GAMES:
Call of Duty QA testers fired after receiving promises of increases from Activision

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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