I don’t need to tell anybody that the pandemic brought a wave of unprecedented change in the ways we live and work. Across many industries, companies had to adapt to quarantine measures, restructuring workflows to allow for remote working and learning new tools and work philosophies in order to keep things running during this time of upheaval. Remote working gave employees more flexibility, allowed them to move to places with lower costs of living, and in many cases, increased work-life balance too.

A lot of this benefited workers, including game developers, who are very vulnerable to the pervasive crunch culture that runs through the industry. Naughty Dog said outright in its documentary about the making of The Last of Us Part 2, that it recognised its crunch problem and that hybrid working was a way of explicitly trying to change that. Being forced to move to remote work was, for many studios, the primary reason systems that could mitigate crunch were put in place at all.

The Rise Of The RTO

But as urgency over the pandemic wanes, companies are starting to institute RTO (return to office) orders, much to the displeasure of their employees. Rockstar Games is reportedly asking its employees to return to office as Grand Theft Auto 6 “enters the final stages of development” for “productivity and security reasons”. Activision Blizzard King ended remote work in favour of hybrid work in April 2023 and instituted a full return to office structure in January 2024. Roblox announced in October 2023 that remote workers had until mid-January to decide if they would either work in the company’s Bay Area office from Tuesday to Thursday or take a severance package. Just last week, Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium Games fired a number of employees after relocation. The list goes on.

The feasibility of completely remote work is dependent on how each individual company works, and it’s not up to me to decide what’s possible and what’s not. As an editor at this website, I work completely remotely and on a different continent from almost all of my coworkers. It’s possible in game development, too – Respawn Entertainment developed Star Wars Jedi: Survivor completely remotely and within three and a half years. Many developers believe that their jobs can be done entirely from home, and others feel that they benefit from having a few days in the office. Some just prefer working in an office environment with their coworkers. These policies shouldn’t be one size fits all.

Layoffs Without The Bad Press

But they often are one size fits all, and it’s undeniable that return to office orders hurt employees, especially those who have previously been told that they will not be forced to return to office. Many job positions advertised as remote are suddenly not. People are being forced to choose between losing their jobs or uprooting their families to move closer to the office, add commute time to their work days, restructure their whole lives, and potentially expose themselves and their families to increased risk of Covid-19. It also particularly impacts disabled developers who were able to enter the industry because of remote jobs, and now may lose those jobs if they’re forced to return to office.

Many developers see these orders as layoffs in disguise. Former Cloud Imperium Games producer Annie Bouffard said on LinkedIn that mass layoffs were disguised as “relocation of staff”. The ABK Workers Alliance at Activision Blizzard King called their RTO order a “soft layoff”. These unpopular policies force large numbers of workers to quit through no fault of their own, without them being explicitly called out as being layoffs done to maximise profits.

More Office Time, More Crunch

The corollary of hybrid and remote working helping to manage crunch is that RTO orders enable crunch. Rockstar is notorious for crunch culture, and it’s very likely that returning developers will have their work-life balance compromised. The Independent Workers union of Great Britain, or the IWGB, published testimony from Rockstar workers saying that management are “refusing to engage with workers”, they “fear management may even be paving the way for a return to toxic ‘crunch’ practices”, and they’re worried about “being forced to work late hours in the office to maintain contact with global teams” when they could have done that from home before.

In the game industry as well as outside it, companies are trying to restore old ways of working. They believe that it will increase productivity, and that this productivity is worth the negative impact it will have on their employees, as well as the loss of talent it will inevitably cause. It’s terrible for the employees that have to adapt to keep their jobs, and terrible for those that have to leave because they made choices based on promises from management that are now being broken. It’s astounding – things finally got better for workers, and their bosses are now trying to run it back. It makes sense that they’re choosing now to do this though, since there’s nowhere else for these workers to go.

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