Activision Exec Claims Unions Could 'Hurt Our Ability to Create Great Games' - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 01 February 2022 / 3,716 Views
Activision Blizzard vice president of QA Christian Arends in the company's Slack channel has claimed unions at the company could hurt the ability to develop great games. Jessica Gonzales, one of the founders and organizers for ABK Workers Alliance and Game Workers Alliance, posted the message via Twitter.
The message from Arends is in response to QA testers at Call of Duty Warzone developer Raven Software who are pushing for unionization at the company.
Arends said that Activision Blizzard "respects employees' NLRA rights to have these discussions about potential unionization and supports your right to do so" before going into a Q&A.
He added "A union doesn't do anything to help us produce world-class games, and the bargaining process is not typically quick, often reduces flexibility, and can be adversarial and lead to negative publicity.
"All of this could hurt our ability to continue creating great games."
VP of QA at Activision just posted this shit in company slack LOL this was posted in a channel where you can’t reply to threads. Sad… pic.twitter.com/oDmG4u9dfq
— Jessica Gonzalez? #WeAreGWA (@_TechJess) January 31, 2022
He compared the process of bargaining with a union and employees having direct talks with management and said union talk could "often takes months or years to come to a collective bargaining agreement." This compared to an agreement that can be made with employees faster.
He added that if Raven employees at Game Workers Alliance were to unionize it doesn't mean all Activision Blizzard studios and QA teams would fall under the new union.
"Even though you may have signed a union authorization card, you are not obligated to vote for the union during an election should one occur," said Arends.
"Remember, the NLRB's elections are conducted by 'secret ballot' so nobody will know which way any employee votes (unless the employee chooses to share this information)."
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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Wealthy executive doesn’t like unions, more news at 11
-"unions could hurt our ability to create great games"-
So could bad working conditions.
-TOUCHE' NINJA APPROVED-
This is so ridiculous. There is a LOT of research that shows humans are more productive with a 30 hour, 4 day workweek than a 5 day, 40 hour workweek, let alone the ridiculous amount of hours dev teams work in crunch mode. I'm not a big union fan in many industries (teaching unions stink in my experience), but anything that reduces the hours dev teams have to work will NOT reduce production, will improve the quality of personal/worklife of their employees, and will reap good will amongst concerned consumers.
Please provide a citation for that research. With a quantitative approach not sociological survey-based nonsense.
I don't mean it personally. You see people evangelising a 4 day week almost every day in the press with the line "evidence shows that" and they're invariably dirt-standard and not reviewed anywhere. My other favourite is "efficiency wages" which actually do materialise in industries which require a great degree of trust and/or oversight, being used as if they were a universal truth. Ie. Pay everyone more and make them work less and you'll magically make more product. No evidence for it.
"No evidence for it"
I forgot staff have the power to always make that 4 day week and more pay happen...
Oh wait, no it fucking doesn't and it cannot be fully researched because those at the top crush that ideal before it can even be put into motion.
Do you just think we can talk about a 4 day week and more pay happen like that?. Look at this article, look at who doesn't like unions, look at who wants to fucking bust them, and now you can see why there's a "lack of evidence", just put two and two together mate it's that simple.
I want a 4 day week over a 5 day and more hours, but guess what?, I don't have the god damn power to make that happen.
So what's your overnight win all solution for the common working class person? (that doesn't involve thinking like an exec).
What's most surprising about your reply is how sure you are that there is evidence whist simultaneously explaining why there isn't any.
If the OP's claim is true, it would be in the interests of any firm (big or small) to implement the changes to the work week. There's no agency problem or conspiracy here where firms sadistically take lower profits just so they can make their workers miserable.
The other more opportune move for firms would be the clear evidence that younger tend to people massively prefer flexible work to pension or healthcare benefits. Again, if the evidence was there, they would have tried to attract talent in this way. So either this is the best policy ever, yet few people have realised it yet... OR it's another "free lunch" fantasy. I know which explanation you've chosen. Trouble is - see my answer to Livewitharya below - there's just no EVIDENCE for it.
Even if your adversarial and conspiratorial model of 'those at the top' blocking research were true (notwithstanding journals of labour economics being full of similar research - see Jstor) that would still not in itself give me any reason to think it would boost production.
You are aware we have dreams of a better society, yet also do not completely possess the power to make them all a reality, right?.
It'd be like suggesting Chinese sweatshop workers wouldn't want to work less hrs and get more pay, but claim that's more of a commenly shared ideal, when we all know deep down inside, from any sane mind on the planet, that those workers would actually want to work less and be paid more.
Heck, lemme give you an example from my pov:
Our island is now changing how bin collection works per village. Instead of collecting the bins weekly, we are now having our rubbish collected every 2 weeks, and what exactly does that tell you as to why, after decades, that has to change?.
Could it be that my gov doesn't want to pay the local bin-men more for their work? (They did have a strike during Nov to Dec last year and early 2021 as well), or could it be because they feel like it?
The former has on and off evidence via the workers actually verbally and physically talking about their rather crap pay, while the latter makes no sense, because the system of garbage collection has worked fine on this island for well over my lifetime and another.
