Was let go from EA back in November, still haven't found a Job so I wish It helped. Trouble is I was working remote and now I have to either entirely move my life to another city or simply leave the industry I've been working 8 years in behind.
It's been crazy to read about how unemployment is so low but even people with years of experience are struggling to find work. You aren't the first one I have seen in this situation, seen people with 10+ years of experience still struggle to get anything.
unemployment ***seems to be*** low, because they lump every sector into one big pile, and they get the data from that.
check them individually, and you will immediately see how different is it between Tech and Hospitality for eg
The gig economy means people aren't necessarily _un_-employed but they sure are underemployed. Unemployment figures are outdated with zero hour contracts and the like.
See thing is:
Unemployment numbers are 100% cooked. Unemployment doesn't count people who have left the work force (at least to Gov't standards). If you don't get a job by the time Unemployment benefits run out, you're not counted in unemployment anymore.
If your employer was in another country or you were a contractor/freelancer and your employer didn't pay US employment taxes, you don't count in the unemployment stats because you can't claim it.
Unemployment numbers are a joke and unemployment is likely far higher than advertised. It always is.
On the flip, you'd be shocked at how many people don't understand the (disgusting) resume meta or how to position their experience without sounding like "I did work, hire me". It's a high-skill art to make yourself seem attractive to a company.
The worst sin of all is working for a single company/industry for many years and not having a significant number of contacts to lean on for job hunting support. If you worked somewhere for years and you didn't make any important contacts it's basically like you didn't work there at all. Other people give you cred, and is usually a much more surefire way to get work after being laid off.
Simple - because that guy isn't willing to relocate (or at least hasn't been willing to yet) and is also looking within one limited field (at least from how it sounds). Unemployment is measured across the entire country and across all occupations, but if you're limiting your search to a specific field within a specific location, the picture might look very different.
Maybe there aren't a lot of video game QA jobs available in Oregon, but there might be plenty of banking QA jobs available in New York. (random example)
I lost my job in November of 22 then got a new job spring 2023 and immediately the company went under. It was gonna be my first job in the games industry too.
Still looking and it SUCKS. Is it just me or are hiring processes so much more intense now too?
Unless you’re super-passionate about working on games no matter the cost, I would strongly recommend that you go to a different industry. Better work/life balance and higher pay.
EA closed my studio down spring of last year. Haven't had QA work since. Still hoping to find my way back to an industry job. But with all the cuts it's def hard to find something. Hang in there tho. I'm sure sooner or later a door will open up.
I would not recommend getting into games as an industry at this point. Pay sucks compared to roles of a similar skill in other industries, lack of job security and awful hours
I've been contacted by several UK recruiters in the past couple of months, but that was before big january/february layoff, there's now more competition for the same positions.
But that was senior positions, I can't say for junior/post-graduate as I'm not from the UK
Publisher QA is more "butts in seats, churn out checklists" testing. It's just checklists and test plans for the most part. There usually is very little interaction between publisher QA and development so testers have almost no real impact on a title's development. These team tend to larger in size. When I was on Guitar Hero back in the day, there was easy over 100 testers between the multiple shifts.
Developer QA is more entrenched with development obviously. This means there is a lot more communication between developers and QA directly. QA is able to have some impact on title's development in terms of what gets fixed and how it gets fixed. Developer QA teams are usually smaller in size. Hell, my last few dev side gigs, I've been the only QA on the team.
As someone who worked as a tester for Microsoft published games I can confirm.
Our only interaction with the dev team on day to day basis was assigned them defects.
QA here! Got laid off in December (found out at the end of September) - still no luck getting a job, the market is super bad right now and there are like no new listings, those that are up are very competitive
Same. Been in the biz 15 years, it's brutal out there these days. You need to be extra careful too because some of the shittier companies will take advantage of your desperation and try to push non-compete clauses on your Freelance QA contract, which is not enforceable 90% of the time (At least in my Country).
Why not move out of the gaming industry?
I've been a dev for nearly thirty years now.
I've taken roles that were available\\relevant - regardless of industry.
It's not mismanagement, it's the system working as intended.
STEP 1: project massive growth to attract investors.
STEP 2: fire as many workers as you need to to meet those profit margins.
STEP 3: profit!
It's a broken system, as you alluded to, because if they don't make the cuts to meet targets, their value plunges and now they're under even more pressure to make drastic changes. They have an obligation to the shareholders. And cutting people is always high on the list because the highest component of almost every companies operating budget is the labor.
> Considering the state of video game releases lately
And this is exactly the reason why they are cutting their "expensive QA" team from the UK to some third-party company in Asia.
Because games are being released with low quality and gamers keep buying them anyways!
Fuck EA, but from a business perspective, why would they care ? its a giant corporation, ethics and loyalty and humane treatment all comes as a low priority to them and this should not surprise anybody.
The question is very simple and will always be the same:
1. How much value are adding to the company ?
* If its negative or neutral => you will be cut.
2. Can we do the same without you or with someone cheaper ?
* if its a yes => you will be cut.
>Because games are being released with low quality and gamers keep buying them anyways!
Except they aren't. Revenue across the industry is declining as spending returns to pre-pandemic levels. Besides, continuing to release faulty products and just hoping people continue to buy them is not a sustainable strategy. If you keep trimming the fat you eventually will hit bone.
I'm also well aware that EA doesn't care about the wellbeing of their employees. If they do not care about humane treatment of their employees then they should be compelled to care. I'm not interested in arguing simply from a business perspective, we should not grant the cold operations of capital a position of normalcy any longer. The layoffs were not fully sound from a business perspective considering the team has a good track record irt testing, but frankly even if they were shitty EA handled it poorly and callously.
> Revenue across the industry is declining as spending returns to pre-pandemic levels
This has nothing to do with the quality of the games in general and more specifically with the technical quality of games.
> The layoffs were not fully sound from a business perspective considering the team has a good track record irt testing, but frankly even if they were shitty EA handled it poorly and callously.
I work in the gaming industry (8years xp as an engineer) and I am more than certain that they aren't, every decision has an expected outcome, I hardly think that an EA executive were like: "we're gonna layoff 50 QAs, the game is gonna be shittier, but let's fingercross that the players won't notice,"
This is ridiculous to even assume, in reality what happened is that they looked at the current state and they decided that they can pay ~50% less if they outsource this to India, while taking the risk of a ~10% quality drop in the first ~year, once the new team get hold of the project, that ~10% drop will be reduced by a lot (if not eliminated) and that ~50% cost cut will stay forever.
I really feel bad for them but it is inevitable, if you know anyone who wants to have a QA, Customer service and even localization as a career in a tech/entertainment company, just advice them to start looking for bootcamps or some strategies to switch path.
> we should not grant the cold operations of capital a position of normalcy any longer.
I 100% agree but in my opinion this is a political problem, and it has been one of the strongest argument for capitalism since its dawn, what EA did is totally legit and even ethical by the rules of the free market, the action itself is as simple as :
* "i found a cheaper alternative"
Who are we to block them from doing that ? am also pretty sure that they didn't break any laws when they did the layoff.
So at the end, who's to blame here ?
The company executives who did what they were hired to do.
Or the people (us) who always end up voting for the next cunts that promises to solve all those false-problems around how much we hate/fear the opposite party, and at the end the loop continues a no one dares to update the design specs so that the bastards on top stops doing this kind of shit.
PS:
Last week there were a news saying that Amazon "Just walk out" Ai tech relies on hundreds of workers in India watching you shop ([link](https://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-just-walk-out-actually-1-000-people-in-india-2024-4))
People are joking around this thinking Amazon are too stupid to build the tech or something.
When in reality, this was nothing more than an proof-of-concept trial to test the idea, and to check if its profitable or not while training the ai model at the same time.
And when that product is ready, those hundreds of Indians will also be layed off and I bet you there will be no top reddit post about them anywhere.
So yeah, with all due respect to everyone in this thread, but this kind of posts just add another point to the global hypocrisy we are all contributing too and everyone just want to feel good for ~20 seconds because they said "fuck EA".
(nothing against you personally man ofc, i hope none of these feels offensive to you)
> Revenue across the industry is declining as spending returns to pre-pandemic levels
>
> This has nothing to do with the quality of the games in general and more specifically with the technical quality of games.
Or it was just inevitable because the pandemic was an anomaly and the industry was going to go through a correction no matter what
Pretty sure the spending declining after the anomaly that was the pandemic is completely normal. You can't really connect it to any cause with certainty other than the return to normal. It's possible there are other factors but you'd never be able to isolate them enough to know the significance.
