Magic: The Gathering Arena Developers Unionize For Better Layoff, Remote Work, and GenAI Protections

The developers of Magic: The Gathering Arena are unionizing with the Communications Workers of America (CWA).

In a public announcement today, a group of Wizards of the Coast (WOTC) employees announced they had a supermajority of individuals committed to a union, and invited WOTC and parent company Hasbro to voluntarily recognize the union and to remain neutral during ongoing unionization efforts.

Speaking to Kotaku, senior software engineers Valentine Powell and Neil White shared that the group began unionizing a few years ago, with efforts initially sparked by two back-to-back rounds of mass layoffs that impacted around 2,000 individuals across all of Hasbro—just under one-third of the entire company—including many at Wizards of the Coast (an additional 3 percent of the company was laid off in 2025).

It was after that first round of layoffs that talks began, but White tells me that internal pushes for return to office were what really accelerated the effort. White and Powell tell me that Hasbro’s messaging on RTO over the last year has been confusing and inconsistent, initially suggesting that those who were already remote would be able to stay that way, or that certain teams could remain remote, and eventually escalating to a near-blanket return to office mandate beginning sometime next year. Already, they say, Hasbro is only hiring new workers local to the Seattle area and mandating in-office work, significantly limiting the company’s hiring pools in the process.

The group listed seven reasons why it was organizing, saying that “recent decisions by WOTC and Hasbro leadership have not aligned with the values of their employees,” and that the list encompassed “only some of the issues” the group faced. Concerns were as follows:

• MTG: Arena staff are asking for better layoff protections, saying they currently live in fear of suddenly losing their jobs
• As the company institutes mandatory return to office, workers are asking for remote work protections
• Amid pressure from leadership to adopt large language model (LLM) and generative AI tools at work, workers are seeking clear guidelines and worker protections around generative AI, as well as the ability to push back on generative AI use when they feel it is not the correct tool for the job at hand
• Many employees report experiencing crunch to meet deadlines, so they are seeking protections around workload expectations
• Employees want clearly defined job roles and better-defined career progression
• Currently, Hasbro can claim ownership of personal projects made in employees’ free time with their own resources. Employees want ownership of personal creative endeavors. Though Valentine and Powell say Hasbro’s policy is common in the industry, employees would like the freedom to be able to work on personal projects for themselves that do not conflict with the work they do for Hasbro
• Finally, employees are concerned about “short-term, profit-driven decisions” and seek to focus on partnerships and products that grow games sustainably

I asked Valentine and White for a bit more specificity on that last point. Valentine pointed back to layoffs, mandatory RTO, and genAI use as decisions made for short-term profit that ultimately harmed the game and team in the long-term. He says the workers want to be able to weigh in when these sorts of things are proposed by management.

“There are a lot of times when these sort of decisions are made to chase a dollar rather than to think about what our product is going to look like ten years from now, and whether this [decision] is contributing to that. So we want…to be able to say, ‘We’re people making the game, we’re engaging with the community, we’re seeing the feedback from the decisions that are being made and we have some information that we could be providing to those decisions.'”

Valentine urges MTG: Arena players and fans to help out by raising their voices and expressing support for the union directly to Hasbro, both by signing the union’s public petition to Hasbro for voluntary recognition, as well as speaking up through social channels like Reddit. “Your voices really matter, especially right now when Hasbro is trying to decide what to do in response to this union. If you ask them to step up and voluntarily recognize, they’re going to listen to the player base, right? Like you are the person we’re making this product for. You have a lot of power right now.”

Valentine says that, when official, they expect the union to encompass around 100 workers across all disciplines within the MTG: Arena team. While Valentine could not say officially, they did note that this was “the highest amount [percentage of eligible individuals] committed to a union of any team that I’ve ever seen unionize.”

The group has filed an election petition with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that it will withdraw if management recognizes the union before close of business on May 1, which is International Workers’ Day. Kotaku has reached out to Hasbro/WOTC for comment.