The People Making D&D and Magic Are Unionizing
There’s some pretty significant news coming out of the folks working at Wizards of the Coast, and this one has less to do with a new D&D book or the next Magic: The Gathering set and more to do with the people actually making those games.
Workers from the Dungeons & Dragons team and Wizards’ Studio X have announced that they’re forming unions as part of United Wizards of the Coast, working with the Communications Workers of America.
The D&D group includes employees working on Dungeons & Dragons and D&D Beyond, while Studio X handles much of the tabletop side of Magic: The Gathering and Duel Masters. Both groups say they have a public supermajority of employees supporting the effort.
They’re asking Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro to voluntarily recognize the unions by October 13. This comes after the MTG Arena team successfully unionized earlier this year.
The issues the workers are organizing around will probably sound familiar to anyone who has been following the games industry lately. They’re asking for better wages, clearer promotion paths, greater job security, sustainable workloads, protections for remote and hybrid work, and better rules surrounding ownership of creative work made outside of the job.
AI is also a major part of the conversation. The D&D group says Hasbro has increased pressure to adopt large language models and generative AI throughout the company. They also credit Wizards with resisting that pressure so far. The union wants protections against AI use written into a contract rather than depending entirely on company policy.
D&D and Magic are creative products built by writers, artists, designers, editors and developers. It’s easy to talk about Wizards as though it were one giant entity, but there are hundreds of people behind the books and cards we play with.
The union is also pushing for clearer protections around personal creative projects. According to the D&D group, current company policies can give Hasbro ownership claims over work employees create outside of their regular jobs. They want stronger guarantees that personal projects created on their own time belong to them.
D&D and Magic are two of the biggest tabletop games in the world. If workers at Wizards successfully negotiate contracts covering things like AI, layoffs, remote work, creative ownership and workload, people at other tabletop companies are going to be watching closely.
There’s still a long road ahead. Forming a union and negotiating a contract are two different things. But with the MTG Arena team already successfully organizing earlier this year, something is clearly changing inside Wizards.
For players, most of what we normally see are books, cards and release announcements. This is a reminder that there are people behind all of those things, and many of them are asking for a bigger voice in how the games they make get made.