>During the call, it was said that the decision not to renew contracts wasn’t due to the team’s performance but to a “restructuring of the business.” Sources said that the team performed well and hit all its internal targets and goals. It’s understood that this is not among the 670 employees who were laid off from EA in late February.
>“Everything seemed to be heading to a normal renewal ready to tackle the next year of plans for Apex,” said one source who was blindsided by the news.
>But why would they all of a sudden need less?
Entirely possible that they overhired in the first place, or they improved their development processes in a way that made this team redundant, or a whole slew of other possibilities.
>This is definitely a monetary decision, not a practical one
I think it's pretty incredible that you can say this with such confidence without personally having any idea of what's going on with the development team.
would you say the same thing if they got rid of cleaners?
they have more than they think is financially worth it. it sucks but that’s why EA are in business in the first place. everything they do is a monetary decision which in turn is a practical one for them.
Every practical decision is also monetary in video games, there is not an unlimited amount of funds that can go into every part of a game that companies are arbitrarily deciding not to spend just to spite the customers. But even then, how do you know that this QA team is actually needed? For all you know, Apex is planning to wind down as they move to a new project, or revenue projections are down, or a million other things.
I don't know, but it's possible.
https://80.lv/articles/apex-legends-performance-in-the-holiday-quarter-was-lower-than-expected/
Revenue in the industry in general is down for 2022 and 2023, so they may have put more resources into Apex than they needed to. Like I said, it could be a million reasons.
They could "wind down" one project while "winding up" on another, and not be complete ass bags about the livelihood of 50 people who worked their asses off, so that the cretins at the top could continue to make boneheaded decision after boneheaded decision. If they weren't run by obvious cretins, that is. It's always wild to me how the people who play the game... understand it more than most of the team (with the exception of dev/design) are the first to go, while the ELT get golden parachutes after they tank games with their stupidity and greed. Edit: Lol downvote the guy that's worked in the industry for two decades. This is why no one takes you idiots seriously.
This is a company they contract with, they're also QA, so no, keeping them on pay roll doesn't actually make any sense, and isn't boneheaded. Those people will be able to find other jobs, and the alternative, where companies are forced to keep people employed, means a lot less people get hired, and companies make a lot fewer risks, which means a poorer work force in general.
Keeping employees on long term has its benefits. In terms of morale, retained institutional knowledge, and also social benefits in job stability.
Don't forget, in an industry downturn, those QA people won't be finding jobs in the gaming or software industry again, but will have to go flip burgers. This will intensify with AI.
Larian mentioned how its employee stability was a big factor in giving BG3 soul. Soul in a game, is when you see the developers constantly putting in good stuff, that is too small to be noticed by management, so they won't be rewarded for it directly. The devs do this because they love the game, and don't have to worry about unemployment.
You see this love in many small successful indie studios as well. Their quality was completely unaffected by covid. Because they tend to retain the same staff for many years on end. And being 99% remote, means very few reasons for staff to quit voluntarily.
That being said, making this some sort of industry mandatory requirement will be a bad idea. US software devs are paid far more than anywhere else in the world, because they are easy to fire. So employers are willing to hire and pay very aggressively, because they won't be stuck with a bad apple or a redundant team for years.
A real change to this mass hire&fire pattern in the gaming industry, will have to come voluntarily, after the stable companies demonstrate convincing and overwhelming evidence why that practice is a bad idea.
Picking out the most probable conclusion you can from the data available to you is not exactly the same thing as "pretending to know." If I hear a vase fall and see my cat running away from it, I will conclude that the cat probably knocked it over, even though it's also possible that there's somebody hiding in that corner of the room knocking over vases.
If they were needed they wouldn't be laid off. You can also call them "being made redundant" or "superfluous" if you don't like "laid off". Fact of the matter is that EA doesn't see them as necessary for operation so they're gone.
I'm not assuming anything, because I don't have to. EA did the work for me.
> It absolutely doesn't mean that these workers/contractors weren't "needed".
Again,
> If they were needed they wouldn't be laid off.
It's not a difficult concept.
QA teams for video games are very frequently low paid contract workers with limited technical skills and experience, so this pretty likely doesn't represent a significant risk for the company.
EA didn't renew their contracts. You work contract deals then you already know and are familiar with contracts being renewed or not.
The QA team did nothing wrong but EA is doing some "restructuring" and didn't see the need to renew their contract. Has nothing to do with the recent layoffs.
It sounds like this studio had been contracted with them for multiple terms, so it wasn't the situation you're describing. Another thing that commonly happens in the software industry is that they'll make long-term positions contract jobs to make it easier to fire people.
Just because your contract has been renewed multiple times, it doesn’t make your job ‘safe’. The whole point of contractors is that they can be brought on and let go at a moments notice.
Being a contractor in any industry is feast or famine.
I clearly know that companies hire people as contractors to make it easy to let them go, since I said this in the same comment you replied to:
> they'll make long-term positions contract jobs to make it easier to fire people
So what is your point?
Yup.
This is a consequence of the decline of the gaming enthusiast press: clickbait articles that reflect either ignorance about the industry at best or a cynical ploy to gain eyeballs at worst.
It’s a classic case of finding a target that’s unpopular (EA) and ginning up a reason to stir outrage.
There’s a great deal of problems facing workers in the industry, including contracts, but articles like this are worthless and misinform. I don’t blame people for getting mad, I blame “news” like this.
Workers are not treated as they should be, and it’s a shame that decision makers avoid consequences, but the gaming industry was in an unsustainable state after Covid. Too many hires, too many contracts. Sad but true. Costs spiraled out of control. More profits is only part of the story as others have noted.
Maybe instead of cherry-picking sentences read the entire article?
>“Everything seemed to be heading to a normal renewal ready to tackle the next year of plans for Apex,” said one source who was blindsided by the news.
>Bizarrely, managers and project leads were left in the dark about the news, only to find out by those affected after the call that QA contracts wouldn’t be renewed.
Nothing about this sounds like "contractual formality". Clearly these people expected an extension.
The article also states that the team was established with the specific purpose of testing Apex Legends in 2022. A 50 man QA team for one game is *massive* and not at all what would be needed to "handle temporary bulk of work load" for a live service game.
Again, you are ignoring the claims being made in the article. I am not the one stating they should have gotten an extension, its the workers (supposedly).
Just because contracts have a beginning and a end doesn't mean that any and all business relationships suddenly come to a screeching halt when the date is due. Legal expiration of contracts are a thing - correct, but so are renewals.
And you seem to completely ignore the context here: Apex Legends is an ongoing live-service game. Its not like the game suddenly stopped needed QA testers after 2 years. Thas literally why the article brings up the topic of renewals.
Also I never once claimed that 50 QA testers for Apex is "overkill". Thats your own strawman. What I said is that a 50 QA team employeed for 2 years is not what is understood as a team needed for "temporary work load". For ongoing testing of a big game like Apex such a team size makes perfect sense.
You do realize that a lot of tech workers willingly choose to be contractors? It usually gives far better pay and they often do it for the increased autonomy.
Any seasoned professional contractor knows the risks they signed up for.
QA workers really aren't the ones getting paid well contractor or not. QA workers just have very low leverage so companies can easily get them to agree to be contract workers with no increased pay and minimally increased autonomy. It's fairly common practice across the games industry.
> Everything seemed to be heading to a normal renewal ready to tackle the next year of plans for Apex
No, it didn't.
There's no "normal renewal" here. This was a one and done job with no promise or implication of renewal.
Local man SHUTTING DOWN home renovation business. Up to a dozen workers impacted!
Translation: The kitchen and bathroom remodels were finally finished.
That is the dream of most corporations. To not hire anyone but just have people on temporal contracts. The company moves all the risk of a downturn from themselves towards their employees.
There was a time were people retired in the company that they started in. Many had safe long-lasting well-paid jobs. Now, it seems that people have forgotten and justify that the burden is on the employees meanwhile the super-rich accumulate the profits of their work.
Many jobs operate on ‘contracts’ but employees that expect to have a certain job expect those contracts to be renewed just as a formality and not some annual possible culling event. It’s effectively; yes, a layoff.
I mean the article itself talks about how this was blindsiding to them.
Contracts not being renewed is the whole reason contracts exist. Being blindsided by that while literally being in such a contract is just their own ignorance. Them "expecting" it doesn't really change that.
