RPS article with some quotes from the people involved:
“Today Raven QA, as a department, is demonstrating in protest of the layoffs on Friday. Raven QA’s team is essential to the studio’s day-to-day operations.”
"The termination of high-performing testers, while workload and profits are soaring, is an unacceptable action by the company and contradicts Raven’s goal of being an exemplary workplace in our industry.
"The goal of this demonstration is to ensure the continued growth of Raven. Everyone participating in today’s demonstration does so with the continued success of the studio at the forefront of their mind.
“To our leadership, we hope you’ll abide by our policy to lead responsibly. To our community, we hope you’ll join us today in demanding better working conditions for QA in the industry.”
You are skipping a lot of quotes from those articles
notably
“Several of those who were let go recently relocated to Wisconsin in anticipation of the return to in-person work. They did so without relocation assistance from Raven, due to reassurances from the studio that their workload was consistent,” Raven Software quality assurance contractors wrote in a joint news release.
Based on how negatively the QA team has reacted to these rounds of layoffs, it was clearly framed differently to those working there, regardless of whether these were contract-to-hire positions, it seems like their higherups were all but promising future full time employement with raises.
It feels like they were basically super busy, everything was going well, and then they just laid off people, even though their workload was high.
This does happen all of the time, but it appears that this particular case was a lot worse than most. Especially when the employees stated that their workloads were high, and many of those let go were essential to their team. This is clearly q4 cost-cutting at its worst. I can’t imagine cutting QA for a live service game a month after launch, it seems like this would be one of the busiest times except for maybe the months leading up to launch.
I’m still amazed that headless testing hasn’t proven more effective than meatbag testing for the kind of unskilled “try jumping through this wall for ten minutes” testing we’re talking about for low-wage contract QA stuff.
Here in Serious Biznass software world, basically nobody does manual smoke/regression testing if they can at all help it, and more specific feature testing is clearly, massively better accomplished by a professional (and professionally compensated) QA that has context for the product and the organization.
e: I guess it’s not necessarily an either/or, and it doesn’t take a ton of finds to make meatbags worth the spend if you pay them poorly enough.
What I don’t get, if it’s so unskilled, why are people moving across the country for those jobs? Surely you can find people wherever you have the studio, why encourage people to relocate?
Doing that to the degree that it would have meaningful value in a game environment means AI work and most game developers do not exactly have A+ AI engineering.
It’s a live service game that’s been running for almost two years now. The only real change coming is the map it’s played on and the addition of new weapons/gadgets that should already be thoroughly tested. It launches tomorrow with all that new content, which is totally different from rolling out a new game.
Also, Raven has been getting the whole Warzone codebase to a pretty good place the last couple months. It’s very likely they do not need as much headcount now.
With the number of people being so low, what’s to say these weren’t the weakest testers of the bunch? Just because the people still there think the people left go were “essential” doesn’t make it so.
I addressed exactly that. The people walking out claim that. Do you have inside info to know they are truthful here? Why do you believe that explicitly and not Brian Raffel, who founded the company?
@inactive_user Why? These are all independent studios under the Activision corporate structure. Raven is thousands of miles from Activision corporate HQ and has existed there for 31 years. You worked in the press. You know every studio is run differently.
Reading all the above, you all think that every Activision studio in the world is full of sexual abusers, workplace inequality, and QA people that should keep their jobs. Is that right?
Certainly corporate leadership created an environment for those things to exist, persist, and even flourish. Doesn’t mean any particular thing happened at any particular division, but leaves open the possibility.
I don’t think being a QA contractor at Raven was just like being Bobby’s assistant, but neither do I think Raven or TfB or Treyarch or whomever are unicorns that inherit no traits from their owners.
There’s a lot of complexity in trying to do automated testing for games. Some of it is because of the extremely tight integration everything has to the underlying 3d engine. This means it’s immensely harder to mock things out and thus every bit of your gameplay systems (some might not even be code but may be UE blueprints for example) needs the full 3d engine up and running. There are a lot of other issues too that we don’t have in the line of business application world.
Here’s a great talk on Sea of Thieves undertaking automated testing, the drawbacks they came across, and where manual testing was still required:
Here’s another one where Ubisoft talks about what it took to automate world data
Even as a non-game developer I found those pretty interesting.
