Activision Blizzard QA staff and other developers are protesting staff layoffs at Raven Software.
Employees at Raven Software, which is owned by Activision Blizzard, indicated this week that they will hold a walkout in protest of last week’s quality assurance layoffs. Twelve QA testers at Raven Software lost their jobs last week in a rather unfair manner.
After moving to Wisconsin at their own cost and receiving many assurances from the studio that not only were their positions secure but that they would soon see favorable adjustments in their pay structure, executives summoned the 12 employees to an office for summary termination.
In a statement from the remaining QA staff at Raven Software, it was said:
“Terminating the contracts of high-performing testers in a time of consistent work and profit puts the health of the studio at risk. Additionally, these actions go directly against the positive culture that Raven has created over the years. The end goal of this walkout is to ensure the continued growth of Raven as a studio and to foster a positive community for everyone who works there.”
The employees at Activision Blizzard have one single demand:
“That every member of the QA team, including those terminated on Friday, must be offered full-time positions.”
Representatives of the QA team say that the team is mostly working on Call Of Duty: Warzone which happens to be a live-service game that requires constant updates and therefore the QA team is deemed absolutely necessary.
The Activision-Blizzard-King (ABK) Workers Alliance is a group of Activision Blizzard employees that was formed early this year in the wake of sexual assault allegations against the business. Raven has already received its backing. ABK claims that everyone at Raven is protesting for the sake of the studio’s continued success.
When approached by the gaming news giant Kotaku, Activision Blizzard stated in an email:
“ Activision Publishing is growing its overall investment in its development and operations resources. We are converting approximately 500 temporary workers to full-time employees in the coming months. Unfortunately, as part of this change, we also have notified 20 temporary workers across studios that their contracts would not be extended.”
This is the third such walkout by Activision Blizzard employees over the past five months, which just proves that the employees have had enough and won’t stand by and be treated unfairly any longer.
It will be interesting to see if Activision Blizzard recovers from all this protest action and how many more times will the employees be forced to stage “Walk-outs” against the leadership of the company.