Today contract testers at Call of Duty Raven Software studio were told the studio will be fired on January 28 next year, a Call of Duty community manager said on Twitter. A source familiar with company events confirmed that for the next few days, in early December, the quality assurance team would meet individually with management to find out if they were unemployed.
Bought by Activision in 1997, Raven Software is today one of the main developers behind Call of Duty titles. The Wisconsin-based company has worked on titles like Call of Duty: Black Ops, Ghosts, Infinite Warfare and others in conjunction with major Activision studios like Infinity Ward. Most recently, Raven Software has become the most public face of the free Warzone battle royale via patch notes and development communications. Raven is, in other words, an important part of the ever-expanding Call of Duty machine.
According to Austin O’Brien, Community Manager for Call of Duty, Raven Software’s QA team has been promising increases for months through Activision. As it turned out, these increases were marked with an asterisk.
The plan, as our source says, is that Activision will absorb some contract testers from Raven Software, hire testers permanently, but the vast majority of Raven developers would be out of work.
Workers who keep their jobs will in effect be promoted from $ 17 an hour to $ 18.50 an hour, along with improved benefits and quarterly bonuses. Promises of raises and other benefits that never come are well-known tactics in the industry as a way to retain contract workers in the hope of being transferred to full-time positions.
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