Former and current employees of Activision share their experience working through crunch at the company, and how it affected their products come release, and it’s not a pretty sight.
Taking the Twitter, Jessica Gonzalez, who was a former employee at Activision-Blizzard working as a Quality Assurance tester at Treyarch, and Quality Assurance analyst at Blizzard, chimed in to give her feedback on a recent Washington Post story about a studio moving to four day workdays. She notes that when working on Black Ops 3, there were times where they had worked 14-hour days. Given the tight deadline that they were on, this resulted in them cutting the campaign entirely from the last-gen (PS3 and Xbox 360) versions of the game. The work needed to get those console versions working was described by her as “abysmal.”
Activision had us doing 14 hours days for blops 3 and we were so behind we had to scrap the entire campaign for old gen 😑
— Jessica Gonzalez💙 #WeAreGWA #ABetterABK (@_TechJess) February 11, 2022
It was abysmal it broke entire builds
— Jessica Gonzalez💙 #WeAreGWA #ABetterABK (@_TechJess) February 11, 2022
Kate Anderson, another QA at Activision, also decided to give a bit of background on this, backing up the claim that while working on Black Ops Cold War — another title developed by Treyarch — that the team had 14-hour days with little notice beforehand. Jessica recounts of days like this, noting that they were asked to stay until 3 a.m. in the morning five minutes before the shifts were ending.
At Treyarch one evening 5 mins before clock out they said “we need everyone to stay until 3am” mind you we were sitting on a broken build blocked all day so not only did we waste a working day but we ended up crunching that entire day into a few hours what a shit show that was. https://t.co/5B9HN5cpvc
— Jessica Gonzalez💙 #WeAreGWA #ABetterABK (@_TechJess) February 11, 2022
With the recent Activision-Blizzard lawsuit on-going, and news that Microsoft acquiring them for close to $70 billion, hopefully the employees will see a lot of this change in the near future. While crunch is fairly common in any industry you look in, it seems that the work environments surrounding it, in particular with the gaming industry, isn’t up to par with where they should be.
I’ve worked until 3am too. In -50. Later, actually, making sure people had water in their homes. Didn’t get anything extra for it. Crunch is starting to become a laughing stock. They just want to unionize so they can keep their useless jobs. Those unions will bite you in the ass eventually, good luck.
Imagine complaining about rare, long hours when you get to work inside a heated building with a chair to sit in. You have it so good compared to the rest of the working class it isn’t even close to funny. If crunch was as bad as they describe it, we’d see lawsuits already. These game companies have incompetent lawyers that would be demolished in all of a few months dealing with any workers rights related lawyers. Yet here we are, more than a decade of these whiny little man children complaining and they still have nothing to show but baseless accusations and zero physical evidence. My neighbor is a nobody at EA and she doesn’t complain one bit. Good money, benefits. They might make garbage games and the woke culture might be a bore but the claims of abuse are just getting ridiculous at this point.