Skip to main content

Call of Duty: Warzone staff poised to walk out following mass layoffs

Following a slew of layoffs of QA testers at Activision Blizzard’s Raven Software, the remaining testers at the Call of Duty-focused studio are reportedly set to walk out.

Filed to Bloomberg Terminal: Most of a team of around 40 QA testers at Raven Software, which works on Call of Duty Warzone, are walking off the job to protest a sudden layoff that began on Friday. They say they’ll be walking out until the layoff is reversed. Story shortly

— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) December 6, 2021

The walkout comes after nearly one-third of the studio’s QA testers, who work to ensure that bugs in games like Call of Duty: Vanguard and Call of Duty: Warzone are discovered before they can be exploited by players, were laid off, according to the Washington Post.

Recommended Videos

In a tweet, Raven Software associate community manager Austin O’Brien said that prior to the layoffs, “my friends in QA at Raven were promised, for months, that Activision was working towards a pay restructure to increase their wages.” On December 3, “valuable members of the team were called into meetings and told they were being let go,” continued O’Brien.

Today’s walkout was reported by Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier in a tweet. It also said that  most of the remaining QA team, comprised of 40 testers, will be walking off the job. Their return is contingent on the previous layoffs at the company being reversed.

For Activision Blizzard, today’s walkout is the latest that has occurred at one of its studios. The massive publisher, which has full ownership over the Call of Duty franchise, as well as Overwatch and World of Warcraft, has been embroiled in sexual misconduct scandals for the past six months. Most recently, it was reported that the company’s CEO, Bobby Kotick, knew of sexual misconduct at the company and had allegedly feigned ignorance, not just to the public, but also to Activision Blizzard’s board of directors. A walkout at the company soon followed, with workers demanding Kotick’s resignation, which has yet to happen.

Otto Kratky
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Otto Kratky is a freelance writer with many homes. You can find his work at Digital Trends, GameSpot, and Gamepur. If he's…
You might want to wait a bit to play Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 on Steam
A player runs in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 multiplayer.

It's Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 launch day, which means potentially millions of players are hopping into the new single-player campaign, the updated multiplayer mode, and Zombies. While posts online about the performance of the game seem to be minimal, there have been reported issues on PC, specifically via Steam.

It's been a common story lately about players being mad at third-party launchers on Steam, and that remains the case for Black Ops 6. Call of Duty's is called Call of Duty HQ (COD HQ), and it's a hub for players to manage their game installs, whether they want to only download certain game modes or launch a specific game. It seems as if players can only switch between modes through the launcher and have to go through multiple menus to boot the game up. In the worst cases, they can't launch the game at all.

Read more
Activision weighs in on Call of Duty toxicity ahead of Black Ops 6
A squad stands together in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.

Activision is looking to curb the toxic cesspool that is Call of Duty multiplayer with a few features coming in its upcoming game Black Ops 6.

While the development team released its voice and moderation system into Modern Warfare 3 at launch, Black Ops 6 will have a more robust version onday one. Voice moderation will be available in five languages -- it already supports English, Spanish, and Portuguese, and will have French and German when Black Ops 6 launches. Text tools can monitor even more, with the ability to work with 20 languages, including Japanese, Turkish, and Romanian.

Read more
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6: everything we know so far
Soldiers fight in a shopping plaza in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.

Now that the new Modern Warfare trilogy is complete, it's time to brush up on all Call of Duty games in order before the Black Ops series resurfaces. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 will pick up where Cold War left off and will be the most ambitious entry in the series yet, as it aims to take the spot as the best Call of Duty game yet. The initial teases were as cryptic as the game's themes of truth, lies, and subterfuge. That hasn't stopped us from digging through all the footage and documents to shed some light on one of our most anticipated upcoming games. There are a lot of exciting changes on the way, so we'll make sure you have all the necessary intel on Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 before release.
Release date

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 will launch on Friday, October 25, 2024.
Platforms

Read more