The hundreds of developers working on Blizzard’s live-service ARPG Diablo 4 are unionising in the face of mass lay-offs across the games industry. Now under the Microsoft umbrella, the Diablo team are joining Blizzard’s World of Warcraft devs and Overwatch team after Microsoft gutted 9,000 jobs earlier this year.
In a recent press release, Blizzard game producer Kelly Yeo explained that there is a lack of confidence in executive decisions to protect employees from the chopping block. Despite Microsoft stating that its games division is “thriving”, the decision was still made to cut jobs to increase profit margins.
“With every subsequent round of mass layoffs, I’ve witnessed the dread in my coworkers grow stronger,” Yeo said as 450 Diablo 4 developers joined the fray, “because it feels like no amount of hard work is enough to protect us.”
Diablo game designer Ryan Littleton, who has worked on the game since 2022, explained that no developer “should have to live with that constant worry that we might be let go at the drop of a hat”, explaining that the union “allows us to organize across the industry to make great games and protect the developers who create them from the constant pressures of layoffs, passion tax, and crunch.”
“My entire career as a developer has seen my peers and I paying the ‘passion tax’ for working in an industry that we love,” added senior software engineer at Blizzard Nav Bhatti. “At some point you have to choose between fight or flight, and forming a union is us doing just that – standing our ground in the industry.”
Blizzard was just one of the studios hit in Microsoft’s recent round of layoffs, but a number of other studios were hit far harder. The Initiative, a new studio working on Perfect Dark, was completely shuttered, and Zenimax Online Studios saw its long in-development MMO Project Blackbird scrapped despite extremely positive playtests.
Microsoft’s layoffs came with a memo to staff by Xbox head Phil Spencer claiming the company has “more players, games and gaming hours than ever before” and that its “platform, hardware and game roadmap have never looked stronger”. Additionally, following the layoffs, one Microsoft executive told workers to use AI to “help reduce the emotional and cognitive load that comes with job loss”.
Despite the issues with its parent company, Blizzard is still working on a host of new content for Diablo 4 with a new expansion planned for next year. Alongside key gameplay improvements, the new expansion appears to be bringing back the beloved Paladin class which players have asked for since launch.
