I adored Blizzard's output for ~20 years - I have every collectors edition they released from Warcraft III to Overwatch - but I'm basically done. The scandals, the shitty monetization, and the half-baked products all point to a radically different culture and company than the one that released Starcraft in 1998. No king reigns forever.

Unionization is the 2nd amendment of labor law.

The 2nd amendment exists because every human has a right to sacrifice themselves meaningfully to fight tyranny. Guns are a proxy for power, and the 2nd amendment says that citizens have a right to some power. Since citizens have a right to some power, our government cannot get too tyrannical because there would be consequences.

The right to unionize is the right to use the threat of force (collective bargaining) against tyrants (CEOs), exactly like the 2nd amendment is the right to use threat of force (use of guns) against tyrants (people who rule as kings).

Unions are the representation of the idea that employees should be able to exercise meaningful power over their CEOs, in particular to demand better wages and conditions.

Without collective bargaining, why would a CEO ever have to compromise or negotiate except with other CEOs? If multiple companies acted like a cartel, how would employees be able to fight that without collective bargaining?

Why are wages generally proportional to the job, and not proportional to a companies profits?

Just like in software, the structure can be sound, while the implementation is poor. I think a lot of the problems people have with unions are implementation detail problems rather than structural flaws.

>existing legal precedent fails to account for the uniquely collaborative nature of game development

This argument is very shaky. Aren't Hollywood films the product of union labour?

I'm not usually pro-union, but if there is any industry that needs to be unionized it's game development.

If only our government wasn't beholden to corporate power, they'd enforce the union busting laws. They know that if enough big companies become unionized, the workers would be able to exert democratic corporate power and influence government.

In New Zealand video game workers have no employment rights. Along with workers on film sets

We call it the "Warner Brothers' Law"

Blizzard brought me some of the greatest joys of my childhood. I remember playing warcraft 1 in all it's 8-bit glory, I loved W3, I am playing my way through Diablo 2 again right now. But it just feels like right around the time of WoW they started to change and it became a priority on revenue over producing good games.

It seems like that is the inevitable result of any successful creator(s) they labor out of love and a joy for what they make and then once they get big enough MBA, managerial types, that are focused on metrics and numbers come in and like a parasite feed on the success of those who labored for love before eventually leaving it an unrecognizable bloated rotting carcass of it's former self.

Is there anyway to build something successfully that contributes to the world without it being subsumed by management culture?

Goodbye Blizzard. No king rules forever.

Are they trying to stop the vote by addressing the issues making people want to unionize, or just trying to illegally stop legally protected unionization?

At this point, it would be better for all those involved [1] if the corporate entity called Activision-Blizzard was burnt to the ground and a new games company was built in its stead, with actually competent managers [2], a unionized labor force and actually enforced zero-tolerance policies on abuse of all kinds among some other nice-to-haves.

[1]: Obviously not Kotick and the rest of the scum, who not only tolerated but even engaged in the "alleged" instances of all manners of abuse for years. I actually wouldn't mind if they provided themselves as kindling on that corporate bonfire after having their golden parachutes cut away to pay damages/"reparations" to their victims.

[2]: ie. with at least a background in games development, not how to best financially screw their workers.