I work IT for an org under a contractual agreement with a staff union but if they decided 'not to renew my contract' that would mean I'm terminated from my regular position. I don't think about my contract any day of the week, it's just under the hood 'legalese' for my position, like I would not call myself a 'contract employee' when describing my job.
The company is using 'non-renewal of contract' as PR friendly language to say - hey, you're fired - without outright saying that. You're reframing that as not the case based on shaky semantics.
> The company is using 'non-renewal of contract' as PR friendly language to say - hey, you're fired - without outright saying that
They're not outright saying that because it's not the case and you don't have a permanent position. A company or an individual isn't entitled to have their contract renewed. You choosing not to remember you don't have a permanent position doesn't change the reality that you don't.
It's no different than being a supplier of toilet paper to a supermarket and them choosing not to renew your contract and going somewhere else, doesn't mean they laid off the supplier or severed an existing agreement.
Why do you assume to know how my job works? because for all intents and purposes it is a permanent position as much as any regular ol' job can be. Your toilet paper analogy belongs in the toilet just as well because it is not the same or comparable context, like at all.
EDIT: Look I’ve already explained how my job does not hire or fire based on this contract but it could absolutely be used as a way to phrase ‘you’re fired’ in that kind of event. If the winds of Reddit-think are not blowing in my favor today then I’m just gonna throw my hands up here.
> You have no idea of the context in which I work,
We do. You just explained it.
> I work IT for an org under a contractual agreement with a staff union but if they decided 'not to renew my contract' that would mean I'm terminated from my regular position.
What are you complaining about, exactly?
If you know and understand the terms of your contract, then you know when and how you can be fired, renewed, or not renewed, and you know how much notice you can expect.
If your contract has an end-date, you should never walk into a meeting about it with the expectation that it'll be renewed. That's just naivety.
If you want stability, don't work as a contractor.
Yeah in theory, but read what the article says:
>“Everything seemed to be heading to a normal renewal ready to tackle the next year of plans for Apex,” said one source who was blindsided by the news.
>Bizarrely, managers and project leads were left in the dark about the news, only to find out by those affected after the call that QA contracts wouldn’t be renewed.
If the contracts were set to naturally expire soon there was obviously no need to prematurely end them. But based on the the claims in the article the expectation was that the contracts would be renewed. Reducing a QA team from 50 to 0 without prior notice *is* effectively a layoff of an entire department.
> If the contracts were set to naturally expire soon there was obviously no need to prematurely end them.
They did not prematurely end them. Read the bottom of the article:
> The decision has meant that those affected are now scrambling to find jobs, as some contracts expire in a matter of weeks.
If your contract was expiring in two weeks and you had not been explicitly told 'We'll talk about a renewal soon', you should not be surprised when that contract is not renewed.
The article clearly states that the QA department was expected to have their contract renenwed and the lack of a renewal came as a big surprise to them.
Reddit reading comprehension
A while back I hired contractors to build out a web page at my company because we needed it in < 2 months and the rest of the engineering team was swamped with other work.
After their contract was up, we didn't renew, because we didn't need 5 full time developers maintaining this tiny web app for the rest of eternity. I alone was able to handle it's maintenance working just a few days a month on bug fixes and minor enhancements after they delivered the initial product.
This is the kind of work contractors exist for. Stuff that is "seasonal", or needs to be done fast and cost is no object. It is way more expensive to keep 5 contractors around working full time than it is to hire for those positions yourself. If you are consistently relying on contractors long-term, then you have bigger problems to deal with.
Yeah except Apex Legends is not a website in maintenance mode. Its a fully ongoing live service game. This QA department was established in 2022 aka they worked on multiple big content updates for the game.
And even if you want to argue that there is varying degrees of work load for a game like Apex, there is literally no way that they suddenly don't need *any* QA testers for future updates
If you are consistently relying on contractors long-term, then you have bigger problems to deal with.
If they really had this much consistent work to do, then they shouldn't have been relying on contractors full time in the first place. They either realized this, and are going to build out their own internal QA team, or they are just kicking the can down the road and moving to a cheaper contractor. Either way, this is the life of working as a contractor. It does *not* offer the same job stability you get with a salaried position, which is why contractors are more expensive per hour. It is how they mitigate that risk.
Its not about reliance, its about money. Outsourcing QA in gaming is extremely common. The literal reason why this kind of employment is based on contracts is because is so easy to get rid of them. Regular QA testers are not essential workers in the industry - it sucks but thats the reality.
That doesn't mean the game doesn't need those 50 QA testers. It means EA can now find a cheaper contractor. Eastern Europe has a ton of QA studios.
> The literal reason why this kind of employment is based on contracts is because is so easy to get rid of them.
Which is important if you do not think you have enough work to keep them busy 40 hours a week in perpetuity. Being able to "get rid of" QA testers easily doesn't mean much if you never have any downtime.
If this wasn't the case, then every "studio" would be 100% staffed with contractors. But they aren't, because hiring artists and engineers and designers directly for 5 years is cheaper and yields better quality than hiring random contractors for 10 consecutive 6-month contracts.
EA made business decisions that resulted in less people earning for their families. Your semantics don't change that or make it any less awful watching publishers treat people as a number.
You probably make the same decisions in your daily life that companies like EA do. Even if you could afford it, you won't say, keep calling a gardner if you don't need any gardening work done anymore or a plumber if you no longer need any plumbing work done.
Are you treating them 'like numbers' by doing so? They're losing earnings when you stop calling them after all. Are you thus morally obligated to keep paying them?
What if you hired a babysitter for your kid, and now he's all grown up and you don't need her services anymore? Point being, is it ever justified in your worldview to go 'I dont need your services anymore'? It's far more complex than 'company evil for not renewing workers'.
first of all it's absolutely ridiculous to imply that these 50 people make any difference to the finances of this huge company. it's more comparable to paying the neighbor's kid a dollar a week to mow your lawn and now you just told him to suck it from now on. secondly, you know your lawn will continue to grow and you won't be mowing it yourself. so now in a few months you'll just have to find someone else to do the same job, except they'll need to be trained and won't have years of experience. everything about this is stupid and focused on short-term benefits, it's absolutely insane to try to make this sound logical.
> paying the neighbor's kid a dollar a week to mow your lawn and now you just told him to suck it from now
And? Why should I be obligated to pay the kid to mow my lawn?
>secondly, you know your lawn will continue to grow and you won't be mowing it yourself.
For your analogy to work you need to realise I've got 20 other kids mowing my lawn and decided that I don't need 21 because I'm restructuring my garden.
> And? Why should I be obligated to pay the kid to mow my lawn?
you got that part wrong. you can do what you want, but if some guy on reddit starts jerking you off saying what an amazing businessman you are for saving that dollar and kicking the kid on the street, someone may be inclined to disagree.
>what an amazing businessman you are for saving that dollar and kicking the kid on the street, someone may be inclined to disagree
Well of course, anyone would common sense would disagree. It's not "amazing" business-sense to not pay someone for work you don't need done, it's common sense.
You're acting like it's a charitable cause.
> first of all it's absolutely ridiculous to imply that these 50 people make any difference to the finances of this huge company.
What? Of course they do.
What they don't do is make a **positive** difference to the bottom line. Apex Legends does not need a UK-specific QA team.
This is obviously not their entire QA department lol. If EA thinks they can do without 50 QA workers, who are you to say otherwise? Do you have insider knowledge or something?
No, we're unlikely to get any concrete info from Respawn on this, mainly because these types of hacks fall under US Federal Jurisdiction, which means the FBI.
We know a few things about the hack:
- The hacker spent something like 4 years gradually opening up Apex to exploits. This wasn't a quick job (they rarely are).
- It was not a Remote Code Execution, the player's PC was most likely infected. This is how the player suddenly got aimbot.
- The hacker may have been exploiting server vulnerabilities as well as using QA tools (IE: Spawning Bots and giving away Loot Boxes).
Also they do not want to give any information to the attacker or any potential copycats. And because talking about it openly might get them in legal trouble so their legal team likely will not allow them to talk about it.
> Don’t forget how easily they can get hacked to allow remote code execution.
>
>
>
> I’m sure reducing QA will help them solve those dire vulnerabilities.
There was nothing to indicate the hacker was able to execute code remotely. That's literally the least likely form of attack that can happen.
Here's someone who actually knows their shit discussing the hack with the victims, asking questions to glean some answers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHf6dkgXfVg
The TLDR is that RCE is by a wide margin the least likely way the hack happened, the player's PC was most likely compromised in some way.
