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The game industry layoffs are really bad, but according to testimony gathered for The Jimquisition, it’s far worse than they look. It’s all thanks for the nasty tactics companies employ to obscure layoffs behind other forms of job termination.
#GameIndustry #Epic #Bethesda #CDProjektred #Layoffs #Money #JimSterling #Jimquisition #Games #JamesStephanieSterling #StephanieSterling #Gaming #Videogames
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I worked more than 10 years at an Activision studio (thank god, no longer do) and was hired as a full time employee as it was normal at the time, but as the years goes on, more and more people were contract workers. People that have been contract workers for 2-3 years an near the end, the majority new hire were contract employees (cause full time employees were resigning in mass, which at some point included me).
They were dangling that carrot in front of them, doing stuff like changing their actual title. They will VERY often do that to QA, cause they knew a lot of QAs were actually desperate people wanting to get into the game industry and went for QA because that was the job they could get, not because they wanted to do QA. So not only QA was on contract, low pay and basically paid with hopes and dreams, but they would often change the contract of some QA to be "Tech Designers" or "Tech Artists" that were essentially doing the job of designers and artists, but paid like QAs and once they didnt need them, they would switch them back to QA. I saw a designer that started QA, but was a designer for 2 years at that point, being switched back to QA, essentially forcing them to resign, that's another great way to hiding layoffs, you make the employee, HUM I MEAN CONTRACTER, want to quit instead.
CEOs are basically Fletcher from Whiplash but without any higher motive except money.
I was watching a bit of Warren Spector's lectures (from 2007) on youtube earlier this week, and there was a bit in the first lecture about unpaid overtime being absolutely necessary in the games industry, saying that the industry couldn't survive without it. Also a bit about testers working long hour for very little pay, hating the games they were testing, with the illusory carrot of a developer position being dangled in from of them. I will add that Spector never sounds gleeful or malicious about any of it, even once mentioning he would like to make games without exploiting workers.
The second lecture gets even better, as he sits down with Disney's HR manager. They repeatedly talk about how they definitely offer jobs if you're "good enough". It starts to sound rather nauseating after a while.
CDPR is functioning in Poland (I'm not sure where they pretend to have HQ to pay lower taxes, it changed too many times), and here it's still not easy to fire unionised workers. That's why most IT firms fear unionisation much more than even Jeff Bezos do. Of course, if fascists and paleo-libs will remain at the helm after coming elections, anything can happen, especially if someone inside CDPR's kingpins has any governmental friends (which means here: "a law is only a kind suggestion how you could behave, but nothing big"). So, no BioWare ending until law is changed.
4:36 I was looking away from the screen when I heard this line, and I thought "there's really only one thing the on-screen footage could be for this"
Sure enough I was mostly correct, although I can't say I saw Pennywise coming (and I don't just mean because of the censor bar WAHEY)
The 'Let's Shit on Bethesda' dance never gets old. If anything with time it just gets funnier as I keep forgetting about it then it comes out of nowhere in videos like this and it warms my little soul.
This sounds like ine of these business practices that are technically illegal but nobody dares to denounce because then they wouldn't get any jobs
"Your patrons pay you to destroy the AAA game industry"
Yes please. Did I miss that tier????
Ah Ubisoft executives arrested! Finally.
And I thought I took collecting retro games too seriously… you're slowly building an actual arcade! I'm still mad at Limited Run for sending me an Atari game that doesn't fit in my Atari!
So (And I need to stress here, I'm genuinely asking, I get that regardless of how cuddly they seem, executives are fuelled by the same shitty, money hungry assholery the entire capitalist structure is beholden to) Iwata actually said that and then purged a bunch of people?
I was head hunted by Unity a year or two ago to work for their e-learning development team. During the discussion they didn't really want to tell me the money I'd be making, just that it was 'competitive'. They said I couldn't do remote work and that it was hybrid in Montreal. I asked if they helped with moving expenses and they said no. I declined as this was a lot of risk on my end. 3 months later, several hundred employees were laid off.
'performance' based layoffs are in ALL lines of work now. It's not just a trans or games industry thing.
