King, the Stockholm-founded studio behind Candy Crush Saga, is heading toward its first strike after more than a year of failed talks over a collective bargaining agreement. Swedish unions Unionen and Sveriges Ingenjörer issued strike notice this week, setting a deadline of 5 a.m. on September 25 for King to sign an agreement or face a walkout at its Stockholm and Malmö offices.

What the unions are actually asking for

The dispute isn’t about a pay raise. A Swedish collective bargaining agreement, or kollektivavtal, sets standardized rules across pensions, insurance, working hours, and employees’ ability to influence conditions at their own workplace — protections that apply automatically once a company signs on, rather than being negotiated case by case. Roughly 550 King employees in Sweden currently work without that coverage. Sveriges Ingenjörer represents about 100 of them; Camilla Frankelius, the union’s head of negotiations, said “a strike is not something we take lightly,” but that members had made clear they wanted the union to escalate.

A year of talks, then a rejection by email

King’s Sweden union club has been pushing for an agreement for more than a year, according to the unions. The company rejected that request in June, with King president Todd Green telling staff in an email that the studio’s “current benefits offering is better for our employees” than what a collective agreement would provide. Unionen’s chief negotiator, Martin Wästfelt, said the union saw no other option after that rejection than to move toward strike action. Sweden’s National Mediation Office has since appointed independent mediators, who are now working against the September 25 deadline to broker a deal before any walkout begins.

The layoffs still hanging over King

The fight over job security isn’t happening in a vacuum. King cut roughly 200 positions in July 2025 — about 96 in Stockholm, 30 in Barcelona, and another 70 across London, Berlin, and remote roles — concentrated in level design, narrative writing, and UX. Entire narrative and UX writing teams were let go and, according to multiple reports at the time, replaced by AI tools those same employees had helped build. For a workforce that watched whole departments disappear into automation with little warning, a collective agreement’s standardized rules on hours, pensions, and workplace influence read less like a formality and more like insurance against a repeat.

Where this leaves King’s Swedish operations

King has been headquartered in Stockholm since its founding in 2003, and Candy Crush Saga remains one of the most consistently profitable mobile games ever made, generating billions in lifetime revenue for parent company Activision Blizzard — itself now part of Microsoft’s gaming division following the 2023 acquisition. That makes King a rare case: a studio with no shortage of money asking a fully unionized, collectively bargained workforce like the rest of its Swedish tech peers to instead accept individually offered benefits. If mediation fails and the September 25 deadline passes, it would be the first work stoppage at King’s Swedish offices, and a notable escalation for a company that has otherwise avoided the kind of organized labor standoffs now playing out elsewhere in Microsoft’s gaming division.

What comes next

Both sides have just over a week before the strike deadline, with mediators from Sweden’s National Mediation Office as the main path to a resolution. King has given no public indication it plans to reverse course before then, and the unions have shown no sign of backing down after a year of stalled talks. Whether or not the strike actually happens, the standoff adds King to a growing list of studios under Microsoft’s umbrella where workers are pushing, through very different means, for more say over how AI and job security get handled going forward.

For more on how organized labor has been reshaping Microsoft’s gaming division this year, see our coverage of Blizzard workers ratifying a union contract covering 1,900 employees, and for the broader financial backdrop driving these disputes, read our analysis of gaming’s record-profits, record-layoffs paradox.