The developers for a video game based on Magic: The Gathering announced on Tuesday that they’ve successfully unionized, following a petition filed with the US National Labor Relations Board.
United Wizards of the Coast, in partnership with the Communications Workers of America, represents the team that develops Magic: The Gathering – Arena. Made in-house at Wizards of the Coast in Renton, Wash., Arena is an online adaptation of the long-running collectible card game.
UWOTC previously announced on June 2 that it had begun the official NLRB election for recognition of its union, with in-person voting beginning on that day. Now that the union has been officially elected via the NLRB, its next step is to seek a ratified contract.
The union’s stated goals include seeking layoff protections; addressing Hasbro’s mandates of required AI usage; dealing with pay discrepancies; keeping the option to work remotely after Hasbro issued a return-to-office mandate; clarifications about workers’ side projects; and transparency regarding career progression and pay scales.
As per UWOTC’s official website, the union is made up of roughly 100 workers in Washington state and elsewhere.
UWOTC previously announced its union efforts in late April, which were originally spurred by the surprise wave of Hasbro layoffs that impacted Wizards in Dec. 2023, despite Wizards as a whole having one of its most successful years on record. (2023 was, after all, the year that Baldur’s Gate III came out.)
The new union initially sought voluntary recognition from Wizards with a May 1 deadline, but Wizards didn’t issue a direct response. Instead, in late May, several Arena team members reported that Wizards had sent them multiple anti-union messages. Other sources noted that Wizards had allegedly hired a legal team that has a reputation for counteracting unionization efforts, which is suggestive.
When asked for comment, a Wizards representative pointed GeekWire to the company’s official statement, shared via LinkedIn.
GeekWire has reached out to UWOTC for further comment.
Arena is a free-to-play digital version of Magic for Windows, MacOS, and mobile devices, which saw full release September 2019. It operates on a “freemium” model where players can play the game at no up-front cost, but have the option to acquire new virtual cards and in-game currency in exchange for real money.
According to official announcements from Hasbro, there were over 13 million registered accounts on Arena as of 2023. At time of writing, independent trackers such as SteamCharts have logged just under 7,700 daily players on Arena for the last 30 days, which is a respectable number for a modern live-service game.
It’s worth noting that many of the issues that UWOTC was formed to deal with are traditional, endemic issues in the video game industry, particularly in the higher-end, “AAA” sector. The last three years in gaming have been punctuated by studio closures, waves of layoffs, allegations of toxic “crunch culture,” and executive mismanagement, despite the industry itself being bigger and more popular than ever.
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