The mood at Raven Software (co-developer of Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War) should be rushing into the basement right now, because apparently the QA team is being thinned out enormously.
Update:
The employees at Raven Software don’t seem to want to put up with anything. Not only did the strike continue, employees from other studios also joined in solidarity, including QA staff from the Texas and Minnesota offices, but colleagues from Blizzard in Irvine also took to the streets. The demand is still that the laid-off employees are taken back and receive full-time contracts. A total of around 200 employees are now said to be involved in the protests.
Update 06.12.2021:
According to Bloomberg, the remaining employees are apparently unwilling to accept the layoffs. Accordingly, a large part of the QA team has now gone on strike to demonstrate against the layoffs and to demand that the layoffs be reversed.
Filed to Bloomberg Terminal: Most of a team of around 40 QA testers at Raven Software, which works on Call of Duty Warzone, are walking off the job to protest a sudden layoff that began on Friday. They say they’ll be walking out until the layoff is reversed. Story shortly
– Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) December 6, 2021
In the meantime, Activision Blizzard has also spoken to Kotaku about the layoffs. According to this, around 500 temporary workers should get full-time contracts in the coming months. In this context, the contracts of around 20 employees from various studios would not be extended.
Original message:
Raven Software has one Report to the Washington Post according to the quality assurance team members were invited to meetings between December 3rd and 8th. In these meetings there seems to be pretty good news for some and very bad news for others. Part of the team is apparently being promoted and given full-time contracts including an increase in hourly wages, while another part will be fired with effect from January 28, 2022. Apparently, a third of the team is said to have been exposed to the air so far.
I am gutted right now. My friends in QA at Raven were promised, for months, that Activision was working towards a pay restructure to increase their wages.
Today, one by one, valuable members of the team were called into meetings and told they were being let go.
— Austin O’Brien (@eyyohbee) December 3, 2021
The dismissed employees are furious, Activision has been promising a revision of the salary structure for months in order to secure a better income. Instead, many of the employees are now without a job. All the more bitter since many had to move to Madison only recently for the job. The fear is also that the remaining employees will now have more work to do and morale will go downhill.
The background to the layoffs is apparently a change in the personnel service provider from the previous partner Tapfin to another company called Volt, which is apparently taking over the employees who are not affected by the layoffs. The manner should not serve to improve the already lousy mood due to the events at Activision Blizzard in the past few weeks.
With Double Agent, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War gets a new game mode with Season 5, which is presented in the latest trailer.
