Armenius
Extremely [H]
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2014
- Messages
- 42,101
Sounds like your typical game dev studio.Wanted to chime in here with some secondhand experiences that I've heard. Disclaimer being that I don't know details and I have never worked at any game studio or Activision / Blizzard specifically.
I used to be active in the game jam scene and met a few developers who worked in some capacity professionally. Of those, I heard generally bad comments about the work environment (staff treated like shit, expendable, crunch , etc) regarding AAA publishers and specifically Activision, EA, and Bethesda. The staff being treated badly by management / treated as expendable could probably be construed as bullying - I suppose it depends on your definition. Also knew a guy who worked as a mid tier manager for playtesting and QA at Activision Blizzard. It did sound like a "toxic" environment or whatever you want to call it - the way he described, it was thankless, lots of turnover for the folks doing real work, crunch, groups/leaders controlling their own little fiefdoms within larger teams, a lot of "high school"-type of BS with poor oversight.
I say innocent until proven guilty in all things, but I have no problem believing most of these accusations could have happened given what I've heard. I haven't talked to the Activision Blizzard guy in years, but as I understand he left (or forced out / fired?) around 2016 after being involved with COD infinite and some sort of internal drama around not hitting whatever arbitrary sales figures it was supposed to.