. Anybody who's making a game is doing something for the first time, and it's an honor to be part of making that art, and it's an honor to be able to play and enjoy that art. I think when you compare it to other types of entertainment art, there's a component of them that are minimized in order to maximize some type of output, so it has an effect on the art itself. It makes it so incredibly hard to hit the target because the target isn't about what is right for the game, it's about what is right for the market — which changes so constantly, and how are you supposed to know what the market is going to be in five years? It's such a wild game of cat and mouse. KF: It's interesting. A lot of games take a significant amount of time to make, especially to AAA standards. These massive titles, they take a lot of time, so you have to convince people upfront to invest. You have to convince them to invest in that amount of time to scale up teams and to let those teams continue to work on the game for that amount of time, and you have to wait. The return on investment is not immediate. You can't just be like: All right, in two years, have me a game. In some cases, that is true. Not every game is made the same way or at the same scale, but for a title like World of Warcraft, it takes us a certain amount of time to make an expansion, and trying to shrink that number, or trying to increase that number, it has different effects one way or another. TW: At a certain point, expectations just become unrealistic. Look at the size of Bethesda Games. They're massive. When I started working at BGS, we still had the nickname of "Bugthesda" and our reputation for having a lot of bugs. So I was talking with a friend, and her brother was like: Oh, now that she's at Bethesda, tell her to do something about all of the bugs. And the thing is, the games are so massive that in order to get rid of every single bug, the game would never come out. And even Starfield — it was our cleanest game in terms of bugs — it still took so long, and that game is so big. If you want a high-quality product that's also massive, you have to be willing to spend a lot of money, and time, and hours, and people to make it. KF: Expectations need to be realistic. PM: Do you think that expectation for these massive games that are bigger and bigger, that are worlds that are so huge that you can play for such a long period of time, do you think that's being driven more from player demands and what gamers want? Or is this a corporate thing, where they're really trying to get this product that's going to make them a ton of money, and they think that if it gets bigger, there's a bigger potential for return or something? Do you have an idea of which side that comes from? TW: I would say it comes from both sides. There are gamers who are happy to play the 12,000th release of Skyrim. The Skyrim community is still massive and super active. And that game is, what, 13 years old? So it makes sense that companies would want to continue to make money off of that. KF: To that point, we have World of Warcraft Classic, which continues to release new and exciting things to do in a game that people have known for a very long time. And alongside that, we're releasing new stuff in retail all the time. So, yes, both. We have a team dedicated to player insights, and interviewing, and testing, and doing stuff to figure out what players are looking for. And I'm sure there are also market things that people consider when they go forward in this. That's above my pay grade. TW: But it's also above my pay grade, so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt. But if you're looking at the math of paying the salaries for a few hundred devs working on a single game for five-to-seven years, money has to be coming in from somewhere. So if you're a studio that has a beloved game that's still being played, of course you're going to want to make income with that because you have to pay the devs who are making the next great game. So it's just something that, I understand why gamers don't love microtransactions, but if you want the games that are happening, it's kind of what has to happen. KF: We're gamers ourselves, so we have some of your same frustrations. And we don't always have the decision-making power in those kinds of decisions, at least not now. PM: Just reflecting on what you're both saying, I remember when I was younger, and I played some World of Warcraft. I played a lot of Lord of the Rings Online, and I was very into really big games that I could just sink hundreds of hours into — and now that I'm in my thirties, it's like: I don't have time for a game that is going to be that long. I want something smaller. So, sometimes I'm like: who is really demanding these huge games? But yeah, there's plenty of people who still put a ton of time into this stuff and it makes perfect sense. KF: It takes gamers of all types, right? You and I might need shorter games because we're working full-time, but then there are also people who want shorter play sessions, maybe, but they're still playing the same game for decade after decade. PM: That makes perfect sense. I feel like one of the big questions that people have been talking about recently, whether it's in video games or in many other industries, is artificial intelligence. Working in video games, artificial intelligence is nothing new. This is a broad term that refers to many different things. The discussion recently has been around generative AI in particular, and these more novel tools that people have been promoting for the past year-and-a-half or so. I wonder if you have any reflections on what you think AI, or the rollout of generative AI — or specifically, corporate's interest in how they might use AI — what that means for video game workers like yourselves. KF: I'm really glad you made the distinction between artificial intelligence and generative AI, or generative artificial intelligence, because they're very different. People have long talked about enemy AI in various games. My sister and I used to swap videos about Lethal Company's enemy AI all the time, just so we can know a little bit more about how they work. So AI is something I work with every day, technically, making