Activision Blizzard’s studio, the Raven Software doesn’t think it’s fair how the publisher laid off the contracted quality assurance (QA) workers.

During the weekend, we talked about how roughly a dozen of game testers who were contracted to work was being planned to be laid off by the Bobby Kotick-led publisher. However, the studio where they work/worked (Raven Software; known for Call of Duty: Warzone nowadays) didn’t stay silent about the situation, announcing that they intend to walk out in protest for how the QA team is being handled.

ABK Worker’s Alliance, the employee group within Activision Blizzard which fights for a change, announced the event on Twitter: “This team was told multiple times by Raven leadership that positive departmental changes were coming. These upcoming changes were also used as the reason why no team members received standard promotions or raise that was meant to be in place by March of 2021. Every member of the QA team, including those terminated on Friday, must be offered full-time positions. Those participating in this demonstration do so with the continued success of the studio at the forefront of their mind.”

Then, an Activision Blizzard spokesperson responded to Polygon: “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.” Meanwhile, Raven has reportedly been conducting meetings with the QA contractors to know if they’ll be promoted to full-time or become redundant.

But we have to ask a question: if Bobby Kotick, Activision Blizzard’s CEO (who still sits in that seat, even though there have been many requests of moving him out of it already), has admitted cutting his pay to the minimum the law allows, why not use the excess money to keep the people in question employed? And even then, we didn’t even mention how Call of Duty continues to grow at the rate the gaming industry does, bringing them virtually an infinite amount of money…

Source: Gamesindustry