20 Videogame QA Testers in Albany Win Union Vote at Activision Blizzard

"A group of about 20 quality assurance testers at Activision Blizzard's Albany location won their bid for a union Friday afternoon," reports the Washington Post: The workers join the Game Workers Alliance, a union at the gaming company that already includes testers from Wisconsin-based Raven Software. Amanda Laven, a Blizzard Albany quality assurance tester, said that the union vote comes just about a year after the testers first began collecting signatures for a union. "We knew we were gonna win, but it's still extremely exciting and gratifying, especially because tomorrow marks the first anniversary of when we started organizing," Laven said.

The testers are the lowest paid workers at Blizzard Albany, formerly called Vicarious Visions, a studio known for its work on the Guitar Hero and Crash Bandicoot franchises. The Game Workers Alliance is the first union at a major video game company in the U.S., and Friday's news marks the union's second significant win in an industry that has historically not organized....

The Blizzard Albany testers took their cues from seeing testers at Call of Duty-maker Raven petition the company and gather signatures. On May 28, Raven testers won their bid to unionize. They're currently undergoing bargaining efforts for a contract.

should it be more then just QA and can job roles b

[Joe_Dragon]

should it be more then just QA and can job roles be played around with so the bosses can push people out the union QA?

Re:

[rsilvergun]

There are various laws to protect from that. As for it being more than the QA department they get the most abuse in the lowest pay and so had the greatest need to unionize. Activision was actually hoping to get a union vote across the whole company because they felt they could get the rest of the artists and programmers to go against it because they're slightly better paid.

The real problem here is that all the votes are done per site instead of per industry. That allows management to divide and conquer.

New York

[bill_mcgonigle]

Since there are 20 Albany's in the US.

Used to be a standard part of news.

Re:

[QuantumLeaper]

Real hard to figure out it's Albany NY, just had to go to their Job listing page, and it says, New York. Most big companies don't have stuff in small towns.

Re:

[kenh]

Albany is the state capitol of New York...

Re: Well yet another company I have to avoid now

[BytePusher]

Well why is that?

Re:

[DrMrLordX]

No big loss. These are Blizzard QAs. They're probably already mediocre, at best.

Re:

[narcc]

Because he's lying, obviously.

Re:

[narcc]

Says the AC.

My father was a union man. We knew what that meant. We know that you're full of shit.

Re:

[narcc]

How delusion does someone need to be to think they're better able to negotiate as an individual than a collective?

Naw, you know that your anti-union shit is complete nonsense. That's why you're posting AC. Pathetic.

Re:

[slarabee]

If you disregard anons, then I will advocate a very similar position.

I spend five years as a union member starting with PACE as then USW. Did laboratory quality control work. Pay was decent. Union experience was horrible. Will never ever work a union shop ever again.

Started with a very mafia like hard sell to join the union (right to work state) the first week. "Dis plant is a very dangerous place. Be a cryin' shame if something were ta happen ta yous." Would actually do anything directly, but I had

Re:

[kenh]

Independent IT contractors do it all the time.

Re:

[narcc]

They negotiate, sure, but not nearly as effectively as they could if they were acting collectively. Do I really need to explain this basic shit to you?

Re: Well yet another company I have to avoid now

[UncleScidhuv]

Yah me too. Now that I left my union job I make ten times as much money, and have a servant monkey at my new job. I can't believe the unions won't let people have servant monkeys.

Re:

[TwistedGreen]

Jealousy, I think.

Re:

[Opportunist]

Yeah, can't have those workers get a decent wage when I don't.

Re:

[Registered Coward v2]

I don't support unionized companies if there is any alternative.

So if you fly you only use FlexJet?

Re:

[alvinrod]

Why do you care? The company didn't force them and the workers are free to associate as they wish.

Re:

[gurps_npc]

You are this close to the definition of a communist. You do not like their business practices, so you boycott them.

You need to learn about this thing called capitalism, where the free market makes decisions, not schmucks that think they know better.

And yes, the free market includes both companies negotiating prices/terms with their customers AND also companies negotiating salaries/terms with their employees.

Capitalism is not code for 'business owners get the power', it is instead code for NEGOTIATED CHOICE

Now comes the hard part

[kenh]

The QA Testers are, reportedly, the lowest-paid workers - that likely won't change, though the testers may bring home slightly bigger paychecks.

What are the grievances, just that they aren't paid enough? I suspect QA Testers also complain about a lack of a career path out of QA and into other departments. I'd like someone to explain if QA tester means more than "playing the games and looking for glitches".

