Microsoft bought ZeniMax for $7.5 billion in 2021, giving the Xbox-maker control of ZeniMax's well-known game publishing division Bethesda Softworks and popular game franchises such as The Elder Scrolls, Doom and Fallout.“Throughout the industry, the quality assurance departments are treated poorly, paid very little, and treated as replaceable cogs,” said Dayberry, who has worked for five years at ZeniMax’s Rockville, Maryland headquarters on games such as Fallout, Prey and The Evil Within.The worker-friendly pledge sought to appeal to U.S. regulator concerns under President Joe Biden about the labor implications of massive business mergers, though it didn't stop the Federal Trade Commission from suing last month to block Microsoft's planned Activision Blizzard acquisition.Dayberry said Microsoft's neutrality promise gave workers confidence that there wouldn’t be any “retaliation or union-busting, which there has been none of.”Microsoft's green light allowed the ZeniMax union certification to go through a third-party arbitrator rather than the lengthier process typically overseen by the NLRB.Microsoft is an outlier in the way tech companies have been behaving.”The unionizing workers are based in Hunt Valley and Rockville, Maryland, as well as the Texas cities of Austin and Dallas."