creatures do creature things. But they're talking about something else. They're talking about generative AI; they're talking about pressing a button and potentially getting a game. Anyone who works on this side of the industry knows that that's a little unreasonable to expect. As far as Blizzard is concerned, we have seen a very cautious stance towards that and a pretty blanket, like: We're not doing that; thanks for right now. Of course, corporate interests might shift. You might need to say certain things to appease certain shareholders or something. And the thing to say right now is: We have our own generative AI button thing that you can press. You go to any website, and they're like: Now powered with AI. It's powered with AI now. It was already powered by an algorithm, and that's all we really mean, but we use the fancy buzzword for the day. TW: When I think about generative AI, especially because one of the teams I used to work with was the concept art team, which some people might think: Ah, you can just use generative AI to do that. But I think of it more as a dangerous thing that we need to be cautious about because even for something like concept art, you can't just generate concept art, because the art director is going to say: Well, I need this minor tweak to happen. And that's not how generative AI works. Generative AI, even for helping with code, or writing a dialogue or a quest, it doesn't know what it's saying. It's not going to be good. You're still going to need actual designers, actual artists there to do the work. So at that point, why are you going to use this tool that's creating a speed bump, that is bad for the environment? Like, just let us do our job. We know what we're doing. And I think that it has the potential to be a useful tool, but we need to be cautious about it. And that's one of the things that ZWU, ZeniMax Workers United, has gotten already. They have a tentative agreement over the use of AI in the workplace. And I think that probably any game studio that's unionizing, one of the things that you're going to want to talk about in bargaining is: How are we going to use AI? How are we going to use it as a tool and not use it to try to replace people? And I say try to replace people because you can try, but I don't think it would actually be an effective replacement for a person. KF: Generative AI just kind of takes information from elsewhere and aggregates it, or takes the average of all of that, and then gives you a result, and then you pick your favorite result and it spins back into itself. We've already heard stories of generative AI poisoning itself because it's getting its own generated images, and it just becomes even worse in its output. What it says it can do isn't quite what it thinks it can do, by any means. I'm concerned because I'm an artist in my free time. I don't like the notion of generative AI replacing people, but right now it isn't ethical. It would be a risk to a company right now to be using it because it has so many copyrighted materials already in the well. Microsoft does not want to be using that — rightfully so — so until they have something that is ethical on several fronts and can actually do that, by then, I don't think even artists would be concerned because it's not a danger. PM: That makes complete sense. And Microsoft just wants to sell it to other people through Open AI right now, hopefully not cram it down the throats of its video game studios — at least that's what I'm hearing, luckily. With reference to what you were saying there, Taylor, around the negotiations, when you're talking about the ZeniMax QA workers union that is happening there — obviously both of your unions now are entering into, or have already begun, contract negotiations with Microsoft. Is there anything specifically that you're looking for in contract negotiations? Will AI protections be part of that? What other things are you interested in? TW: Without getting into the specifics, because we are very early on in the process, we still are working on electing our bargaining committee and actually getting to that table. But, we want to have agreements that address all of the things that we've been talking about: that address layoff protections, protections from AI, pay, all of those types of things. Just general working conditions, making sure that we have a voice in making those decisions is really the main part, is having a seat at that table. KF: We're so early in the process. We just won the vote. We're working on standing up our bargaining committee as well. Again, during our organizing, we heard a wide variety of issues that people are concerned about, but our top four were pay, commensurate with cost of living for the areas that we have to live in and for our industry. You could make a certain amount doing games, or you could make a lot more doing the same thing as a software engineer for some big tech company. We're tech; we should be paid like we're tech. And people are concerned about layoff protections again. Taylor said unions cannot prevent layoffs, but we can mitigate the effects of layoffs. We already get to bargain with the company over how and when and everything. People at World of Warcraft are also concerned about transparency around performance reviews and promotions — how that happens and why needs to be a little less opaque. And the last thing that people are largely concerned about is access to work from home. Cat's out of the bag: the pandemic happened. People need to be able to choose where they want to work. If that's an office, if that's hybrid, if that's remote — we had that freedom for a long time, and people are keen on seeing that change in some form. PM: That makes perfect sense. Those demands all seem very reasonable to me, so hopefully the contract negotiation goes well once that process gets started for both of you. I think I just wanted to end by asking you about the broader trend we're seeing with unionization. We talked about how both of your unions are wall-to-wall unions. We've been seeing QA unions as well. We've been seeing some unionization up here in Montreal. What do you see with the trend in video game unionization? And do you think that this is something that the ball has