Activision Blizzard to Bring on US QA Testers as Full-Time Employees and to Pay a Minimum of $20 Per Hour - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 07 April 2022 / 2,591 Views
Activision Blizzard in a statement announced it will be bringing on all of its US quality assurance testers as full-time employees and to raise their wage to a minimum of $20 per hour.
"Today we announced the conversion of all US-based temporary and contingent QA team members at Activision Publishing and Blizzard – nearly 1,100 people in total – to permanent full-time employees starting on July 1," reads the statement from Activision Blizzard.
Activision Blizzard COO Joshua Taub in an internal email said the following, "QA is, and continues to be, critical to our development success. We have amazing QA teams in place that work hard to ensure our players have the best possible gaming experiences: thank you.
"As Call of Duty evolves, we anticipate periods where the workload will fluctuate and exceed our expanded team’s bandwidth. with this in mind, we’re adding extra support for our team from external partners."
Microsoft in January of this year announced it is acquiring Activision Blizzard in a deal worth $68.7 billion. This is the biggest acquisition in gaming history by a large amount.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has stepped in to investigate Microsoft's Activision Blizzard deal. The FTC will determine if the acquisition means unfair competition or not. FTC chair Lina Khan "will examine the deal with an eye to the combined companies' access to consumer data, the game developer labor market and the deal's impact on those workers who have accused Activision of discrimination and a hostile workplace."
Thanks, VideoGamesChronicle.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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This does not include the people who join a union, so this is how they're trying to get people to stay out of them, even though this whole thing is thanks to those unions.
Ah good catch. Starbucks is going to attempt to do something similar.
where's captain?
lol man they were getting paid less than $20hr? Horrible. I hope their is opportunities for them to move up from there.
Tell me about it I bitch about my pay every day
20$ per hours for a standard quality a. analyst is pretty okay.
Not saying they cannot get more but it is not underpaid or horrible by any means.
Yes but it seems they were getting paid less then that. On top of that this is the minimum. I’m saying under that is starting to get bad for this job imo.
oh yah you said 'less'. Missed that, my bad :) Don't get me wrong tho, even if 20$ is not the worse, still suck to be paid that low anywhere in the world today...
It isn't QA analyst, it is QA tester, so basically people that would be playing the game to find faults.
QA Analyst > QA tester in any case.
So at the end testers would be even lower in the food chain anyway. Which justifies even more a minimum wage.
Eeeerrrr when you say that a 20bucks per hours is a standard and good wage for QA Analyst and say QA tester is below it then that amount would be over good.
Eeeeerrrrr. I did not say it was "good". I said it was "normal" wage.
"normal" != "good".
I'm sorry if you do not like it but that's how it is. Don't put words in my mouth just because you are for some reason on your white horse trying to feel offended for something that does not even relate to you.
I have been working in the software industry for 20 years now and yes the QA analysts/testers/"whatever you want to call them" are at the bottom of the food chain. And fyi, a lot of different companies are mixing up QA Tester and QA Analyst, this is not really important for this matter. Usually, the main distinction is for the Test Engineer when it comes to automated testing.
So to repeat myself, this is "standard". Not that it would not be great for them to get a higher salary; and I would 100% for that. But that's how it is and there is no reason to be offended by it. Also, Method114 said "less" than that anyway.
pretty ok = normal and not good then?
I was not white knighting nothing as I do think 20/hour for an equivalent to entry level position is great.
Good measure.
$20 USD is about equal to $27 AUD... Which is basically minimum wage for a full time employee in many industries here... With the added benefit of sick leave, annual leave, service leave, public holiday loading, superannuation... And more.
Not sure if the US offers all that.
I personally wouldn't get out of bed for that kind of coin... But sometimes the love of a job is more valuable than money.
Imagine what they were on before..
Likely worse, but this is still bad, and should have been improved upon before this.
They probably have most of that, but there's no way to know without seeing the details of the job offers.
QA testers are generally a pretty low paid. The idea is that it doesn't take much education or experience to get started, and your job is to play video games and give feedback about them. I think it's pretty easy to get people to take the jobs.
Consequently, they're relatively low paid.
