The game sold more copies during its pre-launch period than any other Blizzard Entertainment title before it. Players have already spent 93 million hours with the game, and counting. Even before its full release this week, critics were praising its design and story. It's a rare positive outcome for a company that's been mired in controversy. Since 2021, Activision Blizzard's place in headlines has been next to allegations of harassment and news of burgeoning union efforts.

Quality assurance workers at ZeniMax Studios have voted in favor of forming a union with Communications Workers of America -- and ZeniMax's parent company, Microsoft, didn't stand in the way. Microsoft formally recognized ZeniMax Workers United/CWA alongside today's vote results, making this the largest union in the video game industry and the first US union at Microsoft overall. About 300 ZeniMax staff members were involved in the unionization effort, which was brewing for months before going public in early December. This was around the time QA testers at another major video game studio, Blizzard Albany, voted to unionize with CWA. The Blizzard Albany union is the second at parent company Activision Blizzard, after QA staff at Raven Software voted to organize in May 2022.

In the four-day hearing with the NLRB that ended Tuesday, Activision Blizzard and the workers argued over whether workers should be allowed to form a so-called "micro union" of several dozen employees inside the quality assurance department. Shortly after the department announced its intentions to unionize, Activision Blizzard announced the testers would be redistributed around the company and embedded into different departments, a fact Baldwin noted in her letter. The company also argued that all Raven employees should be allowed to vote on unionization. A larger group would require more employee votes in order to unionize, whereas the testers had already reached the needed majority of votes within their department.

In late 2018, thousands of workers walked out of Google offices around the globe to protest the company's handling of sexual harassment accusations against prominent executives. The same year, hundreds of Salesforce employees signed a letter to CEO Marc Benioff protesting the fact the company sold products to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Also in the headlines was an effort by some Microsoft employees to protest the company's bid for work on the U.S. Department of Defense's Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) project. In a letter to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, the employees wrote, "many Microsoft employees don't believe that what we build should be used for waging war." Tech employee activism is nothing new, but the momentum generated by the 2018 wave of protests was.