@johnkingsize

2 years ago

"The shady thing is that they rehired these positions" This is actually pretty common in triple-A game companies, especially these based in countries when work laws are pretty loose like the USA. There is that thing of burning out when you expect your employees to be over 100% daily so that they can push out more work, but the cap on it is that it makes people require rest to eventually get back from the stress and tiredness it produces, both physically and mentally. What companies came with in response to that is the crunch. It consists in spreading tasks, organising work and putting a big focus on KPI and productivity so that your employees work far more than is healthy while on a project, then releasing that project far sooner than would have been healthily possible. Then, instead of having to wait for your workforce to rest before starting another project, you lay the crunched employees off and hire new, unbroken, dream-headed ones and start over. The people who are thrown away by these game companies are mostly people who aren't hirable anytime soon anyway because they have been worked to death and need lots of rest, sometimes counselling. What Blizzard was doing then and does now is not anywhere new, but it pains me to know that my former dream game developer is doing crunch. When it comes to Warcraft 3, this is just this in play. They have axed away resources from this project to reinject them elsewhere, mostly overwatch, but still made it so that they could have something to announce during BlizzCon. So, basically, the reforged thing was a way to have something to announce, run away with the cash people paid and then move on as if nothing happened.

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