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.