Warzone Developer Raven Software Ends Strike After More Than A Month

Qual­i­ty assur­ance devel­op­ers at Raven Soft­ware have called off their strike as the group launched a cam­paign to form a union at the Call of Duty studio.

The ABK Work­ers Alliance social page announced “Pend­ing the recog­ni­tion of our union, the Raven QA strike has end­ed.” The strike began in ear­ly Decem­ber after numer­ous employ­ees were let go after they were promised to get full-time con­tracts. A fundrais­er on GoFundMe to sup­port the strik­ing employ­ees amassed more than $370,000 USD.

Any unused mon­ey from the fundrais­er will be put into a sep­a­rate pool for future orga­niz­ing or strike efforts, as announced by ABK Work­ers Alliance on Twit­ter today.

On Jan­u­ary 21st, a group of testers at the Call of Duty stu­dio began the process of cre­at­ing a union. The qual­i­ty assur­ance devel­op­ers are work­ing with the Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Work­ers of Amer­i­ca union to cre­ate a group called Game Work­ers Alliance. This guild is ask­ing Activi­sion Bliz­zard to vol­un­tar­i­ly rec­og­nize its union. How­ev­er, this has yet to happen.

Call of Duty: Van­guard and War­zone Paci­fic’s Sea­son 2 update has been delayed, while Activi­sion acknowl­edged that the series has been strug­gling in gen­er­al. Whether or not Raven’s work­er strike played a part in this delay is unknown.

There are sev­er­al fac­tors that could be delay­ing updates to games, includ­ing that all Activi­sion Bliz­zard stu­dios are going through a shift after being acquired by Microsoft. Who knows if this will affect the union­iza­tion efforts the work­ers have been work­ing on. No one real­ly knows what will hap­pen with Call of Duty once Microsoft ful­ly takes over Activi­sion Bliz­zard, but Xbox head Phil Spencer did con­firm the series will still be released on PlayStation.