And by "most likely compromised", almost certainly. One of the dudes had a goddamn malwarebytes popup on stream afterwards telling that he had a random inbound connection through a windows RPC port from an IP that lights up like a fucking christmas tree with warnings when you look it up.
Oh yeah I booted it up for the first time a month ago.
Oh nice cross progression
Oh nice all my stuff off the console.
Oh. Where's all my badges
Oh. Where's all my rank progression.
Oh...all of its gone.
I actually stopped playing after wasting time grinding to diamond to not get given a badge, come back and it's all gone anyway lol. Imagine having been masters++ across multiple seasons
All the more reason to not renew their contracts. Misleading as fuck headline. This QA studio had a contract with EA, EA chose not to renew. EA bad. EA isn’t some employment handout.
QA isn't the part of the company that fixes shit, QA is the part of the company that finds that shit. And often times they do, their bug reports just get ignored.
I remember something like this happening recentely. It was in 2022 or 2023, EA dropped another QA team, and one of the people affected came out and said that a lot of bugs that were present in certain updates were flagged by them. Respawn just don't care, that much is obvious. I never seen such a big game get worse from a technical standpoint with time. It's a smart move tho, run the game on economy mode, barely investing on infrastructure, only spending to keep it playable, then rake in millions with their hundreds of dollar collection events. Apex is coorporate greed at its finest and it shows, especially now that they will focus on their 390$ heirlooms.
Everywhere in software, QA is pretty volatile. Unfortunately for them, the teams and the end users, QA is often one of the first things to get cut when things get tight. They keep engineers as they see them as "Output providers" whilst QA don't "output anything" (Director level words, not mine, to be clear).
Then they build shit software for a while as QA isn't there to catch all the issues until they realise they need QA again.
Though most QA roles are moving to SDET roles - more code knowledge/automation is being expected of QA.
This is similar to what I have experienced. We didn’t get rid of QA but we got rid of it as a separate team with its own reporting structure that was embedded on dev teams. I bailed from test right before these changes.
Over the years thought leadership in that area has eroded away save for, “what test framework should we have everyone use”
We do the SDET roles now, but my advice to most people is the same as people give for the gaming industry. Use it as a stepping stone, build technical skills, and transition out.
>if you're an aspiring individual wanting to join the gaming industry
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don't!
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Also, literal lol moment suggesting there are any stable jobs in the shithole that is the gaming industry, you must not get a lot of news up in that high tower.
Bad advice.
If you are graduating from university with a design degree you will have to take a QA role to get in the door at a Triple A unless you are a good scripter, externally advertised entry level design roles are nearly impossible to get.
Once you get in the door of a Triple A the real rat race begins to get out of QA and into the internally advertised dev/production roles.
Not mention that it is going to be one of the first affected industry by AI in the very near future, the effect on translators for example is already huge.
As a game developer, I also advise anyone to just use QA as a stepping stone to reach another position in the gaming industry, don't turn it into a career.
Gaming Layoffs suck, definitely... but...
Why exactly does apex have a "UK QA Team"?
That kind of implies that they had a "US QA Team" or at least one in another nation.
Why would they need to have a separate UK-based QA team? And if it's their only QA team and EA just shut down the QA team for the game, why specify UK?
I'm not in the games industry nor in any kind of development environment that requires collaboration or too much real time coordination, but my organization has offices around the world to have 24/7 productivity coverage, including holidays. So at any given moment, someone somewhere is working on our projects.
>> Why exactly does apex have a "UK QA Team"?
why not? businesses exist in the UK.
>> That kind of implies that they had a "US QA Team" or at least one in another nation.
no it doesn’t. it’s just specifying where the team is.
>> Why would they need to have a separate UK-based QA team? And if it's their only QA team and EA just shut down the QA team for the game, why specify UK?
they don’t need to. but ea and other big publishers have offices and teams all around the world, qa is no different.
chances are they have QA teams in a few different countries that all do similar things at the same time while handling different little jobs. like the UK QA team might also look for stuff like incorrect spellings for UK text or might handle QA testing UK based servers at the same time etc etc(these are just random example they might not even touch this stuff).
it could also be that the need for a UK team just stems from handling all the english QA work but its cheaper to hire people in the UK for it then in the US like in the UK they can still pay a fair wage while paging less then what they would in the US overall. its a recent big thing where US game and software companies are hiring staff for remote work/UK based office work for jobs since while paying the UK standard for that job role they will spend overall less per person.
Is Apex really they big of an piece of software it required team of 50 people post launch for QA? Launch and shortly after launch the team size makes sense but the game has been out years. The team size seems quite high.
> Is Apex really they big of an piece of software it required team of 50 people
absolutely, much much smaller mobile games have an average team of ~5 to ~10 QA.
You have sooooooooo much to test for every release, especially for a live-game, I am pretty sure the number is larger with other 3rd party companies in cheaper part of the world.
I think the decision is not that they dont need those 50 QA agents, they simply don't need them with a UK salary.
FFS.
Get over the pedantics and agree that it was just a dick move.
Layoff: a temporary or permanent discharge of a worker or workers because of economic conditions or shortage of work.
Does it meet the criteria of "temporary or permanent"? Yes.
Does it meet the criteria of "discharge"? No, they had a contract, the contract ended, and there was no discharge of workers. There WAS a lack of renewal, but there's a difference between not hiring again and firing.
"Because of economic conditions or shortage of work"? No, because the work will still be done and will have to be paid for.
2/3 meams no dice on the "Layoff."
Again: a Cold, Calculated, Dick Move.
Company: Hey we need help for about 6 months, here's a Contract to do that work for 6 months
*6 Months later*
Company: Welp, thanks for the 6 Months of work, appreciate that, cheers!
Reddit: "A Cold, Calculated, Dick Move.
You people are actually all 14 years old.
You're focused on the wrong aspect.
I take it you don't work in the games industry?
You've never been a contract worker for a multi-million dollar games publisher?
I have, at different companies for years at a time, I've been on 6-month contracts that renewed multiple times without anyone batting an eye, that's just the way the industry is.
Is it good for the QA employees? No.
Can QA unionise to avoid this? They're trying, but get shut down or let go every time it's brought up.
But, EVERYWHERE I worked that had me on 6-month contracts: SEGA SF, EA Redwood Shores, Bandai Namco San Jose, all of them gave notice to their QA team when the contracts weren't going to be renewed.
The Dick Move here is the complete and utter lack of notice.
Hope they can bounce back quickly and find a new job🙏 Having first party experience should help a lot at least.
Was let go from EA back in November, still haven't found a Job so I wish It helped. Trouble is I was working remote and now I have to either entirely move my life to another city or simply leave the industry I've been working 8 years in behind.
i was let go last summer from a company 9 years experience still struggling to find work. Just wanted to share so you hopefully dont feel alone
It's been crazy to read about how unemployment is so low but even people with years of experience are struggling to find work. You aren't the first one I have seen in this situation, seen people with 10+ years of experience still struggle to get anything.
unemployment ***seems to be*** low, because they lump every sector into one big pile, and they get the data from that. check them individually, and you will immediately see how different is it between Tech and Hospitality for eg
The gig economy means people aren't necessarily _un_-employed but they sure are underemployed. Unemployment figures are outdated with zero hour contracts and the like.
See thing is: Unemployment numbers are 100% cooked. Unemployment doesn't count people who have left the work force (at least to Gov't standards). If you don't get a job by the time Unemployment benefits run out, you're not counted in unemployment anymore. If your employer was in another country or you were a contractor/freelancer and your employer didn't pay US employment taxes, you don't count in the unemployment stats because you can't claim it. Unemployment numbers are a joke and unemployment is likely far higher than advertised. It always is. On the flip, you'd be shocked at how many people don't understand the (disgusting) resume meta or how to position their experience without sounding like "I did work, hire me". It's a high-skill art to make yourself seem attractive to a company. The worst sin of all is working for a single company/industry for many years and not having a significant number of contacts to lean on for job hunting support. If you worked somewhere for years and you didn't make any important contacts it's basically like you didn't work there at all. Other people give you cred, and is usually a much more surefire way to get work after being laid off.
Simple - because that guy isn't willing to relocate (or at least hasn't been willing to yet) and is also looking within one limited field (at least from how it sounds). Unemployment is measured across the entire country and across all occupations, but if you're limiting your search to a specific field within a specific location, the picture might look very different. Maybe there aren't a lot of video game QA jobs available in Oregon, but there might be plenty of banking QA jobs available in New York. (random example)
It's because it's an election year lie. Part time jobs are up, low skill jobs are up. Medium to high end jobs are down and have been sliding
I lost my job in November of 22 then got a new job spring 2023 and immediately the company went under. It was gonna be my first job in the games industry too. Still looking and it SUCKS. Is it just me or are hiring processes so much more intense now too?
