The building that houses video game company Raven Software is shown in Middleton, Wis. A group of quality assurance testers at the company have ratified their first union contract — more than three years after launching the first union at a major U.S. gaming studio. (Photo by M.P. King/Wisconsin State Journal)

Video game testers at Middleton-based Raven Software have ratified their first union contract, more than three years after making local and national headlines by launching the first union at a major U.S. studio.

Ratified on Aug. 4, the contract gives employees a 10% raise while limiting mandatory overtime and preserving remote work options.

The deal is the latest development in a saga involving some of the video game industry’s lowest-paid workers. It comes after Microsoft purchased Activision Blizzard, Raven Software’s parent company, leaving the roughly two dozen testers to negotiate with one of the world’s largest tech companies.

“I think we pretty much got everything we aimed for,” said Erin Hall, a seven-year veteran at Raven and one of two workers who negotiated the contract. As a quality assurance tester, she checks for bugs in the blockbuster Call of Duty franchise and works with developers to fix them.

An Activision Blizzard spokesperson declined to comment but directed Wisconsin Watch to a web page discussing Microsoft’s labor principles.

Studios nationwide employ testers to play new video games and identify problems before release.

Raven’s testers make around $21 an hour, and they’re frequently required to work overtime in weeks-long “crunch time” stretches ahead of a game’s release. The volatile nature of their industry prompted the workers to organize.

The testers walked off the job to protest layoffs of a dozen colleagues in December 2021. They announced the formation of a union the next month — the first at a AAA studio that makes high-budget games. The Game Workers Alliance represents the workers, organized with support from Communications Workers of America.

Lessons from three years of negotiating

For Hall and fellow bargaining committee member Autumn Prazuch, contract negotiations required intensive lessons on bargaining and labor laws. Neither had joined a union before launching their own.

“We had no idea it would be this difficult, or that it would take three-and-a-half years, or that it’d be this stressful, that we would be giving up so many nights and weekends,” Hall said. “We felt like it was the right thing to do, and we did it, and we learned as we went.”

The process took about twice as long as a norm that has grown longer in recent years. Newly unionized workers between 2020 to 2023 spent an average of 17 months negotiating their first contract, according to a Bloomberg Law analysis.

The contract negotiations overlapped with a change of ownership: Microsoft’s $69 billion deal to buy Activision Blizzard. In 2022, while waiting for regulators to approve the deal, Microsoft committed to remaining neutral on the workers’ unionization efforts.

That was after Activision took steps organizers called union busting, including withholding raises granted to nonunion workers and reorganizing Raven’s staff in what the union argued was an attempt to dilute its support ahead of the election.

Prazuch said negotiating with leaders at Activision and Microsoft made her feel like “a little fish in a big pond.”

“You’re sitting across from tech billionaires, and this is a huge company … and we’re 19 people at Raven QA in Middleton, Wisconsin,” she said.

But in that process, Prazuch discovered strengths she didn’t know she had.

“I’ve learned that I have more determination than I initially thought, that my voice is louder than I thought it was,” Prazuch said.

She also learned that the same focus that helps her identify glitches in games allowed her to flag subtle wording changes that would shift the terms of the deal.

The deal they reached limits mandatory overtime to half the weeks in a quarter, and it gives testers the flexibility to choose their schedules when working overtime. Workers who currently work remotely can continue to do so under a contract that also promises 10% raises over the two-year contract period, with potential for additional raises.

Hall said she’d encourage other workers to start unions — if they’re in it for the long haul.

“I would not want to take it back for anything, but it was really hard work,” Hall said. “If people want to unionize at their workplace, just know it’s going to be really difficult, and you have to be committed to seeing it through to the end.”

More video game workers are unionizing

While Microsoft’s promise to not oppose employees’ union efforts contrasts with many other major companies, the process has still had moments of controversy. Communications Workers of America, for instance, criticized Microsoft this summer when it announced plans to lay off around 9,000 workers across the company. That included its gaming division, where it halted production of several games.

