Activision Blizzard Workers Alliance acquires Raven Software QA staff pay bands data


A promo screenshot from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (2022).

While Call of Duty studio Raven Software’s QA staff voting to form the first major US games industry union back in May was a big success story, work hasn’t stopped for the people involved in the subsequent months.

Following Activision Blizzard’s decision to recognise the union in June, after originally refusing to voluntarily recognise it prior to the May vote, negotiations between the two sides have been ongoing.

Now, a fresh development has pushed these negotiations back into the public spotlight, with the group campaigning on behalf of the QA testers having acquired the studio’s pay bands via a Freedom of Information request.

What do you think of the current compensation being provided at Raven Software?

Taking to Twitter, ABetterABK, also referred to as the ABK Workers Alliance, shared some images of documents provided by Activision as a result of the request, which show the minimum and maximum salaries for a range of different roles.

“Thank you to The Freedom of Information Act, for having Activision provide pay bands for Raven Software when they were trying to bust Game Workers Alliance.” claimed the group in the tweet featuring the images, adding: “We’ve done a lot of peer to peer reviews and are using this data to promote equitable compensation and transparency!”

The data, which covers jobs with both salaried and hourly wages, spans multiple departments of the studio, including game designers, artists and animators, from entry to expert level.

However, most importantly for the ABK Workers Alliance, it shows that all four different variations of QA Tester are at the lowest end of the compensation scale, with entry-level testers being at the very bottom of the pile, possessing an hourly salary minimum of $27,500 and a maximum of $44,000.

Meanwhile, the highest-level QA testers have exactly the same band as entry-level game designers, with a minimum of $43,400 and a maximum of $69,400.

On the other hand, the studio’s two types of QA Engineer can make either between $48,600 and $77,700 or $58300/ and $93,300 depending upon their seniority.

Make sure to follow us for more coverage of the Activision Blizzard/Raven Software QA union negotiations whenever significant new developments occur.

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