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[Kotaku] The Human Cost Of Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 by Jason Schreier
- Thread starter dex3108
- Start date
Unfortunately, this treatment of contractors vs employees isn't isolated to the game industry. Much of what was mentioned I've also seen first hand at companies I've worked at. On the flip side, the cases where employees and contractors are treated equally have created friction between the two groups, because employees feel more entitled to preferential treatment over temporary labor, regardless of role. Some cases, they are correct, in that a contractor could receive higher pay per hour with similar benefits offered by their vendor, and all the perks an employee receives (like company parties, work life balance, etc.). Employees want better benefits, better pay, more work life flexibility and employment protection over their contractor colleagues.
But this Volt vendor seems particularly problematic. It seems they are trying to maximize their margins and continue their relationship with Treyarch at any cost, in return for a prolonged engagement. They should be investigated further about how they are exploiting their resources, I would expect for senior management's benefit. I would imagine those guys are also pulling into their parking lots with the Teslas and Jaguars as well.
But this Volt vendor seems particularly problematic. It seems they are trying to maximize their margins and continue their relationship with Treyarch at any cost, in return for a prolonged engagement. They should be investigated further about how they are exploiting their resources, I would expect for senior management's benefit. I would imagine those guys are also pulling into their parking lots with the Teslas and Jaguars as well.
Just your friendly reminder that beyond the hype, beyond the smiles and the puff pieces, this industry is as vampiric as other entatainment industries.
Unionise people !!!!!!
Thanks Jason, your works are always informative and a bright spot in the otherwise desolate landscape of games journalism.
Unionise people !!!!!!
Thanks Jason, your works are always informative and a bright spot in the otherwise desolate landscape of games journalism.
Jesus fucking Christ, what a complete nightmare in every possible way, lives being sucked out of creatives for a product that only benefits the higher ups. Activision and EA wont ever change it seems. I hope devs find a better job elsewhere. That union needs to happen quickly, shit like this shouldn't happen.
They don't work for Treyarch. As such another agency would replace their current employer.
That's really horrible and almost like the worst part in some sick way.
I wont wade into it in the context of games but there is absolutely an important division between skilled labor requiring specific education and knowledge and labor that has no real prerequisites or necessary training to perform.
This is sad, but nothing will change until workers walk out during crunch. It feels like theres a new story about this every month at a new dev. EA, Riot, Injustice's dev just over the past 6 months.
The next two CODs will likely break new records for the franchise since its a reboot followed by a likely cross gen console release. It sounds like the QA testers here are treated like paid interns who will be gone a few months later.
I wonder how many QA get brought on full-time each year?
The next two CODs will likely break new records for the franchise since its a reboot followed by a likely cross gen console release. It sounds like the QA testers here are treated like paid interns who will be gone a few months later.
I wonder how many QA get brought on full-time each year?
Asking them to work hours without the perk of having AC?
I mean I can get some of the stuff like parking in a separate lot or not having access to developer lunches or exclusion from bonuses or exclusion from company health surveys if you really want to push the legal angle (although that's clearly not a healthy productive working environment), but not allowing friendships with developers? Only notifying them of weekend work the night before? Treated with contempt?
I probably wasn't being clear - where I work that is how things are done, to some extent. Admittedly my team isn't nearly the size of Treyarch's, but still, we're not a tiny team. Obviously we still have QA leads, but instead of the leads being the only ones who prioritise and assign bugs, the regular QA folk are trusted to do so as well. Perhaps it's because we don't seem to have a very high QA turnover - our QA are pretty familiar with what should be what priority, and so on. If they aren't they bump it up to the leads. This is typically only for certain categories of bug though. Other stuffs gets put in a backlog and then triaged out in a meeting elsewhere.
If we find stuff assigned to us we don't feel is right, that the priority is wrong, we just bump it back to one of the leads with a comment. It works for us; we recently launched a pretty large project and a few of us came in to work on the weekend to ensure everything went smoothly and fight fires if necessary. It basically wasn't necessary and save for one major issue that ended up not being on our end, everything went fine.
I recognize that. Everyone has some skills. But I think you understand what I meant. I say this as someone who used to work retail.
It disturbs me that we live in a society where some fuck boi executive gets millions in bonus money but the fucking overnight QA team can't get fucking AC.
This is fucking enraging.
This is fucking enraging.
It's cool reading some behind the scenes stuff life how that 2v2 campaign was scrapped because that sounds awesome. I also think that including those development decisions aren't as much as negative other than the impact it has on crunch so I want to isolate that as part for the course as things go through lots of changes during development.
A few other salient points have been brought up but I would love to read more about this Volt company as some here clearly didn't read the whole piece. I want these big devs to be held accountable too but this isn't as clean cut as it seems.