The bin-men have stiked multiple times, yet the gov ultimately gets their say, and because it's being done per village instead of the same time, it makes it difficult for everyone to know what's going on and to rally with the workers to change things back to how they were and to give them more pay.
You can see it all around you, for centuries people have wanted more pay and to work less. I know plenty of artists that crave that dream so badly, because frankly, some of them work themselves into ill health and have to beg their patreons/customers to bear with them as they recover.
You don't need a bar chart to tell you that we work a lot and don't always get paid enough. Look at the poorer countries and the pittance people get there, and yet we are seeing game publishers giving those provinces/regions the absolute middle ginger and doing away with regional pricing, making games in those areas cost x3-10 more.
Don't be that pedantic person. Don't act like you think you know the world better than anyone else and claim you need a bar chart to see that things aren't great and that people do actually deserve to be paid more, even if it's a shitty job (let's be honest, shitty jobs should pay more, to make them appear less shitty of a career/life living wage).
I respect and largely agree with everything you've said. I do tutor in public and welfare economics and want to raise wellbeing as much as anyone else.
If you follow the thought through - with a 4 day work week - this is where you end up: People selling less labour and taking more leisure. Unless this (which I maintain there is no evidence for) is able to maintain output, you have the same money chasing fewer goods. It's pure inflationary pressure, as firms change their price schedule to reflect the new wage levels per unit output, and would after only a short time mean much lower level of consumption per household. As a bonus, you get the rampant wage bargaining death-spiral to perpetuate the whole mess.
This turns a "nice" but fallacious idea of a better society into a catastrophic policy error, massively hurting the people it is supposed to benefit.
What's the better flexible work policy? Keep the ideas on solid ground - give workers the choice to take an extra day off for commensurately lower pay. People who take the extra day off will be better off (because they prefer extra leisure to extra income + labour) and those who do not are no worse off. It's a Pareto improvement - a change anyone could get behind. Sure - it may shrink the economy - but it would be a net welfare gain under basic assumptions, mostly that some people taking a day off doesn't reduce the productivity of the rest.
I expect that when the choice is actually framed in terms of its real consequences for individuals most will prefer to work 5 days a week, but there's no right or wrong answer as people value leisure and cost labour differently.
Yes but if you give someone the chance to take that extra day off with worse pay, what choice does that leave for someone who's already living in a poor eco?, they logically wouldn't choose that day off and instead work more and more, and as a result they wouldn't get much time off and their overall health would decline (as we've seen from numerous parts of the world, japan especially known for their "I'd rather work myself into an early grave than to embarrass myself and dishonour my family").
I know you're trying to meet this both ways, but sometimes, just sometimes, fuck the company, it needs workers, but this whole "you're easily replicable, therefore fuck off" mentality was insanely toxic from the get-go with these companies. They should ideally be the ones trying to meet their workers a bit more than the workers having to meet them at the halfway point.
2yrs before I left M&S, we had a meeting, all staff, but at different times (because we had a lot of workers that worked different schedules). Long story short, we lost time and a half on Sunday's, half the bank holidays, unsociable hr pay is now the same as day pay, and all in trade for a slightly, tiny bit higher increase in base pay, and do you know what happened?.
around 25% of staff left over the following months, mostly older and middle aged workers, that had previously worked for the company for 10-20 years if not longer.
Do you think that was fair, to trade all of that for barely a £1 increase?. I still worked for the company for a few more years, but I told them that I disagreed with that trade, because it wasn't at all meeting us halfway and it was more about cutting the line with Tesco, their competitor, who was doing slightly better in company earnings/profits, which was also a part of our staff meeting.
I feel like there is a right and wrong answer, not in terms of subjectivity, but more in logical conclusion (like your health, your region and wage pay/eco worth, those are undeniably important factors, that you have to toss out the "we dunno if it's right or wrong").
It was an experiment done by Microsoft Japan. Let me also attach a link to the study although the study is in Japanese.
https://news.microsoft.com/ja-jp/2019/10/31/191031-published-the-results-of-measuring-the-effectiveness-of-our-work-life-choice-challenge-summer-2019/
Another link in English:
https://www.npr.org/2019/11/04/776163853/microsoft-japan-says-4-day-workweek-boosted-workers-productivity-by-40
(Disclosure: My preferred system to play games are Xbox and Microsoft Windows PC.)
My caveat for research I am willing to accept is that it must be quantitative research. Not necessarily randomised control trials (how would that work, exactly?) but at the very least an attempt to isolate cause and effect with data.
Though interesting, and one I hadn't seen before, the MS Japan study is a survey based approach. The NPR article ostensibly misunderstood this. My best google translate job tells me exactly what I expected to find, namely that "labor productivity in august 2019 (sales/hr): +39.9% (compared to august 2018)" with the immediate disclaimer (ignored in the NPR article) that it was "a result realized from various factors". ie. There was no control or regression analysis performed.
The trouble isn't just how much of the growth in sales to attribute to changes in the hours worked (rather than the many other factors which affect business performance) but also what part of the residual effect is actually due to the 4-day week and not due to the other changes (WFH, shorter meetings, etc). Also note that decreasing the hours worked by 25% increases productivity (measured per hour) by the 33% if output stays constant.