Raven’s quality assurance team escaped those layoffs, along with a previous round, Hall said. Having a contract doesn’t guarantee the testers won’t be laid off, but it requires the company to offer notice and bargain over severance and benefits.

Keith Fuller, a former Raven Software employee who is now a Madison-based workplace culture consultant, called collective bargaining “one of the few levers that game developers have” as video game companies tighten their belts and as the Trump administration redefines workers’ rights.

“The power imbalance that’s inherent in capitalism shows up very easily in game development,” Fuller said. “I think that this is something that will benefit workers across the industry.”

The organizing trend comes as state lawmakers are exploring ways to encourage video game companies to move to Wisconsin or expand their in-state operations.

In the years since Raven workers unionized, workers at some other major studios have followed their lead. Communications Workers of America says it now represents 2,000 video game workers at Microsoft.

“When we started [our union campaign], we were kind of ambitiously hoping that there’d be anyone that would do this too, and now there’s so many,” Hall said.

This article first appeared on Wisconsin Watch and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To republish, go to the original story and follow the Wisconsin Watch republication guidelines. 

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As power-hungry data centers proliferate, states are searching for ways to protect utility customers from the steep costs of upgrading the electrical grid, trying instead to shift the cost to AI-driven tech companies. (Dana DiFilippo/New Jersey Monitor)

Regular energy consumers, not corporations, will bear the brunt of the increased costs of a boom in artificial intelligence that has contributed to a growth in data centers and a surge in power usage, recent research suggests.

Between 2024 and 2025, data center power usage accounted for $9 billion, or 174%, of increased power costs, a June report by Monitoring Analytics, an external market monitor for PJM Interconnection, found. PJM manages the electrical power grid and wholesale electric market for 13 states and Washington, D.C., and this spring, customers were told to expect roughly a $25 increase on their monthly electric bill starting June 1.

“The growth in data center load and the expected future growth in data center load are unique and unprecedented and uncertain and require a different approach than simply asserting that it is just supply and demand,” Monitoring Analytics’ report said.

Data centers house the physical infrastructure to power most of the computing we do today, but many AI models and the large AI companies that power them, like Amazon, Meta and Microsoft use vastly more energy than other kinds of computing. Training a single chatbot like ChatGPT uses about the same amount of energy as 100 homes over the course of a year, an AI founder told States Newsroom earlier this year.

The growth of data centers — and how much power they use — came on fast. A 2024 report by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission in Virginia — known as a global hub for data centers — found that PJM forecasts it will use double the amount of average monthly energy in 2033 as it did in 2023. Without new data centers, energy use would only grow 15% by 2040, the report said.

As of July, the United States is home to more than 3,800 data centers, up from more than 3,600 in April. A majority of data centers are connected to the same electrical grids that power residential homes, commercial buildings and other structures.

“There are locational price differences, but data centers added anywhere in PJM have an effect on prices everywhere in PJM,” Joseph Bowring, president of Monitoring Analytics said.

Creeping costs

At least 36 states, both conservative and liberal, offer tax incentives to companies planning on building data centers in their states. But the increased costs that customers are experiencing have made some wonder if the projects are the economic wins they were touted as.

“I’m not convinced that boosting data centers, from a state policy perspective, is actually worth it,” said New Jersey State Sen. Andrew Zwicker, a Democrat and co-sponsor of a bill to separate data centers from regular power supply. “It doesn’t pay for a lot of permanent jobs.”

Energy cost has historically followed a socialized model, based on the idea that everyone benefits from reliable electricity, said Ari Peskoe, the director of the Electricity Law Initiative at the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program. Although some of the pricing model is based on your actual use, some costs like new power generation, transmission and infrastructure projects are spread across all customers.

Data centers’ rapid growth is “breaking” this tradition behind utility rates.

