Activision Blizzard customer service and QA employees say they are underpaid and overworked

“Use, discard, repeat.”

Activision Blizzard is having trouble maintaining its quality assurance (QA) testers and customer service representatives. That’s partly by design; workers are hired on a temporary basis. But the work that QA and customer service workers do at Activision Blizzard, in offices in California, Texas and Minnesota, is demanding, employees said, especially considering low pay, the intense crisis and mistreatment by employees. customers.

Current and former employees who spoke with Polygon described feeling defeated by their time at Activision Blizzard, due to a combination of the brutal crisis and the devaluation of their positions.

“I cried when I got the job,” a current employee told Polygon. “I was very excited to be part of the process and to be in this industry. It has always been my dream to work in video games. And now I feel crushed. “

“The company took a lot from me,” another former QA employee, Sami King, told Polygon.

A large part of Activision Blizzard’s QA department, which works on game franchises like Call of Duty, are contract workers employed in offices far from the publisher’s headquarters in California, in places like Austin, Texas, and Eden Prairie, Minnesota. Hundreds of contract workers work with a few full-time salaried employees who lead the quality control process to identify and report game bugs. (The Blizzard employees Polygon spoke to said they were employed by the company itself as salaried workers, while the Activision side houses the majority of the company’s contract workers.)

Fifteen current and former employees in both QA and customer service told Polygon that the structure of Activision Blizzard’s QA and customer service programs, specifically in its Texas and Minnesota offices, makes workers feel undervalued and exploited. . (A dozen additional Activision Blizzard employees corroborated these reports in statements sent to the press, including Polygon, through the ABK Workers Alliance.) These employees described a constant turnover of quality control workers, with people working on three-month contracts with no pay breaks between new contracts. Contracts work in cycles; The workers said company policy specifies a certain amount of time in a contract before a worker has to be out of contract again, also for a designated period of time. Then the cycle repeats. This creates a system where it is challenging to really advance a career in QA; workers can’t afford do not they have a job for three months, and many often just find something new and never return to Activision Blizzard.

Workers pointed to the company culture described in the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing lawsuit filed last month as the root of a company-wide problem. In the lawsuit, employees alleged widespread sexism and misconduct in the workplace perpetuated by leadership that leaked to all levels of the company. Activision Blizzard workers told Polygon that leaders in Texas and Minnesota have been positioning the lawsuit and its alleged toxic culture as a problem specific to Blizzard Entertainment only, which is frequently cited in court documents. But workers at other studios told Polygon that’s not true: Problems are in every facet of the company, and workers hired in both QA and customer service say they feel vulnerable due to the lack of stability. labor.

The 15 current and former employees Polygon spoke with, as well as most of the workers who emailed statements through a representative, said the pay is exceptionally low, with rates as low as $ 12 an hour. During periods of crisis, some people said they worked up to seven days a week for at least 10 hours a day. Some workers said they struggled with their mental and physical health during these times, but felt compelled to work anyway, simply because they were not otherwise paid enough to survive.

Activision Blizzard did not respond to Polygon’s request for comment. Current workers said the leadership has yet to address the demands raised in July.

In the run-up to 2020 launch Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, the workers said they would have a day off every three weeks or a month. “That was his gift to you during the crisis,” said a current employee. “I know some people who have […] He worked 28 days in a row. Twelve hour shifts. That was probably the most chaotic moment. “

“[The pay] it’s never enough, ”said another current employee. “I just want to be able to afford the luxury of living.”

Jessica Gonzalez, a current Blizzard Entertainment employee who has worked in QA at Activision and Treyarch, told Polygon that the company should be held liable for allegedly creating these working conditions that allow abusers to operate on these systems. He said the structure creates a “rat race” culture because of the uncertainty of it all.

“Job security is so uncertain that people feel the need to use these avenues to be seen and enter the gaming industry,” Gonzalez said. “The imbalance of power created by these actions actively enables psychological damage and abuse towards quality assurance. We believe in the product we work on, we love games, we love the community. We love what we do. And I feel like that is used to pay us low wages, to gamble with our livelihood by hanging this carrot full time over our heads so that we do all we can, do all the extra time we can, to be seen as the person who is willing. . do anything for the company. And then his contract is extended. “

Without a clear route for advancement, Activision Blizzard reinforces a misconception, workers said, that QA is unskilled work, “something a monkey could do,” a source told Polygon. In reality, outsourced workers doing QA for Activision Blizzard are doing crucial and tedious work, however these workers told Polygon that superiors often emphasized to them that “real” developers are more important and that workers from QA are easily replaceable. New people are onboard every week, with massive hiring periods coupled with busy periods, leading to many new testers during crisis periods where people work up to seven days a week.

“The conditions for [Call of Duty: Black Ops] Cold War they were horrible, but that’s their best-selling Call of Duty game today, reinforcing that, ‘Yes, these methods work. Why would we spend money? [for better practices]? ‘”A current employee told Polygon.

Several employees told Polygon about situations in which they alleged an imbalance of power between full-time employees and contract workers, creating a toxic environment. Some reported cases of sexual harassment that were allegedly ignored by Human Resources. Workers described a culture in which quality assurance and customer service departments were isolated from other parts of the company; Most of the QA workers Polygon spoke to said they couldn’t speak to developers directly.

Current and former Activision Blizzard employees have joined in solidarity over the past few weeks, staging a strike and demanding that leaders take action and take responsibility for the cultural issue that allegedly disproportionately affects marginalized workers. But contract workers, while still heavily involved in worker movements, say they are reluctant to report misconduct or participate in leadership-proposed “listening sessions” because the contract structure places them in a position so precarious that workers feel they could be fired at any time. weather. Three sources confirmed that, in some cases, hired QA workers weren’t even invited to the proposed listening sessions – specifically, Texas office workers who were hired by a third-party agency. Despite working solely on Activision Blizzard products, these workers are even further removed from inclusion in the company.

Workers said these working conditions also extend to customer service employees throughout the company. Like quality control, customer service is considered a “low-skilled” job within the development process. The pay is low and the work is underrated and often challenging. A current customer service employee said that managers often make the department feel like a burden: “a cost, not a revenue-generating department.”

Several customer service employees described how to deal with verbal abuse at the hands of angry players, such as threats and slurs. A former customer service employee recalled an instance during World of Warcraft: Battle for AzerothThe launch, in which there was extended downtime, when a player told customer service that he wished Blizzard’s office had caught fire in the 2018 California wildfires. Another former customer service employee described instances in which angry gamers threatened to report to company offices. Some workers said it was especially taxing given the way they felt perceived by the rest of the company, along with the low wages.

Several workers said customer service often feels the brunt of the anger during disputes, even after the DFEH lawsuit. “While these comments may not be directed at me personally, they come at a psychological cost and we are told to simply remember [that] ‘We are not the ones who are angry,’ “said a Blizzard employee. “It’s a bit difficult to help someone who tells me to kill myself every day, all because of a video game.”

QA testers described having to encounter similar verbal abuse from players during live audiences. “It was definitely a problem that I saw affect multiple people,” said a current quality control worker. “It was a good time to work seven days a week to hear the players say insults all day.”

The system of separating contract workers from other parts of the company has allowed for top-down misbehavior, the workers said. People felt as if the leadership devalued and dehumanized the workers in these departments, reducing people to just “bodies on a project.”

“That’s where the formula for abuse comes in,” González said. “That’s where I think Activision Blizzard should be held accountable. There is definitely a root in the rot. And it is something that needs to be addressed and corrected. ”