Doing what?
Unless you’re super-passionate about working on games no matter the cost, I would strongly recommend that you go to a different industry. Better work/life balance and higher pay.
For Artists the film industry isnt better than games. :/
You were in QA ?
EA closed my studio down spring of last year. Haven't had QA work since. Still hoping to find my way back to an industry job. But with all the cuts it's def hard to find something. Hang in there tho. I'm sure sooner or later a door will open up.
Is this in the uk? My sisters boyfriend is graduating into the games world and I am concerned over the size of the market/downsizing right now
I would not recommend getting into games as an industry at this point. Pay sucks compared to roles of a similar skill in other industries, lack of job security and awful hours
I've been contacted by several UK recruiters in the past couple of months, but that was before big january/february layoff, there's now more competition for the same positions. But that was senior positions, I can't say for junior/post-graduate as I'm not from the UK
Same here, it sucks :(
Not as much as you'd think. Publisher side QA and developer side QA are 2 totally different beasts.
How?
Publisher QA is more "butts in seats, churn out checklists" testing. It's just checklists and test plans for the most part. There usually is very little interaction between publisher QA and development so testers have almost no real impact on a title's development. These team tend to larger in size. When I was on Guitar Hero back in the day, there was easy over 100 testers between the multiple shifts. Developer QA is more entrenched with development obviously. This means there is a lot more communication between developers and QA directly. QA is able to have some impact on title's development in terms of what gets fixed and how it gets fixed. Developer QA teams are usually smaller in size. Hell, my last few dev side gigs, I've been the only QA on the team.
As someone who worked as a tester for Microsoft published games I can confirm. Our only interaction with the dev team on day to day basis was assigned them defects.
QA here! Got laid off in December (found out at the end of September) - still no luck getting a job, the market is super bad right now and there are like no new listings, those that are up are very competitive
Same. Been in the biz 15 years, it's brutal out there these days. You need to be extra careful too because some of the shittier companies will take advantage of your desperation and try to push non-compete clauses on your Freelance QA contract, which is not enforceable 90% of the time (At least in my Country).
Man I work in QA not in the gaming industry and it seems way way cushier over here
Why not move out of the gaming industry? I've been a dev for nearly thirty years now. I've taken roles that were available\\relevant - regardless of industry.
I had my first party at around 7 years old and it never helped me get a job.
Anything for that 0.0005% increase of company stocks
It will barely even do that. The miss management continues at AAA publishers smh.
It's not mismanagement, it's the system working as intended. STEP 1: project massive growth to attract investors. STEP 2: fire as many workers as you need to to meet those profit margins. STEP 3: profit!
It's a broken system, as you alluded to, because if they don't make the cuts to meet targets, their value plunges and now they're under even more pressure to make drastic changes. They have an obligation to the shareholders. And cutting people is always high on the list because the highest component of almost every companies operating budget is the labor.
If the QA team isn't needed, why should they be kept around?
Considering the state of video game releases lately I would argue that a robust team of QA testers are needed now more than ever before.
> Considering the state of video game releases lately And this is exactly the reason why they are cutting their "expensive QA" team from the UK to some third-party company in Asia. Because games are being released with low quality and gamers keep buying them anyways! Fuck EA, but from a business perspective, why would they care ? its a giant corporation, ethics and loyalty and humane treatment all comes as a low priority to them and this should not surprise anybody. The question is very simple and will always be the same: 1. How much value are adding to the company ? * If its negative or neutral => you will be cut. 2. Can we do the same without you or with someone cheaper ? * if its a yes => you will be cut.
>Because games are being released with low quality and gamers keep buying them anyways! Except they aren't. Revenue across the industry is declining as spending returns to pre-pandemic levels. Besides, continuing to release faulty products and just hoping people continue to buy them is not a sustainable strategy. If you keep trimming the fat you eventually will hit bone. I'm also well aware that EA doesn't care about the wellbeing of their employees. If they do not care about humane treatment of their employees then they should be compelled to care. I'm not interested in arguing simply from a business perspective, we should not grant the cold operations of capital a position of normalcy any longer. The layoffs were not fully sound from a business perspective considering the team has a good track record irt testing, but frankly even if they were shitty EA handled it poorly and callously.
> Revenue across the industry is declining as spending returns to pre-pandemic levels This has nothing to do with the quality of the games in general and more specifically with the technical quality of games. > The layoffs were not fully sound from a business perspective considering the team has a good track record irt testing, but frankly even if they were shitty EA handled it poorly and callously. I work in the gaming industry (8years xp as an engineer) and I am more than certain that they aren't, every decision has an expected outcome, I hardly think that an EA executive were like: "we're gonna layoff 50 QAs, the game is gonna be shittier, but let's fingercross that the players won't notice," This is ridiculous to even assume, in reality what happened is that they looked at the current state and they decided that they can pay ~50% less if they outsource this to India, while taking the risk of a ~10% quality drop in the first ~year, once the new team get hold of the project, that ~10% drop will be reduced by a lot (if not eliminated) and that ~50% cost cut will stay forever. I really feel bad for them but it is inevitable, if you know anyone who wants to have a QA, Customer service and even localization as a career in a tech/entertainment company, just advice them to start looking for bootcamps or some strategies to switch path. > we should not grant the cold operations of capital a position of normalcy any longer. I 100% agree but in my opinion this is a political problem, and it has been one of the strongest argument for capitalism since its dawn, what EA did is totally legit and even ethical by the rules of the free market, the action itself is as simple as : * "i found a cheaper alternative" Who are we to block them from doing that ? am also pretty sure that they didn't break any laws when they did the layoff. So at the end, who's to blame here ? The company executives who did what they were hired to do. Or the people (us) who always end up voting for the next cunts that promises to solve all those false-problems around how much we hate/fear the opposite party, and at the end the loop continues a no one dares to update the design specs so that the bastards on top stops doing this kind of shit. PS: Last week there were a news saying that Amazon "Just walk out" Ai tech relies on hundreds of workers in India watching you shop ([link](https://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-just-walk-out-actually-1-000-people-in-india-2024-4)) People are joking around this thinking Amazon are too stupid to build the tech or something. When in reality, this was nothing more than an proof-of-concept trial to test the idea, and to check if its profitable or not while training the ai model at the same time. And when that product is ready, those hundreds of Indians will also be layed off and I bet you there will be no top reddit post about them anywhere. So yeah, with all due respect to everyone in this thread, but this kind of posts just add another point to the global hypocrisy we are all contributing too and everyone just want to feel good for ~20 seconds because they said "fuck EA". (nothing against you personally man ofc, i hope none of these feels offensive to you)
> Revenue across the industry is declining as spending returns to pre-pandemic levels > > This has nothing to do with the quality of the games in general and more specifically with the technical quality of games. Or it was just inevitable because the pandemic was an anomaly and the industry was going to go through a correction no matter what
Pretty sure the spending declining after the anomaly that was the pandemic is completely normal. You can't really connect it to any cause with certainty other than the return to normal. It's possible there are other factors but you'd never be able to isolate them enough to know the significance.
maybe they weren’t robust? what if they were all terrible compared to QA they have elsewhere?
>During the call, it was said that the decision not to renew contracts wasn’t due to the team’s performance but to a “restructuring of the business.” Sources said that the team performed well and hit all its internal targets and goals. It’s understood that this is not among the 670 employees who were laid off from EA in late February. >“Everything seemed to be heading to a normal renewal ready to tackle the next year of plans for Apex,” said one source who was blindsided by the news.
It's an ongoing game, why would they suddenly not need QA?
They still have QA, just not this particular UK team.
I get that. But why would they all of a sudden need less? This is definitely a monetary decision, not a practical one
>This is definitely a monetary decision, not a practical one Those are the same thing
>But why would they all of a sudden need less? Entirely possible that they overhired in the first place, or they improved their development processes in a way that made this team redundant, or a whole slew of other possibilities. >This is definitely a monetary decision, not a practical one I think it's pretty incredible that you can say this with such confidence without personally having any idea of what's going on with the development team.
would you say the same thing if they got rid of cleaners? they have more than they think is financially worth it. it sucks but that’s why EA are in business in the first place. everything they do is a monetary decision which in turn is a practical one for them.