gotten rolling on, and it's just going to continue going? What are your hopes there? TW: My hopes are what you just said, that we're just the beginning of the line of dominoes. I think that we are showing that it is possible to organize a game workers union, especially under Microsoft. I would love to see every game studio under ZeniMax, under Microsoft, unionized. It'd be super cool if we could then make a union of our unions. I don't know if that's actually a thing, but it would be dope. And then, eventually, the rest of the industry, I think, yes, we're tech workers, but we're also entertainment workers. And when you compare our industry to movies, we make more money than them, and we don't get paid as well as a lot of folks in that industry. It's because that entire industry is basically unionized, and ours should be, too. And from there, just unionize every workplace. We all deserve the protections of a union and anybody who wants to see change in their world. We can't necessarily have a huge effect on the political realities of national politics that we all get upset about one way or the other, but if everybody just does one thing, just does what they can, where they can, then we're going to see change in the direction that we want to see it. And for most people, that change is probably going to be unionizing their workplace. KF: A little union vocab, because I'm a huge dork: there is a process by which unions can come together under one company. It's called accretion. I'm sure there's more specifics than how that process works, but it is possible, for instance, if Diablo or Overwatch or SFD, which is story and franchise development here, if they all unionized and then all of us decided to accrete into one, that would be possible. They'd have to win their own votes first, if that were the case — but yeah, it would be so exciting. We're already seeing the ball continuing to roll. We are unionizing after so many other groups of unions, ZeniMax and Sega and others. And we're seeing more continuing to do so in the shadows. So I'm very excited to see what our fellow studios do going forward because, at least over here, a lot of it's about care for one another. The World of Warcraft team is such a caring place. "Every voice matters" is one of our company values that's printed on a metal plate around the org in the center of Irvine campus. You can feel it here, and I want that for everyone in the industry. I want everyone to feel that their voice matters and that they can stand together with their coworkers for better workplace conditions. PM: Don't we all want that? I was thrilled to see the news that both of your studios had formed these unions, and I'm sure that there will be more good news to come — again, not speaking on insider information, just my hopes and dreams. I was also wondering — this is putting you on the spot a little bit, maybe: any games you're really liking lately that you want to recommend to the listeners, that you think are really good and fun? TW: I don't want to do the whole self promotion thing, but I am going to do it because I am very excited about this. So, I love mobile gaming, and I also really love resource management. For about six months, I got to work on our mobile game Castles, and it is coming out, I think, in a week. It's coming out within this month, and it's very cute, it's very fun, and if you like castle building, or resource management, or mobile games, I highly recommend it. It's a great game. PM: I love that. I've recently been playing The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria, which is very much a crafting game, collecting a bunch of ores, building my little houses and buildings and forts. What about you, Kathryn? KF: I mostly have time for games when I'm gaming with friends. I feel like most of what we do is things like Lethal Company. A lot of my friends are playing Helldivers — I I haven't gotten a chance to dive in myself yet, ha. And, gosh, I keep playing The Sims 3. I keep going back to old games that I've long loved because I have no brain space for new stuff right now. But we are enjoying Lethal Company still, and I play D& D every week. TW: You go back to Sims 3, not Sims 4? KF: Have you played The Sims 4? TW: Yeah, have you played The Sims 3? KF: Oh yeah, I grew up with The Sims 3. TW: Okay. I was really into Sims 2, but I'm into the building component of things, and I like the building in Sims 4. KF: You haven't done any modded Sims 3 then? TW: No, I haven't. Despite where I work, I'm not big into mods. I just always get afraid that I'm going to ruin my computer. Limewire ruined me, as a millennial. KF: I so get that. I was the same way until the pandemic started and we were playing Minecraft nonstop, and we got so bored of the base game, we just started modding it. But Sims 3, they've got tons of stuff. I love The Sims 3. Sims 4, you're so isolated. You're in your own little home. You can't go anywhere, is what it felt like to me. I like being able to walk around the town and poke at stuff, even though there isn't much to poke at. TW: That's fair. For actual gameplay, I get that. But the building in 4 is pretty good. There are things that I get frustrated about. I don't want to drag The Sims or Maxis, so I won't air out my grievances about it. PM: That's EA. You can drag them. It's not Microsoft, right? [all laugh]. I get going back to old games, though. I play a lot of— it's the most recent Civ, but I still love playing Civilization quite a bit. KF: So, six, then? PM: Yeah, six. I can't wait for seven. I'm so thrilled. KF: Is that considered old now? PM: It's like, a decade, close to that, right? KF: Really? PM: Yeah. KF: Wow. I played it for the first time in college. PM: Gotcha. Well, I've been playing it since it came out, and I played the other ones before that while they were out. But I will say it was great to talk to both of you to learn about the process of unionizing at both of your companies, and your thoughts on the broader headwinds that are facing the industry and you as workers. So, thank you both so much for taking the time. It's really been fantastic to talk to you. TW: Thank you so much. It's been great talking. KF: It's been great to get to know both of you.