A few other salient points have been brought up but I would love to read more about this Volt company as some here clearly didn't read the whole piece. I want these big devs to be held accountable too but this isn't as clean cut as it seems.
Then the companies you worked for are absolutely shite, no offence. I've worked across two industries (recently went into software development)and the general sentiment across both is that kids should absolutely talk to and interact with more expirience staff.
If chaos is a concern then your have bigger issues with your hiring process, time management and general office culture.
QA testers are replaceable and don't have the same set of skills as a developer. This kind of treatment is nothing new in the Tech industry. I'm not saying that their treatment is right, but its the status quo.
I've actually seen some QA testers get promoted and sent to programming courses by the workplace so that's cool.
I've actually seen some QA testers get promoted and sent to programming courses by the workplace so that's cool.
You have described contract work to a T. I am 100% certain that the no AC on weekend/evening stems from the agency either not responding to the weekend HVAC email or its equivalent sign up system. The problem is that they are not Treyarch employees. They work for an agency that is providing a service. The agency is responsible for its employees work conditions and/or finding people capable to fulfill the service they contracted for.
THIS.
Every product has gone smoother if QA has the trust to talk to, work with and interact with the rest of the team. Treat them the same, and you might even find some really talented people to hire into different roles, be it design, art, programming. Heck, the best QA managers are those who've come up through QA, not those who've come through business school.
What in God of War's name is this? I get that someone has to be on the second floor – okay, sucks maybe in summer with the building not having an elevator. But you're not supposed to eat where there's food!? You're not allowed to park your car where any car could stand and being parked!?
When I was working at a 300 staff company there was a canteen where everyone could eat, and people from different departments meet each other because they usually don't except for a occasional stop-by. Seems pretty standard. Why would you exclude some of your staff from having those benefits? Everyone had to pay for the meal so it wouldn't even make any difference in regards of costs if that would be the (lousy) argument.
There is so much wrong with all of this I wouldn't know where to continue to shit on Treyarch.
When I read that people were being told not to talk to each other/devlelopers... I always thought that you weren't allowed to talk about Destiny 2 over at BioWare was a hyperbole, but now, reading this, I really can imagine that everyone was literally like,
"maybe we should try that event like in Desti—"
"Heretic! Stop this blasphemy at once! *folds his hands to prayer* Dear CEO, please forgive me that I have spoken with this sinner who uttered the name of the game that must not be named. Oh, and by the way move your bloody car from the spot that says, 'No QA testers allowed'". *scares away the QA tester with a newspaper*
Sad thing is I now believe those things happen.
I am kind of torn on that
I fully agree that none of this should be allowed to be brushed under the rug and that people need to be aware of the problems the industry is facing. If only to prepare for the inevitable "Super popular game A is delayed because entire dev team went on strike" stories (i am being optimistic)
But just look around. Even folk here are pretty desensitized to the point that they would rather shitpost than discuss it. Not to mention the more general take of "Ugh, we know already, stop telling us" stuidity. And this has the added problem of ACTUALLY normalizing this kind of behavior and environment.
I genuinely don't know what can be done. I still come down on the side of "Provide the information in a clear and unbiased manner and let people make their own decisions",. but I acknowledge that mindset is a naive one.
Now that we're going back to two devs, I can imagine it being worse.
The game industry needed to be unionized since the 70s.
The game industry needed to be unionized since the 70s.
Every time I hear the "MTX and GAAS is so games can make more money and pay the dev teams since prices didn't rise with inflation" and then I see this I'm just...filled with rage. Especially with the higher ups salaries being so damned obscene. Just genuinely enraging.
Unionization is absolutely needed but these are independent contractors (hired through a third party agency) which would not be protected by a potential union.
Oh boy reminds me of those EA QA days with Volt with these internal "feel free to talk to us if there any are isssues!" emails.
Within QA itself we collectively saw these as "don't bring this up with any leads or managers or you'll be labeled as the problematic one"
This game in particular is one of the worst microtransaction hells of all time. With post-launch updates it's the new Battlefront 2 now that they added some really powerful guns that you unlock through loot boxes.
This game is a great example of bad worker treatment not resulting in anything good. Because the corporation is greedy, they still need to milk the cash cow.
I'd hate to say it but I'd even deal with lootboxes and MTX and F2P mechanics in moderation if it meant devs stopped getting shit on. But we all know so long as it's a job in demand and a revolving door industry that won't change. Why pay more when you can get young hopefuls who will work for peanuts and give you giant overhead?
"we appreciate the contributions made by all parts of the team." Maybe show that to your damn employees then!
This was quite a depressing read. I was expecting more of a deep dive on the game development side of things (like on Anthem) but aside from the campaign problems there didn't seem to be much trouble on the front. In fact I'm thoroughly impressed by how good Blackout was/is when it was developed in 9 months.