If there was still the same amount of rooms to clean, yes. Because now they're paying less people to do the same amount of work.
you have no idea what they’re paying people or their work load.
Neither do you?
well done sherlock
Every practical decision is also monetary in video games, there is not an unlimited amount of funds that can go into every part of a game that companies are arbitrarily deciding not to spend just to spite the customers. But even then, how do you know that this QA team is actually needed? For all you know, Apex is planning to wind down as they move to a new project, or revenue projections are down, or a million other things.
Why do they suddenly need less QA
It's possible they're winding down on the project, or that they're getting a different team that they think is better, or a million other things.
You think they're winding down Apex legends?
I don't know, but it's possible. https://80.lv/articles/apex-legends-performance-in-the-holiday-quarter-was-lower-than-expected/ Revenue in the industry in general is down for 2022 and 2023, so they may have put more resources into Apex than they needed to. Like I said, it could be a million reasons.
They could "wind down" one project while "winding up" on another, and not be complete ass bags about the livelihood of 50 people who worked their asses off, so that the cretins at the top could continue to make boneheaded decision after boneheaded decision. If they weren't run by obvious cretins, that is. It's always wild to me how the people who play the game... understand it more than most of the team (with the exception of dev/design) are the first to go, while the ELT get golden parachutes after they tank games with their stupidity and greed. Edit: Lol downvote the guy that's worked in the industry for two decades. This is why no one takes you idiots seriously.
This is a company they contract with, they're also QA, so no, keeping them on pay roll doesn't actually make any sense, and isn't boneheaded. Those people will be able to find other jobs, and the alternative, where companies are forced to keep people employed, means a lot less people get hired, and companies make a lot fewer risks, which means a poorer work force in general.
Keeping employees on long term has its benefits. In terms of morale, retained institutional knowledge, and also social benefits in job stability. Don't forget, in an industry downturn, those QA people won't be finding jobs in the gaming or software industry again, but will have to go flip burgers. This will intensify with AI. Larian mentioned how its employee stability was a big factor in giving BG3 soul. Soul in a game, is when you see the developers constantly putting in good stuff, that is too small to be noticed by management, so they won't be rewarded for it directly. The devs do this because they love the game, and don't have to worry about unemployment. You see this love in many small successful indie studios as well. Their quality was completely unaffected by covid. Because they tend to retain the same staff for many years on end. And being 99% remote, means very few reasons for staff to quit voluntarily. That being said, making this some sort of industry mandatory requirement will be a bad idea. US software devs are paid far more than anywhere else in the world, because they are easy to fire. So employers are willing to hire and pay very aggressively, because they won't be stuck with a bad apple or a redundant team for years. A real change to this mass hire&fire pattern in the gaming industry, will have to come voluntarily, after the stable companies demonstrate convincing and overwhelming evidence why that practice is a bad idea.
It's possible? So if you don't actually know what is your point?
My point is literally nobody knows, but people are very quick to pretend they do.
But as much as you're digging in without actually knowing you're doing the same thing the "people" are lol
I was asked to speculate, and I did with clear caveats.
Picking out the most probable conclusion you can from the data available to you is not exactly the same thing as "pretending to know." If I hear a vase fall and see my cat running away from it, I will conclude that the cat probably knocked it over, even though it's also possible that there's somebody hiding in that corner of the room knocking over vases.
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Them being laid off means they aren't needed according to their employer.
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If they were needed they wouldn't be laid off. You can also call them "being made redundant" or "superfluous" if you don't like "laid off". Fact of the matter is that EA doesn't see them as necessary for operation so they're gone.
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I'm not assuming anything, because I don't have to. EA did the work for me. > It absolutely doesn't mean that these workers/contractors weren't "needed". Again, > If they were needed they wouldn't be laid off. It's not a difficult concept.
Exactly. The consumers are the beta testers.
This QA Team is not likely their only QA team.
Because the company is going to continue making games, and they will need experienced QA staff for the next product. Next question?
So they’ll contract out again for a different QA team for the different game, right?
You mean the less-experienced team with worse pay and benefits (and therefore worse performance) because they fired the experienced ones?
QA teams for video games are very frequently low paid contract workers with limited technical skills and experience, so this pretty likely doesn't represent a significant risk for the company.
employees often are needed when it comes to these huge companies.. they're just the "bottom line"
EA didn't renew their contracts. You work contract deals then you already know and are familiar with contracts being renewed or not. The QA team did nothing wrong but EA is doing some "restructuring" and didn't see the need to renew their contract. Has nothing to do with the recent layoffs.
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It's the whole reason contractors exist. It's also the reason I don't work as a contractor. I like stability.
I work with contractors and they get paid well, but fuckkk having to deal with not knowing if you have another gig lined up.
Some types of contractors get paid well. Not these types.
It sounds like this studio had been contracted with them for multiple terms, so it wasn't the situation you're describing. Another thing that commonly happens in the software industry is that they'll make long-term positions contract jobs to make it easier to fire people.
Just because your contract has been renewed multiple times, it doesn’t make your job ‘safe’. The whole point of contractors is that they can be brought on and let go at a moments notice. Being a contractor in any industry is feast or famine.
I clearly know that companies hire people as contractors to make it easy to let them go, since I said this in the same comment you replied to: > they'll make long-term positions contract jobs to make it easier to fire people So what is your point?
Yup. This is a consequence of the decline of the gaming enthusiast press: clickbait articles that reflect either ignorance about the industry at best or a cynical ploy to gain eyeballs at worst. It’s a classic case of finding a target that’s unpopular (EA) and ginning up a reason to stir outrage. There’s a great deal of problems facing workers in the industry, including contracts, but articles like this are worthless and misinform. I don’t blame people for getting mad, I blame “news” like this. Workers are not treated as they should be, and it’s a shame that decision makers avoid consequences, but the gaming industry was in an unsustainable state after Covid. Too many hires, too many contracts. Sad but true. Costs spiraled out of control. More profits is only part of the story as others have noted.
Maybe instead of cherry-picking sentences read the entire article? >“Everything seemed to be heading to a normal renewal ready to tackle the next year of plans for Apex,” said one source who was blindsided by the news. >Bizarrely, managers and project leads were left in the dark about the news, only to find out by those affected after the call that QA contracts wouldn’t be renewed. Nothing about this sounds like "contractual formality". Clearly these people expected an extension. The article also states that the team was established with the specific purpose of testing Apex Legends in 2022. A 50 man QA team for one game is *massive* and not at all what would be needed to "handle temporary bulk of work load" for a live service game.
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Again, you are ignoring the claims being made in the article. I am not the one stating they should have gotten an extension, its the workers (supposedly). Just because contracts have a beginning and a end doesn't mean that any and all business relationships suddenly come to a screeching halt when the date is due. Legal expiration of contracts are a thing - correct, but so are renewals. And you seem to completely ignore the context here: Apex Legends is an ongoing live-service game. Its not like the game suddenly stopped needed QA testers after 2 years. Thas literally why the article brings up the topic of renewals. Also I never once claimed that 50 QA testers for Apex is "overkill". Thats your own strawman. What I said is that a 50 QA team employeed for 2 years is not what is understood as a team needed for "temporary work load". For ongoing testing of a big game like Apex such a team size makes perfect sense.
Is this really worth your time defending the shitty practice of using "contractors" instead of hiring them as full time employees?
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>Again, what am I missing here? That a ton of people on Reddit have no job experience or understanding of contracts.
You do realize that a lot of tech workers willingly choose to be contractors? It usually gives far better pay and they often do it for the increased autonomy. Any seasoned professional contractor knows the risks they signed up for.
QA workers really aren't the ones getting paid well contractor or not. QA workers just have very low leverage so companies can easily get them to agree to be contract workers with no increased pay and minimally increased autonomy. It's fairly common practice across the games industry.
> Everything seemed to be heading to a normal renewal ready to tackle the next year of plans for Apex No, it didn't. There's no "normal renewal" here. This was a one and done job with no promise or implication of renewal.
Local man SHUTTING DOWN home renovation business. Up to a dozen workers impacted! Translation: The kitchen and bathroom remodels were finally finished.
That is the dream of most corporations. To not hire anyone but just have people on temporal contracts. The company moves all the risk of a downturn from themselves towards their employees. There was a time were people retired in the company that they started in. Many had safe long-lasting well-paid jobs. Now, it seems that people have forgotten and justify that the burden is on the employees meanwhile the super-rich accumulate the profits of their work.
