05/23/2022 10:00 AM EDT
Presented by Kroger
With help from Eleanor Mueller
GAME ON: Officials with the National Labor Relations Board this afternoon will count the votes in a potentially watershed union election involving the video game industry.
Quality assurance testers employed by Raven Software — known for its work on the “Call of Duty” franchise — are seeking to organize under the Game Workers Alliance, a nascent union affiliated with the Communications Workers of America.
Voting was conducted by mail over the better part of the past month, and ballots were due back by Friday. The potential unit is pretty small — approximately 21 workers — and just a fraction of the Wisconsin-based studio’s workforce.
QA testers are an oft-overlooked part of game development. They do the grunt work of rooting out bugs and potential problems in the weeks and months before games are released publicly. While the idea of being paid to play video games sounds appealing, the reality of these jobs is that they’re typically among the lowest paid parts of the team and can have demanding workloads finding and cataloging issues within a project’s timeframe.
As an industry, game development falls somewhere between Hollywood and the tech sector. Big-name companies, like Raven’s parent Activision Blizzard, are multibillion-dollar operations and have the lofty financial projections and Wall Street expectations that...
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