It was only a few days ago that 34 quality assurance testers at Raven, one of the studios working exclusively on the Call Of Duty series, formed the first ever union among Activision Blizzard employees. Today, management has responded to their success with some changes, breaking up the members of the union.
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As Polygon’s Nicole Carpenter reports, earlier today Raven studio head Brian Raffel emailed all staff about an ‘organizational change’ that takes the now-organized QA team—who have only just returned to work having been on strike for seven weeks—and splits them up, spreading them across the rest of the workplace.
The concept of “embedded QA,” where testers are integrated within the rest of a studio’s workforce (as Raven is doing here), is not a new one, and is increasingly common across major video game studios; BioWare, for example, has been doing it for years.
The timing here is certainly interesting, though. Like how these long-planned changes, months in the making, are kicking in for QA staff almost at the exact moment they’ve returned to work from their strike, and will immediately break up the members of the union and scatter them across the studio.
I’m sure that’s just an honest organizational change, and has nothing to do with Raven’s new union, something Activision executives fear more than death itself.
Update: 1/25/21, 3:01 p.m. ET: The CWA blasted Activision’s newly announced plan to restructure Raven QA today, calling it “nothing more than a tactic to thwart Raven QA workers who are exercising their right to organize.”