So yeah, again, I am yet to see any evidential reason whatsoever to make these kinds of claims that it boosts production.
Yeah, too right, you need to make those developers work 80 hours weeks instead of hiring more people, am I right?
In other words, that's not just Kotick that need to be kick out after acquisition close
Absolute crap, but what else is new when it comes to Activision.
I wonder if they noticed that parasitic monetization schemes also hurt their ability to make great games.
The exact same line every business tries to push when unionization is under discussion.
"Exec"
Exec's hate unions as it limits their ability to treat employees like shit. Oh and you were not creating a great anything you shitbag exec.
Big company hates the idea of Unions, because said unions could help makes changes for staff at the cost of the company doing something it doesn't want to do...
What else is new?. Heard this story from big corps for years, but I've also heard of union busting, which I think most sane people would frown upon.
Tough shit Acti, people want those unions because you treat your staff like garbage, and unions are going to be wanted as a result, deal with it.
You'd be surprised. Thanks to the education system, unions have been thoroughly demonized in many parts of the United States. They've blamed the unions for the rise of Japan, and even tied labor unions to Communism. A lot of people in the US do support union busting.
It's weird to me, since unions are so common in my country.
I've lived in anti-union states most of my life. In one of those states, Oklahoma, I was living there when so-called "right to work" legislation was passed in the late 1990s. RTW basically makes it so that you can't set up union shops in that jurisdiction. After he signed the bill into law, the governor of Oklahoma held a press conference carried on every local channel proclaiming Oklahoma "OPEN FOR BUSINESS!" to thunderous cheers from his donors and the Chamber of Commerce.
More like: "OPEN FOR SLAVERY!"
Unfortunately, in the US, you can induce a knee-jerk paroxysm against all most anything if you accuse it of being tied to communism. Early in the labor movement in the US, the powers that be did everything they could to tie unions to communism (and much of the anti-communist sentiment in the US was really veiled anti-Semitism, whatever deficiencies communism itself might have as a political philosophy.)
Almost like some people never really got out of the cold war.
This actually predates the Cold War. The first red scare in the United States was in 1919. The labor movement was one of the first things implicated in the red scare, after a dockworkers' strike in Seattle.
As much as I greatly dislike Communism, Unions are possibly the one good thing to come out of it. I do strongly believe that workers should unite and hold those at the top of a company accountable, and making sure they meet their workers demands, instead of treating their workers like cogs in a machine (which I feel is incredibly toxic approach from a company pov, as it means the company has no soul, and thus no right to exist if it's going to perpetuate a toxic lifestyle approach to how it treats it's workforce).
Activision should first learn to make great games to begin with,instead of only keeping COD alive. Although admittedly they did well enough with Warzone.
They never learn.
And here I though it was their senior management.
Did he say "world-class games"? HAHAHAHAHA, as if they were making these in the
first place. They should fire him.
Agreed. Activision’s corporate culture and toxic work environment are hurting its ability to create great games.
As a former union member and son of a union activist, I absolutely agree that unionizing could, and almost certainly will, hurt the company's ability to make great games. The biggest problems with unions are that they decrease flexibility and lead to an adversarial relationship between employees and management, rather than collaborative. I've seen it my whole life.
Eventually, my father realized that unions were counterproductive, and he left union organizing, and later left union work. I still believed in unions, but then I got a job in a union shop and found that the CBA made it difficult for both the company and ambitious employees to succeed. It was only helpful to bad employees.
I absolutely support the right of anyone to organize for whatever reason they want. But, having the right to do so doesn't make it a good idea.
The only thing worse than unions, is no unions. I've worked for several unions, and also had several non-union jobs too, and am currently a small business owner. Labour unions are far from perfect, but they're one of the best tools we have to rein in particularly bad employers. And right now Activision Blizzard is a particularly bad employer!
Yeah, I mean, people are attacking him left and right, but nothing he said is wrong. My time in a Union and working as a contractor as the same facility let me see many of the negatives that Unions bring to the table.
For example, I remember when a light bulb went out in our work area. I was going to change it but I was told that I wasn't allowed, that a grievance would be filed if it did. So we had to contact a supervisor who had to contact another supervisor and then we had to wait for maintenance to change the light bulb--and what were they doing? Playing on their phones in their breakroom. But you're not allowed to rush Union members so the bulb didn't get changed until they felt like it, which was the next day. It was a simple freaking light bulb I could have changed in minutes.
That sort of occurrence hasn't happened with my step-dad, and he's worked union jobs for decades now.
Sounds like the union you worked for had it wrong and was garbage. No they aren't perfect, but what you described is both lazy and batshit insane, over a freaking lightbulb of all things. Never had that happen here.
Unions are a way of the past, an old mentality mindset
I agree. And unions can be part of the solution, especially in jurisdictions where laws tend to favour the employers over the employees, and especially in companies where management is particularly bad (of which Activision Blizzard absolutely counts). Microsoft's HR department really needs to bust some heads in Acti Blizz if and when the acquisition closes.
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