I've witnessed it myself first hand, If you see your job suddenly have VERY DIFFERENT requirements from you without even negotiations? There's a good chance they're looking for reasons to get rid of you and they need to build a case for it first.
As someone who worked as a 'contractor' for HP for nearly 15 years…… These practices are common through all of tech and is bullshit.
I'm not in the games industry, but this all sounds extremely familiar to a job I left a couple of years ago. We were salaried, so the manager claimed we needed to work overtime to get the job done, even if it meant no additional pay. But then when things slowed down in the winter time, he'd cut our pay to save costs. As people burnt out and left, he'd blame those people for imparting more work on those who stuck around. When I started, there were 14 people doing my job, and by the time I left, there were only 5.
loooooved the bethesda is bethetic comeback
re: Bethesda fans being skeleton warriors, I think there is this weird thing where people think if they like a game they have to like the company behind it. I remember with Rock Band 4 I would criticize things about it I felt was lacking compared to 3 and get told I need to support Harmonix, despite most of the original Rock Band staff being long gone from the company at that point.
Anytime I get to hear the Bethseda Bad song, I have a good day. Thank god for Stephanie.
The entire idea of publicly owned companies is antithetical to prosperity for exactly the reason you mention: publicly owned companies must grow infinitely. Privately owned companies don't have to. They might want to anyway, but it's not obligatory. They can decide "we're making enough revenue to stay stable. Let's just wait until we have an opportunity and not start selling our organs to boost stock prices."
years of working for shitty U.S. mega trucking companies was terrible and nearly drove me to suicide. I'd do it again to NOT work for Bethesda
Crunch is a wonderful example of how we just rephrase inhumane practices and act like they're not inhumane.
It is worth pointing out that the both the private and public sector seem to be making it common practice now to under-hire despite rising demand in the workplace. This is purely anecdotal evidence on my part, but i have seen many a workplace where, despite it being manifestly obvious that more staff is needed, management either cant hire because a higher authority prevents them (oft the case in the public sector), or wont hire (common in the private sector) and in both cases the objective of this is obvious; money.
Politicians want to cut the public service so they can go to their stupid white suburban constituents and boast about how they saved money on the budget and therefore are fiscally prudent (meanwhile all the roads and bridges they refuse to spend money repairing are literally crumbling around them).
In the private sector the motive is much simpler; management/shareholders want a greater slice of the pie, and it makes it easier to steal more of it if they dont need to go through the motions of divying it up amongst more staff; overworking an undersized staff compliment is just a half-baked effort to funnel more profit into the hands of the shareholders, owners, and c-suite. Never mind that running a business that way is a long term disaster; business has repeatedly demonstrated that they'd rather have 1 cookie now than 2 later, especially if having 1 cookie now means labour gets zero cookies.
I wonder how much this has been ongoing the whole time outside the game industry, vs how much other industries are learning bad lessons from the games industry, and trying to apply them to make their own companies into more efficient scam machines.
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. And triple AAA game industry.
Beware if companies start moving from places like California to texas to save a buck..
Texas is still stuck at $7.75 minimum wage.. yet has a almost 9% sales taxs on all goods, zero protection for workers right.. very anti union, and doesn't force employers to pay into unemployment (average business can pay as low as $10.00 usd a month for unemployment) its also not allowed for contract and part-time workers to get unemployment..
Also the rent double over the pandemic so it can be down right evil 😈
I tried for yrs to get out.. while I see so many stream in (thinking following the jobs and things will be good..)
If a company wanted to move.. it's only for the worst
I worked several freelance jobs over the past 2 years and I can testify at how much the industry has turned careers into 'gigs' and nothing substantial for people who wish to break into gaming, illustration, comics, animation, filmmaking.
I literally created BG designs for the intro of an episode of Black-Ish and no one, not even the name of the studio that was commissioned to create it, was credited on that episode in the end credits
It's like what Kevin Smith said about the industry as a whole– you fail upwards to get anywhere and anyone who is truly successful/good at their job are kept at the bottom.
That's the whole reason why the strike took place and why many more are expected to happen again.
damn your content never comes up in my feed, glad your still at it!
