Developers and QA testers at Raven Software, the studio behind Call of Duty: Warzone, have staged a walkout following Activision’s termination of several QA contracts. Activision laid off around 30% of Raven Software’s QA staff last Friday, after promising “positive departmental changes” earlier in March. Some employees even relocated to Wisconsin without assistance prior to the layoffs.
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.
— ABetterABK ? ABK Workers Alliance (@ABetterABK) December 6, 2021
“Every member of the QA team, including those terminated on Friday, must be offered full time positions” the ABK Workers Alliance said in a public statement, outlining the demands of the walkout. “Terminating the contracts of high performing testers in a time of consistent work and profit puts the health of the studio at risk.”
The layoffs are doubly concerning when you take into account that Activision reportedly relocated 32 quality assurance testers from its Austin office to work on Warzone. Before that, QA at the Austin office was working on the recently released Call of Duty: Vanguard. Despite relocating due to the “incredible scale of testing needed for the Warzone Pacific map”, Activision decided to lay off a total of 12 QA testers at Raven Softworks, many of whom have been working on Warzone for some time.
Many of those laid off were also in good standing and took a shocking 5 weeks of overtime leading up to the release of the new Caldera map. Worse yet, the “positive departmental changes” Raven Software promised back in March were made in exchange for standard promotions and pay raises.
In a statement to Kotaku, an Activision representative said that the layoffs were part of a plan to convert “approximately 500 temporary workers to full-time employees in the coming months”. How exactly a layoff of 30% of the QA team works into these promotions is yet to be seen.
[Source: Uppercutcrit, Kotaku]
