Activision Blizzard: Employees talk about their difficult working conditions

Like a survey published in 2018 by the must-have Jason Schreier, it is within the "QA" department (for Quality Assurance, the small hands that test your games to try to refine the details and 'In extracting the vilains bugs) that the Polygon Nicole Carpenter journalist went to collect some testimonies between Texas and Minnesota.

THIS IS NOT A METHOD

As at Ubisoft French, pointing last summer for allowing the same kind of corporate culture, the revelations of the Californian survey did not fail to react internally. But this time, the dual character of the company makes it possible to return the ball: some employees believe that the management problems are exclusive to Blizzard, when others say that all structures are impacted.

But here, it is mostly the working conditions of the QA teams that are denounced, the interested parties referring to particularly unstable positions and submitted to an infernal turnover, which keeps the teams in a certain precariousness:

The safety of employment is so uncertain that people need these little jobs to be seen and getting place in the industry. This imbalance allows to abuse and exert psychological abuse on QA teams. They wave the carrot of a full time so that we do the most overtime possible, so that one becomes the one or the one that will do everything for the company. And finally, they simply renew your short contract.

Generally little integrated with the rest of the development, the department employees testify to the generally un flatplacement remarks they are witnesses, their position being considered a loss expense. The returns of the public are not better, and the absence of rest obviously does not help to take a step back. On several occasions, Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War is cited as the worst example of what could be done at Activision:

It's great when you have to work seven days a week and make you insult all day by players. For Black Ops Cold War, we had a day of rest every three to four weeks. I saw people chaining 12 hours days for 28 days in a row. Working conditions were abominable, but it's the best-selling episode of Call of Duty so far, why would they change their methods?

* If Activision Blizzard has already announced to Placeun Audit led by a law firm already challenged by employees, Polygon says that several short contracts of the QA department have not been invited to speak on the subject. * Let's leave the word one last time:

Activision Blizzard should be held responsible, there is something rotten at the root. We must address this problem and set it.