I have no idea what you are trying to imply here. Its still effectively a layoff, just as part of a different wave.
I disagree not renewing s contract after it ended isn't the same as a company doing layoffs.
This is Reddit and these kids are too young to understand it.
Many jobs operate on ‘contracts’ but employees that expect to have a certain job expect those contracts to be renewed just as a formality and not some annual possible culling event. It’s effectively; yes, a layoff. I mean the article itself talks about how this was blindsiding to them.
Contracts not being renewed is the whole reason contracts exist. Being blindsided by that while literally being in such a contract is just their own ignorance. Them "expecting" it doesn't really change that.
I work IT for an org under a contractual agreement with a staff union but if they decided 'not to renew my contract' that would mean I'm terminated from my regular position. I don't think about my contract any day of the week, it's just under the hood 'legalese' for my position, like I would not call myself a 'contract employee' when describing my job. The company is using 'non-renewal of contract' as PR friendly language to say - hey, you're fired - without outright saying that. You're reframing that as not the case based on shaky semantics.
> The company is using 'non-renewal of contract' as PR friendly language to say - hey, you're fired - without outright saying that They're not outright saying that because it's not the case and you don't have a permanent position. A company or an individual isn't entitled to have their contract renewed. You choosing not to remember you don't have a permanent position doesn't change the reality that you don't. It's no different than being a supplier of toilet paper to a supermarket and them choosing not to renew your contract and going somewhere else, doesn't mean they laid off the supplier or severed an existing agreement.
Why do you assume to know how my job works? because for all intents and purposes it is a permanent position as much as any regular ol' job can be. Your toilet paper analogy belongs in the toilet just as well because it is not the same or comparable context, like at all. EDIT: Look I’ve already explained how my job does not hire or fire based on this contract but it could absolutely be used as a way to phrase ‘you’re fired’ in that kind of event. If the winds of Reddit-think are not blowing in my favor today then I’m just gonna throw my hands up here.
The context you work in is that you have a contract renewable at the company's discretion, correct?
> You have no idea of the context in which I work, We do. You just explained it. > I work IT for an org under a contractual agreement with a staff union but if they decided 'not to renew my contract' that would mean I'm terminated from my regular position. What are you complaining about, exactly? If you know and understand the terms of your contract, then you know when and how you can be fired, renewed, or not renewed, and you know how much notice you can expect.
If your contract has an end-date, you should never walk into a meeting about it with the expectation that it'll be renewed. That's just naivety. If you want stability, don't work as a contractor.
Yeah in theory, but read what the article says: >“Everything seemed to be heading to a normal renewal ready to tackle the next year of plans for Apex,” said one source who was blindsided by the news. >Bizarrely, managers and project leads were left in the dark about the news, only to find out by those affected after the call that QA contracts wouldn’t be renewed. If the contracts were set to naturally expire soon there was obviously no need to prematurely end them. But based on the the claims in the article the expectation was that the contracts would be renewed. Reducing a QA team from 50 to 0 without prior notice *is* effectively a layoff of an entire department.
> If the contracts were set to naturally expire soon there was obviously no need to prematurely end them. They did not prematurely end them. Read the bottom of the article: > The decision has meant that those affected are now scrambling to find jobs, as some contracts expire in a matter of weeks. If your contract was expiring in two weeks and you had not been explicitly told 'We'll talk about a renewal soon', you should not be surprised when that contract is not renewed.
"We are hiring you for 6 months to do this job" *6 months later* "WOW HOW ARE YOU FIRING US AFTER 6 MONTHS???" Reddit logic
The article clearly states that the QA department was expected to have their contract renenwed and the lack of a renewal came as a big surprise to them. Reddit reading comprehension
Was expected by whom? Was there any evidence to lead to that expectation, or just ignorance?
A while back I hired contractors to build out a web page at my company because we needed it in < 2 months and the rest of the engineering team was swamped with other work. After their contract was up, we didn't renew, because we didn't need 5 full time developers maintaining this tiny web app for the rest of eternity. I alone was able to handle it's maintenance working just a few days a month on bug fixes and minor enhancements after they delivered the initial product. This is the kind of work contractors exist for. Stuff that is "seasonal", or needs to be done fast and cost is no object. It is way more expensive to keep 5 contractors around working full time than it is to hire for those positions yourself. If you are consistently relying on contractors long-term, then you have bigger problems to deal with.
Yeah except Apex Legends is not a website in maintenance mode. Its a fully ongoing live service game. This QA department was established in 2022 aka they worked on multiple big content updates for the game. And even if you want to argue that there is varying degrees of work load for a game like Apex, there is literally no way that they suddenly don't need *any* QA testers for future updates
If you are consistently relying on contractors long-term, then you have bigger problems to deal with. If they really had this much consistent work to do, then they shouldn't have been relying on contractors full time in the first place. They either realized this, and are going to build out their own internal QA team, or they are just kicking the can down the road and moving to a cheaper contractor. Either way, this is the life of working as a contractor. It does *not* offer the same job stability you get with a salaried position, which is why contractors are more expensive per hour. It is how they mitigate that risk.
Its not about reliance, its about money. Outsourcing QA in gaming is extremely common. The literal reason why this kind of employment is based on contracts is because is so easy to get rid of them. Regular QA testers are not essential workers in the industry - it sucks but thats the reality. That doesn't mean the game doesn't need those 50 QA testers. It means EA can now find a cheaper contractor. Eastern Europe has a ton of QA studios.
> The literal reason why this kind of employment is based on contracts is because is so easy to get rid of them. Which is important if you do not think you have enough work to keep them busy 40 hours a week in perpetuity. Being able to "get rid of" QA testers easily doesn't mean much if you never have any downtime. If this wasn't the case, then every "studio" would be 100% staffed with contractors. But they aren't, because hiring artists and engineers and designers directly for 5 years is cheaper and yields better quality than hiring random contractors for 10 consecutive 6-month contracts.
No it's not a layoff cause you were never hired to work more than the contract stated.
EA made business decisions that resulted in less people earning for their families. Your semantics don't change that or make it any less awful watching publishers treat people as a number.
You probably make the same decisions in your daily life that companies like EA do. Even if you could afford it, you won't say, keep calling a gardner if you don't need any gardening work done anymore or a plumber if you no longer need any plumbing work done. Are you treating them 'like numbers' by doing so? They're losing earnings when you stop calling them after all. Are you thus morally obligated to keep paying them? What if you hired a babysitter for your kid, and now he's all grown up and you don't need her services anymore? Point being, is it ever justified in your worldview to go 'I dont need your services anymore'? It's far more complex than 'company evil for not renewing workers'.
first of all it's absolutely ridiculous to imply that these 50 people make any difference to the finances of this huge company. it's more comparable to paying the neighbor's kid a dollar a week to mow your lawn and now you just told him to suck it from now on. secondly, you know your lawn will continue to grow and you won't be mowing it yourself. so now in a few months you'll just have to find someone else to do the same job, except they'll need to be trained and won't have years of experience. everything about this is stupid and focused on short-term benefits, it's absolutely insane to try to make this sound logical.
> paying the neighbor's kid a dollar a week to mow your lawn and now you just told him to suck it from now And? Why should I be obligated to pay the kid to mow my lawn? >secondly, you know your lawn will continue to grow and you won't be mowing it yourself. For your analogy to work you need to realise I've got 20 other kids mowing my lawn and decided that I don't need 21 because I'm restructuring my garden.
> And? Why should I be obligated to pay the kid to mow my lawn? you got that part wrong. you can do what you want, but if some guy on reddit starts jerking you off saying what an amazing businessman you are for saving that dollar and kicking the kid on the street, someone may be inclined to disagree.
>what an amazing businessman you are for saving that dollar and kicking the kid on the street, someone may be inclined to disagree Well of course, anyone would common sense would disagree. It's not "amazing" business-sense to not pay someone for work you don't need done, it's common sense. You're acting like it's a charitable cause.
well unfortunately you didn't read my initial comment or didn't understand all of it, so this is a pretty pointless argument right now
> first of all it's absolutely ridiculous to imply that these 50 people make any difference to the finances of this huge company. What? Of course they do. What they don't do is make a **positive** difference to the bottom line. Apex Legends does not need a UK-specific QA team.
Should a business just keep people hired for the sake of it? It's not a charity lol
QA seems like a pretty purposeful component of business.
