Hundreds of unionized game developers began marching simultaneously outside Xbox studio locations across North America at 12:30 PM ET on July 15th — and for the first time in the industry's history, they did it in six places at once, in four cities, across two countries. The Save Our Devs march schedule confirmed a coordinated wave of demonstrations stretching from Maryland to Montreal to the Pacific coast.
Workers under the OneBGS banner — the Communications Workers of America (CWA)-affiliated union representing more than 240 Bethesda Game Studios employees — launched coordinated demonstrations outside ZeniMax studio offices in Rockville, Maryland; Austin and Dallas, Texas; and Montreal, Canada. A separately organized rally at Obsidian Entertainment in Irvine, California brought Blizzard employees out in solidarity, while United Videogame Workers-CWA staged a concurrent march at Microsoft's main campus in Redmond, Washington.
The campaign is called "Save Our Devs," and its immediate cause is Microsoft's July 6 announcement of approximately 3,200 Xbox job eliminations — 440 of which were union-represented positions across Bethesda Game Studios, ZeniMax Online Studios, id Software, ZeniMax Workers United QA, and ZeniMax corporate, according to the CWA's official statement on the layoffs. The marches are the most visible pressure point in an ongoing legal dispute over whether Microsoft must negotiate the layoffs themselves, or only their consequences — and that distinction, grounded in federal labor law, is what will determine whether today's march produces anything workers can actually use.
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