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

By Otto Kratky December 6, 2021

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.

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.

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Otto Kratky is a freelance writer with many homes. You can find his work at Digital Trends, GameSpot, and Gamepur. If he's…

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