Multiple Job Losses Expected At Team17 As It Splits With CEO Michael Pattison

@Maddie47 Because they think QA can be outsourced on the cheap. This is partially true, however...
...the biggest insult is that they think: you do not QA THAT much, because if the game is shipped in some state, it is considered to be good enough.

"Boss, the game is broken
"But can you play it? I mean can you start and play it for a while?
"Yeah but...
"That's enough, we'll patch later - axe the QA team, job done there
"Uhh.. and what about the bug reports for the patch?
"Don't need'em, the community will report any issues anyways
"But... our reputation... I mean our goodwill...?
"Is it in the contract? No. See? So I don't care. Now leave

/bittersweet sarcasm

A QA. Team 17’s weak point since the amiga days. Let’s cut them.

@Maddie47, I'm assuming that QA testers are probably easier to replace via outside contractors or other temp/part time workers in comparison to developers, artists, etc.

IIRC, QA testing largely consists of a lot of rote, "unskilled", work where a worker may be tasked with playing the same segment of a game over & over again (stuff like maybe even jumping in place over & over again in the same spot repeatedly) and note if they run into any bugs or other inconsistencies.

when was their last hit? quite a while ago... and they couldn't manage to bring worms to a new level for how long now? 20 years?

@jojobar Overcooked 2, me thinks.

@RR529

There is that aspect to it, but there is also far more to it than that. It’s certainly not an unskilled role and the many QAs out there may have an issue with that label.

New Arcade Pool.. Job done..

There are different approaches to QA. A skilled QA team can really help the dev team pinpoint where bugs are happening, especially when the QA team can fully replicate it consistently. But, that's a more expense resource than just getting people in off the street to basically mass playtest a game. In this kind of situation at best you might have QA Manager that understands how to do QA and will do what they can to push the team to that level of performance. But, it's also unskilled labor so that manager is constantly balancing how to get the project done w/o having to burn themselves out by trying to train someone who's going to be gone at the end of the project. I've seen both. I'd go with a smaller QA team that really knows what their doing, and I've heard from the dev team they prefer that as well vs trying to solve against the law of numbers.

Oh, that reminds me. Worked with a sr manager type before my short stint in gaming. He always mused about setting up a QA company that was able to do highly detailed QA with a dedicated team. It always sounded good, but in hindsight after working in the biz, I realized it wasn't practical. There's little incentive to hire a dedicated company like that which would have to charge a premium for the scale of testing he talked about. His main angle was a series of test bed not unlike what you see some of the tech youtubers like LTT and GN are trying to do for their hardware & GPU reviews, but he wanted to target games specifically. You all know where the market went. Lowest cost provider that was able to do "good enough" as measured by some bean counter, not the studio head or the producer on the game.

Should make a new Alien Breed

An industry cannot rely on infinite growth, when the audience's spending power is getting smaller and smaller (while still being microtransactioned and subscription-serviced to kingdom come).
Mark my words, you heard it here first: 2024 and 2025 will be the start of another 1983 industry crash.

I only hope that all those affected by layoffs will be okay ❤️🙏🏽 All working class people in the every industry, including video games, deserve a good quality of life.

I wish they would have made a traditional sequel to Worms WMD, the last great game, instead of getting sucked into the battle royale hype

As someone with no interest in buying NFTs myself, I don't care either way if they exist or if Team17 makes them. What a weird reason to come "under fire."

the only thing that worries me about this is I believe team 17 published blasphemous, right? just leave them alone. let them cook. they’re doing amazing things for the community

I hope they all find jobs.

@NatiaAdamo ah yeah they published this right? or is it really from team 17 developed?
They also published dredge, which I think was quite successful

@FirstEmperor it’s not that weird when you take into account exactly what NFTs are, how they function and the way they are used.

The blockchain is an environmental disaster, the amount of power it uses to perform it’s basic functions are phenomenal and worst of all that entirely by design. At it’s peak, there were reports of entire cities having their power diverted to keep nearby blockchain servers going in some of the more corrupt areas of the world.

Which is a good Segway into the second point - it’s all a scam. One big, zero-sun Ponzi scheme. It’s designed only to benefit those already rich who set up the blockchain or crypto currency it runs on. And many of those people are huge, known financial criminals. And there are many worse people using it too who I won’t list because NL mods sometimes get funny about that.

So they’re environmentally irresponsible, morally bankrupt scams that don’t even do what they are advertised as doing - which is a thing that wasn’t even needed anyway.

So yeah. Any company that uses them and comes “under fire” for that deserves it.

@Ogbert Okay, there's a simple solution. Don't buy NFTs and let them fail on their own. I personally think gambling is a scam but I don't go around whining about Konami's involvement with pachinko machines.

@FirstEmperor well they are falling on their own anyway. But I think it’s fair to express disappointment and disdain at a company for engaging in immoral practices. Staying silent and assuming it will just go away doesn’t work and is how large corporations get away with stuff like this. Besides not everyone knows how bad they are, and talking about it, calling the company out for it helps spread that information. It’s also good to remind the companies that as the customer you expect certain standards from them or you’ll go elsewhere.

Inaction is never the solution to this sort of thing.

@Ogbert You can express whatever you want. I, on the other hand, am not going to worry about the existence of a product I have no interest in. There is nothing immoral about offering a product that some people apparently want.

Inaction isn't a solution because there is no problem here that requires one.

@FirstEmperor you don’t think it’s worth speaking out when companies are trying to push a scam product on to you? And one that has devastating environmental impact as well?

It’s not getting upset that the product exists and we don’t want it. It’s the very core of the product is damaging in so many ways.

I don’t know, if games companies started offering a special edition of the game where they drop a tank of oil into the sea with every purchase would you just be like “well I don’t want that but maybe others do so whatever”. Or maybe if they just offered to shoot an endangered species with every sale? Don’t give a damn about the environment or wildlife? How about if with every sale of every game they offered to divert a chunk of power away from a small village somewhere until the people had no electricity. Because the latter literally happened as a result of NFTs and crypto currencies.

Honestly you’re not evening listening to what these are an the impacts they have. They are not something to stay silent about they are something to tell companies you are not ok with them pushing. Perhaps this is a new crypto-bro tactic? Rather than telling people all the magical things that it all does (when it’s provable it does none of it) you’re just trying to get people to be quiet about it so it can all slip by and maybe into the mainstream again? Honestly I can’t think of another reason to be so dismissive.

@Ogbert NFTs don't seem to me to be any more of a scam than your typical physical collector's item that people already spend too much money on. And certainly no more of a scam than pachinko or slot machines. Not for me, but if there's a market for them then so be it.

Those are some hilariously misleading analogies you've provided there. If NFTs really use up that much energy then comparing them to a gas guzzling SUV would have been reasonable. Which is yet another product I have no interest in ever buying, but I also don't have a problem with SUVs existing.

So now I'm a "crypto-bro" because I don't have any interest for or against NFTs? That's one of the more amusing fact-free conspiracy theories I've read in a while, so congratulations on that.

Not a single NFT, but yeah crypto currencies, blockchains and NFTs were using that much power. It was quite widely reported and reliably sourced. Some blockchains even boasted about how their system was ‘only’ using a third of the amount of power that the global banking systems were using. Neglecting to do the maths of their system supporting about 30,000 and the global banking supporting several billion so that’s actually a pretty extreme case of Green-washing there.

Honestly, even ignoring all the actual terrible impact of these systems. You seem perfectly happy to support a company that actively trying to scam you anyway. Which in and of itself makes no sense. That’s why I was curious if that was a weird new tactic? The levels of logic are about the same.