3 Gaming Companies Who've Allegedly Treated Their Employees Like Garbage

Gaming is one of the fastest growing media sectors, from your nana spending real world money on Candy Crush Saga to your little niece clicking heads in Call of Duty, right on down to you, trying to get your baby to sleep so you can play Elden Ring in peace and quiet. The growing market means increased demand for newer, bigger, better games. And because the relatively new gaming industry remains largely un-unionized, the market growth is driving corporations to force workers into punishing conditions. Sorry to bum you out, but knowledge is power folks. Here’s 3 companies treating employees like garbage, and what they claim they’re doing to change.  

Activision Blizzard. The company that owns Candy Crush, World of Warcraft, and Call of Duty has been candy-crushing the spirits of its employees for years. The hyper toxic workplace culture here has allegedly been extra punishing on women. Things have gotten so bad that the state of California sued the company after one female employee committed suicide during a company retreat, her family claims that the sexual harrassment she faced there was a big contributing factor in her death. The company has now appointed a diversity, equity, and inclusion officer, so they’re making gestures to address the wrongdoing on some level. The company is also being acquired by Microsoft, which will surely change the corporate culture in some way. But only time will tell if the changes will be surface level or actually address the rotten core of one of gaming’s most toxic workplaces.

Facebook/Meta. Daddy Zucky can change the name to Meta all he wants, we know it’s still Facebook. Facebook/Meta may not be developing any AAA titles on their own, but Facebook Gaming is trying to become a serious heavyweight in the interactive entertainment space. Oh wait, they already are. More than 350 million people use Facebook Gaming every month according to market reports. Using social media can feel really bad for mental health and if you work at Facebook, guess what, you’re gonna be using Facebook. Meta employees are notoriously upset about their work life balance, again, being plugged into social media at all times is not healthy. There’s also the mental strain of working for a company that is actively destroying our democracy. We’ll see if the fast approaching Metaverse helps or hinders.

Rockstar Games. This one stings. Red Dead Redemption 2 is one of the greatest open-world games ever made. But it was made, sadly, with gamer tears. Employees have been alleging for years that Rockstar is a toxic place to work. Crunch, or spending hours of unpaid overtime each week, to get games ready for release, is a big problem in many companies. Rockstar has been accused in the past of allowing employees to destroy any sense of work life balance to meet deadlines that the company has set. But after all the bad publicity of crunch on Red Dead 2, things seem to be changing for the better, according to anonymous employee reviews on Glassdoor.