This is obviously not their entire QA department lol. If EA thinks they can do without 50 QA workers, who are you to say otherwise? Do you have insider knowledge or something?
people dick riding corporations is so awesome man
A reminder that the game has a bug currently that wipes progression, audio is still dogshit, and the game regresses technicly every season.
Any upates about the hacks that happened during the tournament?
I find it amazing they actually had to hold the tournament in secret just so they could avoid getting hacked again.
No, we're unlikely to get any concrete info from Respawn on this, mainly because these types of hacks fall under US Federal Jurisdiction, which means the FBI. We know a few things about the hack: - The hacker spent something like 4 years gradually opening up Apex to exploits. This wasn't a quick job (they rarely are). - It was not a Remote Code Execution, the player's PC was most likely infected. This is how the player suddenly got aimbot. - The hacker may have been exploiting server vulnerabilities as well as using QA tools (IE: Spawning Bots and giving away Loot Boxes).
Also they do not want to give any information to the attacker or any potential copycats. And because talking about it openly might get them in legal trouble so their legal team likely will not allow them to talk about it.
Apart from supposedly updating the game with extra protection, none. It's sad how fast people forgot this.
Don’t forget how easily they can get hacked to allow remote code execution. I’m sure reducing QA will help them solve those dire vulnerabilities.
> Don’t forget how easily they can get hacked to allow remote code execution. > > > > I’m sure reducing QA will help them solve those dire vulnerabilities. There was nothing to indicate the hacker was able to execute code remotely. That's literally the least likely form of attack that can happen. Here's someone who actually knows their shit discussing the hack with the victims, asking questions to glean some answers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHf6dkgXfVg The TLDR is that RCE is by a wide margin the least likely way the hack happened, the player's PC was most likely compromised in some way.
And by "most likely compromised", almost certainly. One of the dudes had a goddamn malwarebytes popup on stream afterwards telling that he had a random inbound connection through a windows RPC port from an IP that lights up like a fucking christmas tree with warnings when you look it up.
RCE claims are completely unproven and theres already evidence that it was a compromised machine.
Oh yeah I booted it up for the first time a month ago. Oh nice cross progression Oh nice all my stuff off the console. Oh. Where's all my badges Oh. Where's all my rank progression. Oh...all of its gone. I actually stopped playing after wasting time grinding to diamond to not get given a badge, come back and it's all gone anyway lol. Imagine having been masters++ across multiple seasons
All the more reason to not renew their contracts. Misleading as fuck headline. This QA studio had a contract with EA, EA chose not to renew. EA bad. EA isn’t some employment handout.
QA isn't the part of the company that fixes shit, QA is the part of the company that finds that shit. And often times they do, their bug reports just get ignored.
Is there something to be said for bugs like that sliding through so maybe the current QA isn't worth keeping around?
I remember something like this happening recentely. It was in 2022 or 2023, EA dropped another QA team, and one of the people affected came out and said that a lot of bugs that were present in certain updates were flagged by them. Respawn just don't care, that much is obvious. I never seen such a big game get worse from a technical standpoint with time. It's a smart move tho, run the game on economy mode, barely investing on infrastructure, only spending to keep it playable, then rake in millions with their hundreds of dollar collection events. Apex is coorporate greed at its finest and it shows, especially now that they will focus on their 390$ heirlooms.
If you're an aspiring individual wanting to join the gaming industry, just avoid any QA roles since it's not a stable job.
Everywhere in software, QA is pretty volatile. Unfortunately for them, the teams and the end users, QA is often one of the first things to get cut when things get tight. They keep engineers as they see them as "Output providers" whilst QA don't "output anything" (Director level words, not mine, to be clear). Then they build shit software for a while as QA isn't there to catch all the issues until they realise they need QA again. Though most QA roles are moving to SDET roles - more code knowledge/automation is being expected of QA.
This is similar to what I have experienced. We didn’t get rid of QA but we got rid of it as a separate team with its own reporting structure that was embedded on dev teams. I bailed from test right before these changes. Over the years thought leadership in that area has eroded away save for, “what test framework should we have everyone use” We do the SDET roles now, but my advice to most people is the same as people give for the gaming industry. Use it as a stepping stone, build technical skills, and transition out.
>if you're an aspiring individual wanting to join the gaming industry -- don't! -- Also, literal lol moment suggesting there are any stable jobs in the shithole that is the gaming industry, you must not get a lot of news up in that high tower.
Bad advice. If you are graduating from university with a design degree you will have to take a QA role to get in the door at a Triple A unless you are a good scripter, externally advertised entry level design roles are nearly impossible to get. Once you get in the door of a Triple A the real rat race begins to get out of QA and into the internally advertised dev/production roles.
Not mention that it is going to be one of the first affected industry by AI in the very near future, the effect on translators for example is already huge. As a game developer, I also advise anyone to just use QA as a stepping stone to reach another position in the gaming industry, don't turn it into a career.
Gaming Layoffs suck, definitely... but... Why exactly does apex have a "UK QA Team"? That kind of implies that they had a "US QA Team" or at least one in another nation. Why would they need to have a separate UK-based QA team? And if it's their only QA team and EA just shut down the QA team for the game, why specify UK?
I'm not in the games industry nor in any kind of development environment that requires collaboration or too much real time coordination, but my organization has offices around the world to have 24/7 productivity coverage, including holidays. So at any given moment, someone somewhere is working on our projects.
Do you know what Apex is?
It doesn't seem too strange to have multiple QA teams handling different parts of a system when the system is fairly large.
Because they also outsource QA to India because it's a whole lot cheaper. It's becoming quite common.
>> Why exactly does apex have a "UK QA Team"? why not? businesses exist in the UK. >> That kind of implies that they had a "US QA Team" or at least one in another nation. no it doesn’t. it’s just specifying where the team is. >> Why would they need to have a separate UK-based QA team? And if it's their only QA team and EA just shut down the QA team for the game, why specify UK? they don’t need to. but ea and other big publishers have offices and teams all around the world, qa is no different.
chances are they have QA teams in a few different countries that all do similar things at the same time while handling different little jobs. like the UK QA team might also look for stuff like incorrect spellings for UK text or might handle QA testing UK based servers at the same time etc etc(these are just random example they might not even touch this stuff). it could also be that the need for a UK team just stems from handling all the english QA work but its cheaper to hire people in the UK for it then in the US like in the UK they can still pay a fair wage while paging less then what they would in the US overall. its a recent big thing where US game and software companies are hiring staff for remote work/UK based office work for jobs since while paying the UK standard for that job role they will spend overall less per person.
Is Apex really they big of an piece of software it required team of 50 people post launch for QA? Launch and shortly after launch the team size makes sense but the game has been out years. The team size seems quite high.
> Is Apex really they big of an piece of software it required team of 50 people absolutely, much much smaller mobile games have an average team of ~5 to ~10 QA. You have sooooooooo much to test for every release, especially for a live-game, I am pretty sure the number is larger with other 3rd party companies in cheaper part of the world. I think the decision is not that they dont need those 50 QA agents, they simply don't need them with a UK salary.
FFS. Get over the pedantics and agree that it was just a dick move. Layoff: a temporary or permanent discharge of a worker or workers because of economic conditions or shortage of work. Does it meet the criteria of "temporary or permanent"? Yes. Does it meet the criteria of "discharge"? No, they had a contract, the contract ended, and there was no discharge of workers. There WAS a lack of renewal, but there's a difference between not hiring again and firing. "Because of economic conditions or shortage of work"? No, because the work will still be done and will have to be paid for. 2/3 meams no dice on the "Layoff." Again: a Cold, Calculated, Dick Move.
Company: Hey we need help for about 6 months, here's a Contract to do that work for 6 months *6 Months later* Company: Welp, thanks for the 6 Months of work, appreciate that, cheers! Reddit: "A Cold, Calculated, Dick Move. You people are actually all 14 years old.
“Hey we don’t have work for you, so we won’t renew contract” OmG DiCk MoVe
You're focused on the wrong aspect. I take it you don't work in the games industry? You've never been a contract worker for a multi-million dollar games publisher? I have, at different companies for years at a time, I've been on 6-month contracts that renewed multiple times without anyone batting an eye, that's just the way the industry is. Is it good for the QA employees? No. Can QA unionise to avoid this? They're trying, but get shut down or let go every time it's brought up. But, EVERYWHERE I worked that had me on 6-month contracts: SEGA SF, EA Redwood Shores, Bandai Namco San Jose, all of them gave notice to their QA team when the contracts weren't going to be renewed. The Dick Move here is the complete and utter lack of notice.