A group of workers at Activision Blizzard have voted to unionize, establishing the first union at a major North American video game company. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) counted nineteen ballots in favor of unionizing with the Communications Workers of America (CWA), with three opposed.

The workers, organizing under the banner of Game Workers Alliance, are quality assurance (QA) testers at subsidiary Raven Software, a Wisconsin studio that works on Call of Duty. The testers are responsible for ensuring games run smoothly without any glitches for users.

Their efforts ramped up last year in response to “crunch,” the term for the final phase of game development, which can entail working twelve-to-fourteen-hour days with few, if any, days off for weeks at a time. After Activision laid off twelve QA testers in December, Raven QA testers threatened to walk out, organizing a work stoppage, an action that laid the groundwork for this week’s victory. As one worker at Activision told the Los Angeles Times, the stress of this schedule was compounded by her being a contract worker — a common arrangement in not only the games industry but the broader tech industry as well — which required her to “continually reapply for new positions within the company whenever her contracts end.” Soon after the workers began their union drive in January, Activision announced that it would convert 1,100 temporary QA contract workers to full-time work, raising their wages to $20 an hour.