Activision is laying off dozens of employees despite “doing nothing wrong”

On By Garmin Philip

At Activision Blizzard there are again dozens of layoffs. Many employees from quality assurance are laid off.

Another day, another negative headline from Activision Blizzard. Right at the start of Advent, Activision Blizzard is in the process of laying off a number of employees. Over a dozen have already been given notice, others are still worried about their jobs.

What happened? As from a report by The Washington Post shows, between December 3rd and December 8th, some Raven Software employees will be asked for private interviews. It is a question of whether the employees will be terminated or whether they will switch to permanent employment. More than a dozen of the employees in quality assurance – more than a third of this area – have already been informed of the termination.

Raven Software is a studio owned by Activision Blizzard and is primarily responsible for games such as Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War and Call of Duty: Warzone.

What the quality assurance?
The employees in quality assurance, often just called “QA”, are basically game testers who put the content through its paces. They write bug reports and often play a few passages over and over again to try out any eventuality and discover bugs or problems that the developers may not have noticed.

QA employees are important to the vast majority of games, but they often have an unjustified reputation that their job is all about playing video games.

“It’s embarrassing to work for Activision Blizzard”

An anonymous employee told the Washington Post that one felt “hurt and betrayed”. Most of the employees who were called to meetings have been fired and told that they have “done nothing wrong”.

Austin O’Brien, one of Raven Software’s community managers, said on Twitter that he was “feeling burned out”.

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That being said:

My friends in the QA at Raven have been promised for months that Activision will work to create a better pay structure and raise their wages.

Today, one at a time, key team members were called to meetings and told that they would be fired.

Apparently not even the project managers in QA knew about the impending layoffs, as another employee (Evan Avillanoza) reports:

Our team is destroyed and absolutely no one will want to work, even if they get promoted. I was toying with the idea of ​​leaving anyway because of the reputation Activision has built in the past and I just don’t want to support this company any longer. … I think it’s embarrassing to work for Activision.

The affected employees will continue to work for Activision until January 28, but can leave the company beforehand if they wish.

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