Feel sorry for the QA folks. The AC part is especially fucked.
Feel sorry for the QA folks. The AC part is especially fucked.
As someone who works in QA (though not in games industry) we do tend to end up dealing with a lot of bad (technical, not workplace) stuff that gets dumped on us due to our position in the process, though thank goodness it isn't anywhere near the degree of what is described here jeez. I don't know how I could show up to work every day if things were like that.
You guys have to understand. These are necessary burdens. How would those poor billionaire companies survive? They can't afford luxuries like food for their employees or decent office spaces. They cant afford to release a $60 dollar game without delaying it or filling it with anti-consumer microtransactions.They can't afford not to crunch their staff. It's not their fault. I'm sure they didn't want to do all of this stuff in the first place, but they have no other choice. #Pray4Acti
Oh boy damage control
Good work usual Jason.
That's why I bailed out of QA after 1 year, I could work in IT Support for more money and work about 1/3 of the time.
I fear for the employees working on the 2020 Black Ops game. As the article said, it's a shorter development schedule, and it's likely going to be cross-gen, so...
And the price should go up. It is insane that video game prices have stayed at 60 for as long as they have. Cartridges used to be way more than $60 and since they went to that reduced price point with discs they haven't even kept up with inflation let alone the increased production cost for HD graphics. As much as people would whine, modern AAA games should cost much closer to $100 than $60.
I'm seriously disappointed in Treyarch to be honest.
While they had a reputation for being the "good ones", the ropey monetisation of their previous games put me off buying Black Ops IV, and now this really gets my back up against this company.
Fantastic work by Mr. Schreier, just a shame it's made me so sad and annoyed.
While they had a reputation for being the "good ones", the ropey monetisation of their previous games put me off buying Black Ops IV, and now this really gets my back up against this company.
Fantastic work by Mr. Schreier, just a shame it's made me so sad and annoyed.
I don't agree with how they have been treated, I just want to say something from the other side. I am not trying to downplay unfair working conditions across the industry.
Millions of people try to enter Q&A every year. There is virtually no demand for Q&A people, and the majority of it takes placing during a certain period of time of development. So it is abnormal for these to be hires. Lets break down an example of a contracted hire I just did on a 1 day projected that my company needed someone for. We paid $32/hour to the temp company and they probably paid the temp like $13/hour with no benefits. Did I have a pizza party with them after? Your goddamn right I did. Is that a workers right? Espeically a temp we do not hire on board nor provide any benefits to. Not its not. Did they park up front? or down the block? I have no idea I was busy working and that's not a real problem.
Millions of people try to enter Q&A every year. There is virtually no demand for Q&A people, and the majority of it takes placing during a certain period of time of development. So it is abnormal for these to be hires. Lets break down an example of a contracted hire I just did on a 1 day projected that my company needed someone for. We paid $32/hour to the temp company and they probably paid the temp like $13/hour with no benefits. Did I have a pizza party with them after? Your goddamn right I did. Is that a workers right? Espeically a temp we do not hire on board nor provide any benefits to. Not its not. Did they park up front? or down the block? I have no idea I was busy working and that's not a real problem.
I was gonna say this sounds like govt contract work, with some agencies, govt employees being better than the norm.
Contract work just sucks, period. But sounds like contract work in the gaming industry is worse.
When I worked briefly for Sony FPQA (or by whatever the contractor's name was rather), they pretty much treated us as suspected criminals at all times. QA jobs in other industries were only slightly better, but that was probably just because our numbers were more manageable and there was a higher baseline for qualifications. The faux outsourcing/contractor thing is hard to justify and needs to be dealt with legislatively. At least at the time though some of the things meant to fix it didn't really help. A few months of living off unemployment was part of the scam so to speak, contractors could only work for so many months continuously before you'd have to treat them like real employees so you'd be laid off with the understanding that you'd be back in 3 months or whatever the reset period was. No idea if anything has changed there in the last 10-15 years.
The complaining about other employees getting bonuses and buying new cars in the article is a bit much though. The job still is what it is entry-level, low qualifications and low responsibility.
The complaining about other employees getting bonuses and buying new cars in the article is a bit much though. The job still is what it is entry-level, low qualifications and low responsibility.
Testers are seen as expendable because they are. There is a line out the door of people dying to get their foot in the door. They are paid very minimal, let go and rehired at the drop of a hat. They take it often without complaint. Treated like trash. If anyone does complain or raise a fuss, they are simply let go and replaced very very quickly.
It's always sat poorly with me with how a lot of studios treat their qa department. This story with Treyarch is not new, unique, or even the worst of it.
It's always sat poorly with me with how a lot of studios treat their qa department. This story with Treyarch is not new, unique, or even the worst of it.