A performance based layoff implies that the job slot will open back up. I wonder how many of these companies started interviewing new candidates to replace the cut workers
i worked at a (small, local) coffee shop that used performance as a reason to “let me go” which was such bullshit cuz the real reason was that i was making a fuss about there not being adequate raises/pay and then all of a sudden im written up for performance and fired by the end of the month 🙃 constructive dismissal aint just a big corporation thing unfortunately :/
Did you know bobby kotick was in moneyball??
I missed this Bethesda dance! And i didn't know that, until now
My first job in tech was as a contractor (web dev, not games). It felt like every three to six months I was on edge about whether or not I would get to be hired full time. When COVID came around the company ended all of their contracts early, resulting in hundreds of people left without jobs (or health insurance) in March 2020.
I did remember Unit 13. I actually really liked it.
Did you just show a clip from Wishmaster 2?? Holy shit!!!
One of the new tactics is changing work from home positions into in-office positions. If you don't move or quit, you get fired for cause. Lots of people quit. So they shed headcount without ever actually laying anyone off.
This awful stuff is common in the tech industry as a whole. And to be frank as a programmer myself this is why I don't hold FAANG jobs nowhere near in high regard as I used to. Because even if you do get a high-paying job at one of those companies, who knows what unrealistic expectations their investors expect of them. So at a drop of a hat they might decide to do a "silent layoff" by either making things harder, set unrealistic expectations, or use any other sneaky tactics to set you up to fail and force you out. And if you end up not being forced out the environment that kind of decision making creates is one you don't want to be a part of. Amazon is notorious for their "rank-and-yank" performance reviews, and is honestly what this video reminds me of the most. And if you factor in other things like rescinded job offers, you can only come to the conclusion that while tech jobs pay very well and look good on a resume, they aren't what they used to be. And this is just for highly coveted software engineering positions, which doesn't even cover the even worse BS that people like temp contractors and QA go through. So yeah I won't work at AAA video game studios and I look at major tech company jobs with a huge skeptical eye, even at companies that aren't as bad like NVIDIA or Apple. Times have changed, and I won't put up with office Social Darwinism for a second. Even if it is for a big paycheck at a well known company.
The quicker people stop sucking Nintendos corpo cocc and realize they’re another heartless corporation the better
Damn, I'm not even a patron but if you're actually gonna destroy the triple-A game industry, I might just join Patreon!
This isn't just the video game industry, its ALL industries.
The amount of people doing the labour of full time employees while only being a contract worker is insane. I worked for a very large company as a contract worker where in my contract I was only supposed to be working 24 hours a week maximum, which I was happy with and was what I requested because I was doing my own thing on the side that I wanted to focus on. After 1 month I was asked to start working 50-60 hours a week. If I accepted then they might bump up my pay when I renew my contract, but if I didn't then they didn't know if they could renew my contract, along with a vague threat that they were very well known in the industry and that not accepting would look very bad on me for future job searches.
There really needs to be better labour laws in place that make it more expensive to hire contract workers then to just hire someone full time.
As always, a very scathing and true parsing of the current state of the gaming industry, Thank God for you, Stpehanie.
Its funny how people loved now cynical Steph was before their transition, and how annoyed they are afterwards. Nothing changed except their appearance and pronouns. Oh and some hilarious trans jokes. They haven't changed how they called out publishers for treating workers poorly, treating consumers poorly, and bigotry in the gaming sphere. Same sexual and gay jokes they made before their transition (I remember Sterling making dick sucking jokes at least as early as after they left the escapist, maybe during their time at escapist?). Same boglin jokes. They always dressed eccentric. The only thing that changed is their hat, they wear a lot more pink, they make jokes about their boobs, and have new pronouns.
But yeah suddenly the cynicism is too negative. Then they go agree with some cishet dude yelling about how AAA devs are evil.
oh wow shit on bethesda clip is back!
“Performance” has been a long standing tactic of capitalism. Jack Welch introduced the concept of sacking the bottom 10% performing members of staff every year to boost performance. The member of staff’s contribution or historic performance was irrelevant.