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Anytime this comes up, it's worth pointing out how deeply weird US unionization is compared to the broader world.
There is now a union ... just for Wizards of the Coast employees. UWOTC-CWA now has a monopoly on negotiating for WotC employees. Dues flow up to the CWA, but members don't necessarily get the benefit of bargaining industry-wide. There is also no choice within WotC for what union represents you.
It's still a deeply flawed relationship, especially compared to what a median European enjoys. It's not a simple "US companies bad - EU companies good" - the NLRA is in desperate need of reform by Congress and political actors across the US have stymied progress.
Hopefully they can push back against some of these collabs. I have yet to meet someone who is thrilled with playing a deck with Post Malone, TMNT, or The Walking Dead in it. The best you get is indifference.
Seems highly unlikely. Us unions Almost Never have input in product strategy and marketing decisions. That isn't part of their Union contract and they don't have a seat at the table of governance
Has anyone actually looked at what other creator-facing unions negotiated? Game writers guilds sometimes get consultation clauses, not veto power. Feels like the bar here is "we get told before Post Malone happens," not "we stop it."
1k of 25k sounds fine til you notice which 1k get reprinted and power-crept every set. Wizards did this with Un-sets in the 90s too—nobody minded til it started eating the main product's design space.
There are ~25k total different MTG cards. Who cares if even 1k of them are for collabs (as long as they don't contain broken cards that end up in tournament play)?
1k collab cards is 1k more places for text-matching bugs, API glitches, and edge cases in whatever tracks legality. That's not a design problem, that's an ops problem waiting to happen.
(People might not know the inside joke here, namely that WotC has in the past sent the actual Pinkertons after some people suspected of leaking unreleased cards)
Worked in tech for a long time before I got to WOTC. Went through a lot of layoffs and short term executive decisions that invariably leave anyone without preferred stock out to dry. Wish I had a union then. Glad to have one now.
Edit: Words are my own. I am not a rep of WOTC or Hasbro.
There's actual research on this in labor econ — "psychic income" jobs (prestige, access, doing what you love) tend to organize later, not because conditions are better, just because workers tolerate more before collective action feels worth the risk.
Did you not know what you were getting into? Most folks I know in Seattle have pretty commonly talked about wotc being an absolutely abysmal company to work for going all the way back to the early 00s.
The only reason to be there was for the love and the buying access/perks. That access & perks are long gone.
Had a friend whose dream job was to work on D&D. He's got a fairly high profile in the TTRPG space and developed one major product/book release for D&D. The experience spun him out of Hasbro and the TTRPG industry entirely.
Played a ton of Arena, and the Wizards support queue response time on account issues used to be measured in weeks. If a union gets someone to actually own that pipeline, worth it alone.
There is now a union ... just for Wizards of the Coast employees. UWOTC-CWA now has a monopoly on negotiating for WotC employees. Dues flow up to the CWA, but members don't necessarily get the benefit of bargaining industry-wide. There is also no choice within WotC for what union represents you.
It's still a deeply flawed relationship, especially compared to what a median European enjoys. It's not a simple "US companies bad - EU companies good" - the NLRA is in desperate need of reform by Congress and political actors across the US have stymied progress.