It may have flown under the radar due to the sheer size of acquisitions we're used to these days, but Activision Blizzard acquired Spellbreak devs Proletariat earlier this year to help out with development on World of Warcraft: Dragonflight. It's now been announced that these same developers are planning to unionize, which would make it the third Activision Blizzard studio to do so.
Proletariat announced its plans earlier today (thanks Kotaku), where it revealed the group Proletariat Workers Alliance will attempt to unionize with the Communications Workers of America (CWA). The Proletariat Workers Alliance has asked Activision Blizzard to voluntarily recognize the union, although the group has also filed a unionization vote with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in any case.
As for what happens next, the NLRB will likely decide to grant the Proletariat Workers Alliance its vote, while Activision Blizzard will probably do its best to delay that vote until the last minute. It's unlikely that the company will voluntarily recognize the union, given the history it has with both Raven Software and Blizzard Albany, two other studios underneath the company that have successfuly unionized.
The Proletariat Workers Alliance claims it has a supermajority among staff eligible to vote for unionization and, should the group be successful, it would become the first union at Activision Blizzard to feature all non-management workers. Both Raven Software and Blizzard Albany unionized earlier this year, but both unions only included QA testers rather than the entire developers as a whole.
In other Activision Blizzard news, the company recently accused the FTC of ignoring the "significant benefits" of Microsoft's acquisition of the company. It also claimed that the FTC's recent attempts to stop the deal are to "protect Xbox’s competitors from hypothetical harm that has no basis in marketplace realities."
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