Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Gaming
  3. News

Blizzard employees are organizing on Slack to boost pay, vacation time

Don Reisinger
By

Blizzard employees are collaborating to improve working conditions and increase pay across the company, according to a new report.

Nearly 900 Blizzard employees in the company’s Slack channel are developing a list of demands they hope to submit for management review as early as this week, Bloomberg reported after obtaining a draft copy of the list. It encompasses a host of requests, including pay increases for Blizzard employees in customer service and quality assurance divisions, as well as more vacation time, according to Bloomberg. The employees are also seeking a revamped model for handling vacations.

Recommended Videos

“We will continue to adapt our compensation to build and keep the workforce our company needs today and tomorrow,” a Blizzard spokesperson told Bloomberg in a statement. “We understand that some Blizzard employees have specific requests, and we look forward to hearing from them directly.”

Related

The movement appears to have started last week after employees compiled salary data both at Blizzard and competing companies. Several employees told Bloomberg in an earlier report this week that they’re underpaid and former employees earned significantly more after leaving for other studios.

The report also showed a disparity in how Blizzard compensates employees at different levels within the company. Many employees in recent years earned raises below 10% of their annual salary, including one worker who said they saw their pay increase by 50 cents an hour. Management and those with six-figure salaries earned bonuses of more than 20% of their pay during the same period, according to the Bloomberg report.

The list of grievances employees are preparing for management decries what they describe as the company’s meager pay. It also claims some workers, who are forced to work in the high-priced Irvine, California, area that Blizzard calls home, are making significantly less than the city’s median household income, according to Bloomberg.

It’s unclear how long Blizzard will have to respond to the employees’ requests and what may ultimately happen if they’re not met. But the requests come at a time when employees are increasingly speaking out against studios. Ubisoft, for instance, has faced widespread criticism over the past several weeks after employees recounted cases of sexual harassment and abuse. The studio has launched an investigation and fired several executives in light of the revelations.

Still, the gaming industry is notorious for its treatment of employees, widespread (and regular) layoffs, and poor pay. Despite that, game companies have been able to avoid employees unionizing and working together to create change. The Blizzard development may be one of the most prominent examples yet of a first step toward unionization.

Blizzard, a division of Activision Blizzard, did not immediately respond to a Digital Trends request for comment.

Updated at 2:35 a.m. PT on August 5 to include more details.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Don Reisinger
Don Reisinger
Don Reisinger is a freelance technology, video game, and entertainment journalist. He has been writing about the world of…
Diablo 4 release time, file size and preload options
Diablo 4 promotional image of Lillith.

The time for betas and tests is over, and now we only have the full Diablo 4 experience left to wait for.

Featuring a brand-new story, new skills, and a whole new way to play with a persistent world, hundreds of hours will be spent slaying demons alone and with friends.

Read more
Activision Blizzard fined over Diablo Immortal’s microtransactions
Diablo Immortal's main screen on the Asus ROG Phone 5.

Activision Blizzard is being fined by the PEGI (Pan-European Game Information) Complaints Board and Enforcement Committee over the inclusion of microtransactions in its 2022 mobile game Diablo Immortal.

This news comes just after Nintendo got sued in North America over its implementation of loot box microtransactions in Mario Kart Tour. However, this decision comes from the European game ratings board PEGI after a reassessment of Diablo Immortal's rating. Activision Blizzard, along with Hunt: Showdown Bounty Hunter -- Limited Edition publisher Plaion, got fined over not properly disclosing the presence of microtransactions in their games when disclosing information to PEGI for a game rating. That's a shocking omission in Diablo Immortal's case, considering just how much it entices players to spend money on the game.
"Both games were published in 2022 and although they contain paid random items (like loot boxes or card packs), this was not disclosed to PEGI when the games were submitted for a rating license," a description of the case says. "Since this amounts to a violation of the rules described in the PEGI Code of Conduct, the PEGI Enforcement Committee sanctioned both companies with a fine of 5000€. The companies had also taken immediate action to update relevant store listings and marketing materials."
A fine of only 5,000 Euros is an extremely small drop in the bucket for a company like Activision Blizzard; Diablo Immortal alone was estimated to be making $1 million a day around its launch by Appmagic. Still, it's a noteworthy slap on the wrist and will hopefully encourage companies like Activision Blizzard to be more open and honest about the presence and relevance of microtransactions in their games. 

