There are TONS of art outsourcing companies, just mostly not in the US. I would bet that every large AAA team is working with at least one if not multiple art outsourcing groups.
And more and more there are smaller dev houses that specialize in helping out with larger productions, like Sumo’s various studios. For example, they’ll be responsible for specific levels, or other discrete elements using the primary studio’s tools.
For sure, it is a completely different industry than most others. Closest analogue is the movie industry, where studios can shutter due to volatility.
Most of the workers on those products have unions, which exist to help with that volatility.
Keep doing shitty stuff like overpromising promotions, you’re just going to have an even harder time attracting employees, and definitely make people more interested in unions.
I knew a bunch of people who worked QA at Activision Value down the road here in Minnesota. “What’s Activision Value?” you ask. Friend, Activision Value was/is (I think they rebranded?) a division of Activision that primarily shat out lowest-possible-budget branded tie-ins built by contracted dev shops in places like Czech Republic and wherever else you can find people who have heard of this “software” thing but don’t require more than a sandwich every other week or so to feed their families.
Activision Value did…not have humane QA practices. Why they even employed Americans I have no idea – possibly because localization was a constant struggle and they needed fluent English speakers? I dunno. But man, there were some stories.
This was idk 15 years ago at this point so who knows. But yeah, not inspiring.
It’s called managing, they’re making new stuff all the time; maybe not with the exact amount of people, but I’d be astonished if by and large it isn’t on a company of that size. But, yeah, I know it’s not an ActiBilzz exclusive, but if I’m not going to get pissed * at the biggest parties who could well afford to without losing a thing, what would I be angry at for destroying the will to live of the working class, a highly specialized segment at that, with no future to look to with whatever health they’re left with? They could just give them a token christmas bonus, and no one would even be talking about it, but no, it’s their right to have yearly christmas firings, damn you! Sorry, layoffs from endless temporary contracts, got to be legally correct here or I’m an insane populist who hates businesses.
And, yeah, as above, to some extent, it means no one is going to, or should, be that motivated about final quality, in case you somehow still care about Call of Creed Cry XXII, and you don’t want the same bugs over and over again on your shiny painted over leftovers from 10 years ago.
* well, not literally, because I’d be raging 24/7; at this point, this doesn’t even register as news to me
It’s starting to feel like this is becoming a Capitalism is Bad thread. For those who want to have that discussion, I believe it already exists in the P&R forum.
Of course nothing’s going to stop anyone from continuing to post more general thoughts about how they hate how corporations operate, but I would hope we could keep those complaints specific to gaming.
The remaining QA workers walking out doesn’t really settle anything. I don’t know how you could accurately parse at a distance how much of that is solidarity for people wronged, and how much of that is their own self-interest and seizing the moment with sympathetic publicity. To be clear, I’m not saying it’s just the latter, but I also don’t see how you could rule that out.
You can’t discuss the serious business of making games without political discussion, the power dynamics of violent harassment don’t appear in a vacuum. Case in point… And, IMHO, the grind them down and let them go of highly trained workers to is a pretty specific criticism, even if not exclusive.
But, really, and again, if this is the only way we can have capitalism, and I’m pretty sure it’s not, it’s not going back up in support anytime soon.
This is the weirdest threadcop I’ve seen here in a minute.
Except that I don’t think that narrative makes any sense. These are the testers who were kept on and got raises, if I understand right? And they made no other demands for themselves? So they’re risking their jobs with a walkout for…?
(And it is risking their jobs. The press coverage and the “fashionability” of walkouts won’t last forever. I guarantee they’re all very aware of that fact. Yet they’re doing it anyway.)
It’s worth mentioning that this team apparently works on Warzone. It’s a live game.
There should always be work for them to do, without needing to keep them on for an indeterminate amount of time until the next game.
Yeah.
So, seriously though, so many other industries understand how to manage people in a better way. Contractors or not, it is stupid for them to remove people that could/have been valuable to them. If they are planning on pumping/dumping people willing to relocate for their company they should probably just contract things out entirely and not try to do some sort of weird contract-to-hire internal B.S. clearly it went over very poorly in this case.
I mean, part of working for a big publisher should be protecting you from those issues in sales and critical reception, because they are a big entity and pushing out lots of games at all times. Tying employment to review scores is not a great plan, and not sustainable. Definitely lots of better ways to handle things like this.
I think in this particular instance, Actiblizz heavily overpromised their QA dept with permanent positions, and didn’t follow through, which was a pretty shitty thing to do.
I mean, they were paying Kotick 154 million (with stock and salary) a year for what? To get themselves into a PR nightmare? It is pretty clear Activision/Blizzard doesn’t know where to spend their money wisely. I wonder how many more QA staff they could have held had they not been lining the pockets of a man clearly not fit to run a company.
“People don’t want to work anymore!”
“People don’t want to work FOR YOU anymore”
One of my former MSFT colleagues ran that studio for a while. He once told me they had shipped 75 titles in a single year! I had shipped one in that some time…
If there is one thing businesses hate, it’s having to employ people for mission critical work that ebbs and flows. They should probably just grow up instead of imagining they can create 100% utilization of all staff at all times.
The fact that Call of Duty is all in on live service games with constant updates changes the situation a lot from what you describe, and that’s ignoring the fact that Activision shops a Call of Duty game every year on top of Warzone and Mobile. Realistically, how long before they were going to need to hire up for the 2022 title? Cynically, it sounds like they just trashed a part of the team knowing they could hire new people in 4 weeks at starting wages instead of paying the higher rates they had been promising the existing employees.
Those people are also compensated like they will need to live off the proceeds from a single project until the next one comes around. Because of unions that understand that need.
Ah, thanks, I should’ve read more before jumping in.
Raven QA are walking out again today and being joined by QA teams across the Activision organization.
Here’s the WaPo reporting on the layoffs.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2021/12/03/raven-software-layoffs/
Notable…
The company told quality assurance testers at certain studios across the company Friday that Activision Blizzard has ended its contract with staffing partner Tapfin and will expand its contract with Volt, another staffing provider, so that current testers at some studios will now become Volt employees.
This really seems like typical layoffs accompanying changes in contracts and company needs.
Re: the walkout today…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2021/12/06/raven-software-walkout/
Also notable…
Raven studio head Brian Raffel told employees in a studio-wide meeting Monday that he didn’t consider the terminations to be layoffs; instead he described them as temporary employment agreements that weren’t renewed, according to people who were present at the meeting. Raffel apologized and said that the communication could have been clearer, and that the meetings to hand out terminations took longer than expected due to having to meet one on one with individuals.
Words have been put to action and it seems clear that Raven employees don’t have this same view. And they’re willing to walk off their jobs over it. So I’m a bit skeptical that everything is as cut and dried as Brian Raffel is making it out to be.
Either that or they’re just fed up with have no job stability and being treated like disposable cogs, which if so good for them. I’m not in the game industry but we still go 18-24 months before release cycles. I can’t imagine throwing away our QA talent every year and retraining a fresh batch every release. Does the game industry really place so little importance on domain knowledge??
It’s a total entry level job. You’ve played hundreds or thousands of video games… what do you think?
Again, I will note that Activision being in the news recently makes this into something it likely isn’t if that wasn’t the case as it seems like standard industry practice. It’s easy to keep kicking the dog when it’s down. Should people have more job security? Absolutely! Is it true that people have that security in ANY software industry? Not really… unless you have unions.
Playing the role of apologist for corporations is a thankless job.