“These are cities, these data centers, in terms of how much electricity they use,” Peskoe said. “And it happens to be that these are the world’s wealthiest corporations behind these data centers, and it’s not clear how much local communities actually benefit from these data centers. Is there any justification for forcing everyone to pay for their energy use?”

This spring in Virginia, Dominion Energy filed a request with the State Corporation Commission to increase the rates it charges by an additional $10.50 on the monthly bill of an average resident and another $10.92 per month to pay for higher fuel costs, the Virginia Mercury reported.

Dominion, and another local supplier, recently filed a proposal to separate data centers into their own rate class to protect other customers, but the additional charges demonstrate the price increases that current contracts could pass on to customers.

In June, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission convened a technical conference to assess the adequacy of PJM’s resources and those of other major power suppliers, like Midcontinent Independent System Operator, Inc., ISO New England Inc., New York Independent System Operator, Inc., California Independent System Operator Corporation (CAISO) and Southwest Power Pool (SPP).

The current supply of power by PJM is not adequate to meet the current and future demand from large data center loads, Monitoring Analytics asserts in a report following the conference.

“Customers are already bearing billions of dollars in higher costs as a direct result of existing and forecast data center load,” the report said.

Proposed changes

One of the often-proposed solutions to soften the increased cost of data centers is to require them to bring their own generation, meaning they’d contract with a developer to build a power plant that would be big enough to meet their own demand. Though there are other options, like co-location, which means putting some of the electrical demand on an outside source, total separation is the foremost solution Bowring presents in his reports.

“Data centers are unique in terms of their growth and impact on the grid, unique in the history of the grid, and therefore, we think that’s why we think data centers should be treated as a separate class,” Bowring said.

Some data centers are already voluntarily doing this. Constellation Energy, the owner of Three Mile Island nuclear plant in central Pennsylvania, struck a $16 billion deal with Microsoft to power the tech giant’s AI energy demand needs. 

But in some states, legislators are seeking to find a more binding solution.

New Jersey Sen. Bob Smith, a Democrat who chairs the Environment and Energy Committee, authored a bill this spring that would require new AI data centers in the state to supply their power from new, clean energy sources, if other states in the region enact similar measures.

“Seeing the large multinational trillion dollar companies, like Microsoft and Meta, be willing to do things like restart Three Mile Island is crazy, but shows you their desperation,” said co-sponsor Zwicker. “And so, okay, you want to come to New Jersey? Great, but you’re not going to put the basis (of the extra cost) on ratepayers.”

New Jersey House members launched a probe into PJM’s practices as the state buys its annual utilities from the supplier at auction this month. Its July 2024 auction saw electrical costs increase by more than 800%, which contributed to the skyrocketing bills that took effect June 1.

Residents are feeling it, Smith said, and he and his co-sponsors plan to use the summer to talk to the other states within PJM’s regional transmission organization (RTO).

“Everything we’re detecting so far is they’re just as angry — the other 13 entities in PJM — as us,” Smith told States Newsroom.

Smith said they’re discussing the possibility of joining or forming a different RTO.

“We’re in the shock and horror stage where these new prices are being included in these bills, and citizens are screaming in pain,” Smith said. “A solution that I filed in the bill, is the one that says, ‘AI data centers, you’re welcome in New Jersey, but bring your own clean electricity with them so they don’t impact the ratepayers.”

Utah enacted a law this year that allows “large load” customers like data centers to craft separate contracts with utilities, and a bill in Oregon, which would create a separate customer class for data centers, called the POWER Act, passed through both chambers last month.

If passed, New Jersey’s law would join others across the country in redefining the relationship between data centers powering AI and utilities providers.

“We have to take action, and I think we have to be pretty thoughtful about this, and look at the big picture as well,” Zwicker said. ”I’m not anti-data center, I’m pro-technology, but I’m just not willing to put it on the backs of ratepayers.”