Raven’s Call of Duty developers quit after one month to launch a campaign to unionize the studio.
The ABK Workers Alliance social media page announced: “Pending recognition from our union, the Raven QA strike has ended.” The strike started in early December after a number of staff members were fired. A fundraiser on GoFundMe to support the striking workers has raised more than $370,000.
Any unused money from the fundraiser will be set aside for future organizational or strike efforts, ABK Workers Alliance said on Twitter.
On January 21, a group of testers at Call of Duty studio Raven Software began the process of forming a union. The quality assurance developers are teaming up with the Communication Workers of America union to create a guild called Game Workers Alliance. The group asks Activision Blizzard to voluntarily recognize the union, but so far it hasn’t.
Pending the recognition of our union, the Raven QA strike has ended. Unused strike funds are being stored for future organizing/strike efforts.
We’ll post or retweet any GWU updates here. Appreciate all the community support throughout the strike!
— ABetterABK ABK Workers Alliance (@ABetterABK) January 23, 2022
Season 2 of Call of Duty Warzone and Vanguard was recently delayed due to the battle royale’s status. This does seem to be related to the strike of the QA testers at Raven Software. Despite all the problems and the lesser sales of Vanguard, this and its predecessor (Black Ops Cold War) managed to reach the first two positions in the US charts.
It will be interesting to see what impact the acquisition of Microsoft will have on the atmosphere within Activision. In this case we are referring to the way in which this strike came about. What do you expect Microsoft to do once they take the helm at Activision?!