Read more
Why cloud gaming is the linchpin in Microsoft’s troubled Activision Blizzard acqusition
Key art showing multiple devices playing games via the cloud.

The United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) delivered a shocker this week when it blocked Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard on Wednesday. While a lot of focus on Microsoft’s fight was centered around whether or not the acquisition would give Xbox consoles an unfair advantage over PlayStation consoles, what ultimately decided it was a much smaller market: cloud gaming.
The idea of being able to stream the game you’re playing from the cloud has existed for well over a decade. Cloud gaming’s relevance to the video game industry has only grown over the past several years thanks to both failed and successful efforts from big tech companies like Google, Amazon, and, most importantly, Microsoft. Still, cloud gaming is considered relatively niche, with Activision Blizzard Bobby Kotick calling it "inconsequential" in an interview with Bloomberg and UCL Associate Profession Joost Rietveld saying it’s not a distinct market in a submission to the CMA.
Despite those pleas, the CMA claims that cloud gaming is a “nascent market” and that “already strong incumbent in this market even stronger” in its 418-page report on the matter. Following the CMA’s decision on Wednesday, I spoke to several different analysts to find more clarity about how big Microsoft is in the cloud gaming space and why the CMA should feel compelled to intervene. While experts mostly side with Microsoft over the CMA on this decision, one greater truth emerged from these discussions. Whether one thinks cloud gaming is relevant to this acquisition or not, this emergent style of gaming has reached a point of no return where it'll be instrumental to the video game industry going forward. 
Microsoft, king of cloud gaming
Cloud gaming may sound like a niche within the industry, but that's not entirely accurate. BrandFinance Managing Director Laurence Newell tells Digital Trends that “cloud-based services account for over 70% of Microsoft’s brand value, amounting to a staggering $137.5 billion.” That’s quite an eye-catching number that understandably would raise a regulator's alarm bells. However, Newell admits that gaming only makes up 8.5% of Microsoft’s revenue, and cloud gaming is an even smaller amount of that slice.
Despite its relatively small impact on the wider company, most of the experts I spoke to agreed that Microsoft has emerged as a cloud gaming leader thanks to its compatibility with a large segment of the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate library. Conversely, Activision Blizzard has had almost no cloud gaming presence outside of one Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice port on Google Stadia before that service’s shutdown. If it were to be acquired, it is inevitable that more Activision Blizzard games would likely come to cloud-based gaming services.

Despite the shutdown of Google Stadia and the relatively small brand value received from cloud gaming compared to the rest of the company, the CMA still points out in the press release about its decision that “monthly active users in the U.K. more than tripled from the start of 2021 to the end of 2022. It is forecast to be worth up to 11 billion British pounds globally and 1 billion pounds in the U.K. by 2026.” Associate Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the UCL School of Management Joost Rietveld, who has also been a consultant for Microsoft during its acquisition process, challenges the notion that cloud gaming as a whole is a single market.
Instead, Rietveld splits it into four categories, placing Xbox Game Pass into a category called “cloud gaming as a feature,” which is when it’s “offered as part of a consumer-facing distribution platform” or “included within a bigger bundle of services provided by the platformer.” Under Rietveld’s view, services like Nvidia GeForce Now, Ubitius, and EE -- all of whom Microsoft has made individual deals to bring Activision Blizzard and Xbox Game Studios titles to -- fall into different categories and thus shouldn’t be considered or directly compared to Xbox Game Pass. No matter how they’re categorized now, the real question mark looming over the technology is its future growth, according to Omdia Senior Principal Games Analyst Steve Bailey.
“Will it remain a niche additional service or become the gaming platform of the future?” Bailey asks in his statement to Digital Trends. “Our projection is that cloud gaming is growing rapidly (revenue should more than double by 2026), but it’s still a long way from taking over the games market, so it remains arguable either way.”
“Arguable” stands out as the keyword to me here. Like any emergent technology, we’re heavily debating the positives and negatives of cloud gaming, specifically through the lens of this acquisition. But what exactly is it that the CMA sees in Microsoft that worries them?
The CMA’s problem with Microsoft
“The CMA’s argument is not that acquiring Activision Blizzard would allow Microsoft to dominate the console market as a whole, where Sony and Nintendo have strong positions relative to Xbox, but only that it would help it to achieve a dominant position in cloud gaming specifically,” Bailey tells Digital Trends. “Microsoft and Activision Blizzard will likely argue that this is disproportionate, given the relatively small scale of the cloud gaming market.”

Read more