QA Tester is likely considered an entry-level position where the employees are expected to train/prepar

Re: Now comes the hard part

[EldoranDark]

QA is a much more sophisticated process than playing a game until you run into a glitch. These days the roles in the QA department are very specialised, involve months of training just to get to grips with the proprietary tools, and often involve making the fixes too. With the scope of modern games, QA is not some last step before the game is shipped. They are involved from the very beginning and negotiate content coverage, check areas and task priorities at every milestone.

Re:

[alvinrod]

Maybe at some companies, but a lot of it is still people running into walls or repetitively doing other boring crap. Coding knowledge may not even be necessary, but at other places it'll be software devs building tools to automate the process, because paying someone minimum wage to drive into walls isn't cheap given how large games have grown.

Re:

[kenh]

You equate software testing and QA. QA does not partner with game designers & developers, those are software testers, QA tests release candidates before they are made available to the public.

These folks are the lowest-paid team members because they bring very minimal skills to the table, and that won't change with a union.

Re: Now comes the hard part

[EldoranDark]

There are probably companies that run like that, but that's definitely not always true. Software testing as you describe is often under a wider QA umbrella. There is also a problem with rolling out QA to only test RC at the end of the release cycle. Big games take many years to develop and constant QA coverage is needed at every stage. It involves hundreds of people. And by the time you get close to submitting the game to the major platform companies, you need your QA people to know the game inside and out

Re:

[mysidia]

someone has to be at the bottom, why not the workers that sit around and endlessly play new games, looking for issues the software developers and testers didn't find earlier?

Well, no.. Contrary to apparent popular belief: QA testers do not merely sit around and play the games–
That is not proper and not fair to the QA testers; such dismissal of their value by management would be a good reason for them to unionize in attempt to better secure appropriate pay for the value the QA positions bring to the c

Re:

[kenh]

QA involves teams having a full understanding of the project and the creation and use of testing tools and methodology including extensive checklists to run software and confirm all functionality is correct.

No. You are describing software testers - QA is a special subset of software testing, with minimal skill requirements and zero input on game design implementation. They work on release candidates, that's it.

Re:

[tlhIngan]

What are the grievances, just that they aren't paid enough? I suspect QA Testers also complain about a lack of a career path out of QA and into other departments. I'd like someone to explain if QA tester means more than "playing the games and looking for glitches".

Depends on the company. For a large developer like Activision/Blizzard, QA is basically as you describe.

Generally a salaried position requiring 6 days of work a week, 60 hours minimum, and for a lot of it, it is basically running around carefully

I'm pro-worker, but

[hdyoung]

the result of this is that all QA testing of Activision games will be moved out of Albany. They'll wait 2-3 years until the stink dies down, then quietly mothball the facility.

Unionization can only succeed when the work MUST be done locally. Game QA testing is literally the most easily outsourced work on the planet.

Those 20 game testers can revel in their newfound union membership for 12-18 months. If they're smart, the'll start prepping for the inevitable job search .

Re:

[DrMrLordX]

It's Blizzard, not Activision as a whole. Activision is a publisher that publishes from many different developers (Blizzard being one of their wholly-owned developers).

More generally, can 20 people be a useful union?

[Narrowband]

Exactly. My first thought when I read this article was "all 20 of them, huh?" 20 people seems like such a small number a business could replace them en masse. Don't like the contract agreement? Go on strike? Fine, none of you are required to take the contract, you're all fired. Next batch?

You hear about so many unions starting up among really small groups, like this, or a single Starbucks location, and then guess what, that particular location closes. Unions have a place, but unionizing at too small

Has QA not yet been outsourced to pre-orderers?

[ffkom]

From what I've heard lately about the quality of video games, when they are published versus "one year later", I thought that the video game industry has already outsourced all of the QA work to the cheaper-than-zero "workers" which are the people that pre-order video games and even pay long before they start their QA work for the manufacturers...

Testing is not QA

[Megahurts]

Personal pet peeve: If they're testing, it's not QA. It's QC.

Quality assurance is the task of designing process which will produce outputs that comply to some standard. QC is the task of testing the properties of processes to ensure their outputs comply to standards. In an ideal world, QC data will help drive QA improvement.

The confusion of such things tends to bother me because I happen to have a career in QC/QA and ignorance about the field and the proper definitions of these things tends to permeate into the industry to a really disturbing degree. (It's a field full of phonies, ignorance, and charlatanism)

Re:

[arosenfield]

That may be technically correct, but it's not the convention used in the video games industry. Game developers and publishers overwhelmingly use the term QA for the employees who are testing games and filing bug reports, as well as for the folks improving the processes by writing the test plans, developing automation tools, etc.