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Former full-timers accuse company of “stalling and intimidation tactics”
Image credit:EA
Image credit:EA
Laid-offDragon Age: Dreadwolf andMass Effectdevelopers are attempting to turn this year’s “N7 Day” of Mass Effect-themed festivities into a day of mass revolt. The developers in question are a mixture of former full-time staff and former Keywords Studios QA testers who have worked on Dreadwolf under contract. They’ve organised pickets outside BioWare Edmonton’s offices in Canada, and are calling on BioWare fans to get involved on social media, while trying to engage current BioWare staff in conversation about unionisation.
The protesting QA testers werelaid off in late September, after BioWare decided not to renew their contract with Keywords for work on the new Dragon Age, which issupposedly playable from start to finish. They’re calling for their jobs to be reinstated, and continue to claim that they were fired as punishment for forming a union.
The Keywords union have, however, convinced the Labour Board that BioWare’s offices did represent their place of work during their time on the Dreadwolf project, not least because it relied on remote access to computers housed within the building. They began working for the Dragon Age team during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, which obliged them to do so from home. They also claim they decided to unionise only after Keywords and BioWare attempted to mandate a return to the office.
Today’s protest is less about stopping work at BioWare than engaging BioWare employees in conversation, Russwurm added. “We’re going to be out there, getting the word out, and even talking to BioWare employees coming and out of the building that might be interested in unionization,” he said. “That’s more of our focus than actual disruption.”
In the statement, the former BioWare full-timers accused the company of “stalling and intimidation tactics to try and get us to drop out”, writing that “a lot of the more junior employees and those with families, who had more monetary pressure on them, could not risk waiting on a court case that may take many months more to resolve”.
They further accuse BioWare of only offering the laid-off developers an additional payment and professional assistance finding new employment on condition that they sign an NDA about the details of any settlement, and waive the right to future legal action or “to complain in anyway way about anyone associated with BioWare now or ever in the future”.
The developers “strongly believe that if Dragon Age: Dreadwolf does not do as well as BioWare or Ea wants at launch, there will be more, even larger layoffs.” As such, they “believe it is important to hold BioWare responsible and get a clear decision on what settlement amount is legal” so as to “ensure that the next group who is laid off are not treated as poorly as we were.”
This year has been an awful one for games industry job losses, and developers are increasingly unwilling to take it on the chin. Last month,CD Projekt staff formed a new unionto - amongst other things - “negotiate the terms of mass layoffs as well as in individual cases”.
