Throughout Black Ops 4’s rocky development, testers said they worked under unfair conditions-a theme that’s common in the video game industry, but one that remains worth scrutinizing. They described a company in which contractors, and particularly testers, feel like they’re perceived and treated as inferior. This account of Treyarch’s studio culture, and of the development of Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, is based on interviews with 11 current and former staff members, all of whom spoke anonymously in order to protect their careers. It’s just a culture of not being cared about.” “We’re getting paid these very minimal amounts working these ridiculous hours, yet these people are getting paid absurd amounts of money. “That broke a lot of people,” said a tester who left shortly afterwards. They didn’t even qualify for a $21 bonus. So it was a gut punch to at least a few of them when, in January of this year, news broke that the video game publisher Activision had given a cash and stock bonus worth up to $21 million to its new chief financial officer, Dennis Durkin. For the past year or so, some say they’ve been working around 70 hours a week.

Many of Treyarch’s employees are not full-time staff but contractors, which means that, among other things, they don’t qualify for the bonuses that full-timers might get from all those Black Ops 4 sales.Īccording to Glassdoor aggregates and testimonials from employees to Kotaku, Treyarch’s QA testers are paid a base wage of around $US13 ($19) an hour. It was also a turbulent production, marked by a drastic reboot, the last-minute addition of a battle royale mode, and what one developer described as “perpetual crunch” that perhaps hit the QA team hardest. It made more than $700 million in its first three days on sale, helping ensure that Activision’s 2018 financial results were what chief executive Bobby Kotick called “the best in our history.” Put another way: When I asked a non-tester at Treyarch about the party, they responded, “Surprised they were invited at all.”Ĭall of Duty: Black Ops 4, released last October, is the latest entry in Activision’s massively popular first-person shooter series. Sometimes, they’re allowed to scrounge for leftovers an hour later, once the non-testing staff have gotten to eat. When lunch is catered, testers are told that the food downstairs is for the development team, not for them. When they get to work, testers have to park their cars in a different parking lot than other employees, one that’s further away from the office. Some testers say they’re told not to speak to developers in other departments, and one told me they’ll only do so surreptitiously, out of fear of getting fired. Testers work on the second floor of the office, while most of the other developers are on the first. It was a small affront, but it felt indicative of a bigger problem: At Treyarch, many contract employees, especially the testers, say they feel like second-class citizens. “It sucks, but honestly we’re pretty used to getting these sort of ‘rules’ when they do any parties here.”

“QA was told we were only allowed down at the party for a max of 20 minutes, and we ‘really shouldn’t drink anything’ because we still had to work,” said one tester. There was pizza, beer, and jubilation for everyone at the studio behind Call of Duty: Black Ops 4-except the quality assurance testers, who had to leave shortly after they got there. One Friday afternoon a few weeks ago, the developers at Treyarch held a happy hour event to welcome the summer interns.

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