During work on 2020’s Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2, a hugely popular skateboarding game, Laven said the team “crunched for several months.” Workers at Blizzard Albany are no strangers to excruciating crunch periods. Periods of such overexertion are commonly known in the industry as “crunch” and at least 40 percent of game developers have reported experiencing crunch at least once, according to a 2019 survey from the International Game Developers Association. At this point, some studios may push their testing teams to put in extra shifts, resulting in some of the most prominent cases of abuse in the industry. QA work typically entails long hours, particularly as a game’s release date nears. It’s not like we’re just sitting around and just playing a game for fun.” ![]() We’re not necessarily playing the game in a natural way. “Some of our tasks also include trying to do a complex series of moves in a game to see what happens when you trigger 18 sounds at the same time. “The majority of our job is doing things like walking into a wall 20 times to see what happens when you walk into it on the 21st time,” said Laven, who is the lead audio tester for Blizzard’s upcoming role-playing game Diablo 4. Amanda Laven, a leading organizer at Blizzard Albany, described the role as enjoyable work, but “not the same as getting paid to play games all day.” The 20 employees seeking to collectively bargain at Blizzard’s Albany studio have some of the lowest paying, yet most important roles in video game development. ABK is responsible for games like the annualized Call of Duty series and other best-sellers like Overwatch and World of Warcraft and is in the process of being acquired by Microsoft in a gargantuan $69 billion deal. The team at Raven won their union election decisively back in late May, signifying the first successful union drive at one of the largest video game companies in history. If successful, QA testers in Albany would continue the momentum initiated by testers at Wisconsin-based Raven Software, another subsidiary of Activision Blizzard King (ABK). ![]() The workers have chosen to organize under the name Game Workers Alliance Albany. ![]() To get there, quality assurance (QA) testers at Blizzard’s studio in Albany announced in late July they want to form a union at the company with the help of the Communication Workers of America (CWA). Workers at Blizzard Albany want to democratize their workplace, seeking improved work-life balance, fair compensation, and improved benefits, as well as open communication between employees and Activision Blizzard King.
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