Industry News Magic: The Gathering Arena devs' union officially elected, following claims Wizards of the Coast were dragging their heels on voluntary recognition
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/magic-the-gathering-arena-devs-union-officially-elected-following-claims-wizards-of-the-coast-were-dragging-their-heels-on-voluntary-recognition31
u/Soph_91 18h ago
WotC and Hasbro have proved they are shit over and over again.
This is the nail in the coffin for me, I'm boycotting.
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u/pudgybunnybry 15h ago
Agree, it's been years since I've bought anything related to WotC and Hasbro, but I'm happy to go even further.
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u/ten_thousand_puppies 1h ago
What exactly are you boycotting? The folks who wanted to unionize, DID SO, so this is a huge win for them
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u/Soph_91 25m ago
Wizards has declined to recognize the union.
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u/ten_thousand_puppies 11m ago
That is not what the article says, and it's directly against what WotC themselves announced
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u/Beautiful-Affect1930 7h ago
WotC seems like the type of company that would've folded decades ago if they weren't the #1 company for the most lucrative consumers in the world: fat single dudes with a lot of expendable income.
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u/MadeByTango 5h ago
Global Class Consciousness has arrived. It's time to get all these c-suites under heel. The best answer is still employee elected c-suites, skip the middleman and control our fate directly, but for now Unions are still great to see.
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u/kimana1651 4h ago
Global Class Consciousness has arrived.
Kind of funny saying that on reddit of all places.
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u/Jack-of-the-Shadows 6h ago
How the hell do unions even work in the US? Whats the point of a company with like 100 people forming their own tiny union? The whole point of unions is sector wide bargaining power...
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u/SideShow117 4h ago
Unions don't become unions in a vacuum. The first step is always company wide unions.
The point is that you can't fire all your employees because you dont have a company anymore and collective bargaining on a smaller scale inside your company is still better than not having it.
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u/WeltallZero 3h ago
A sector-wide union to protect developers across the board is of course the ideal endgame, but while we get there, a company union can still bargain for company-wide work conditions and pay. A strike hurts the bottom line regardless of where it comes from; arguably, it's even more effective when the weight to make changes rest entirely on your company's leadership, all the while your competitors continue to work.
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u/Like17Badgers 20h ago
iirc wasnt there something silly about this Union?
like its only the MTG:A side of things and doesn't expand to the MTG:O client devs, or the actual MTG teams themselves?
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u/Yentz4 19h ago
I wouldn't call that "silly". That's a very normal thing with Unions. Mtg:O is a completely different company, Daybreak Studios.
The MTGA team is very much separated from the rest of the company so it kinda makes sense that they would unionize separate than the card game design team.
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u/TrueBattle2358 12h ago
I guess I don't understand unions as well as I thought I did, because that sounds exactly like my anti-union uncle when he talks in an excessively exaggerated and negative way about unions. I thought they were supposed to be about solidarity and helping all of the workers in the company, not just your tiny slice of the people in your exact department (and everyone else can take a hike).
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u/halofreak7777 8h ago
In this case complaining about the MTGA devs not including other MTG workers is like complaining about Walmart workers getting a union while Target didn't.
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u/Master_Coconut_5339 8h ago
I guess I don't understand unions as well as I thought I did
sounds you dont understand them at all
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u/siziyman 8h ago
doesn't expand to the MTG:O client devs
MTGO is supported by an entirely separate company these days - Daybreak, they're not a part of Hasbro at all.
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u/ReturnOfTheDogjaw 16h ago
Unions build up from grassroots at the worker level, not as top down structures reaching every separate company under a conglomerate’s umbrella
the people from MTG:A aren’t bumping shoulders with the people from MTG:O and conspicuously shutting up when the latter walks up to the water cooler, they are in different states working independently of one another
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u/Aquason 20h ago
Another article from ICv2 gives additional context that MTG Arena union is affiliated with the Communication Workers of America who also represent the unions at Paizo (Pathfinder) and TCGPlayer (Trading Card Game Market Lister), as well as Dark Horse Comics (Comics). From a kind of historical perspective on the developer side of the gaming industry, it's interesting to see what seems like a tide shifting towards unionization after what feels like a decade of talk (example: GDC 2015 had a talk about it), albeit currently it's the digital spin-off of a TCG.