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Call of Duty made $3 billion in 2020, so of course Activision Blizzard QA . shutting down

Call of Duty made $3 billion in 2020, so of course Activision Blizzard QA . shutting down





One of the studios responsible for the success of Call of Duty is laying off QA testers who are reportedly making $17 an hour for their work on franchise Activision Blizzard, said to be $3 billion in 2020 Bring it Raven Software, best known for its work on Call of Duty. :Black Ops Cold War and COD: Warzone has now laid off a third of their contract QA testers, as Kotaku and The Washington Post report.

Raven's associate community manager Austin O'Brien said team members were being called to in-person meetings to determine whether they would still have jobs on January 28. So far, the company has reportedly fired a third of its QA testers, or about a dozen, but it's possible more could follow. The Post quotes an anonymous Raven contractor who said that "after being given the bad news everyone was told, 'You didn't do anything wrong'."

Better ABK, an employee advocacy group, says that many employees moved to Wisconsin for jobs without getting help from Activision Blizzard. O'Brien also tweeted that the company was promising team members that they would be raised after Activision (the owner of Raven) completed a pay restructuring, and that may be true in a brutal way: Kotaku reports. That's an increase from $17 an hour to $18.50 an hour, with better benefits and bonuses that workers who live there will receive.

Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier tweeted that some of the testers he spoke to won't know his status until next week, which means he'll have to endure an uncomfortable weekend before finding out if he's got a holiday job. Will have to spend on hunting. A QA tester for the studio tweeted that they wouldn't know until Tuesday, and Kotaku reported that the studio's developers learned about the layoffs through word of mouth rather than an official announcement.

Activision Blizzard has shown a pattern of laying off workers amid a booming business, as Kotaku points out. In 2019, after CEO Bobby Kotick announced that 2018's financial results were the best in the company's history, the company laid off about 8 percent of its employees. In June, Kotick reportedly received $155 million after a shareholder vote — a few months before that, the company laid off about 50 employees who managed the incidents, giving them a three-month severance and $200 in Battle Used to give out .net gift cards. Gamesindustry.biz reports that Call of Duty: Vanguard, a game created by Sledgehammer Games and published by Activision, had the second biggest game launch in 2021.

Activision Blizzard has been in the news lately for not acting on horrific working conditions and repeated claims of abuse and sexual harassment from employees. There are also allegations that Kotick knew about the issues for years and had his own history of harassment. In less than a week, the company is set to release the Call of Duty: Warzone expansion that joins Vanguard.

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