Reflections on losing a job

December 11th, 2024

Bit of a dour way to christen a blog, but I need to get some feelings off my chest. Fair warning, this post goes into some pretty heavy subject matter, including depression and thoughts of self-harm; I've done my best to keep the tone from getting too crywanky (for lack of a better word), but please be advised.

On Monday, the 9th of December 2024, I and 98 other insourced Keywords QA testers working at Warner Bros. Games Montreal were laid off in a massive end-of-year wave following some abysmal performance from multiple games being tested at the studio. We were all brought into a zoom call with HR, and told that on the 31st of January 2025, we'd be packing our things and leaving the office for good — they had no work for us, and no money to pay us to work on other projects in the interim. In their words, they prioritized testers in the Functionality QA department, and those with the least seniority were cut. I had been working there for two and a half years, and many of the people who'd been cut alongside me had been there for far longer and were far better testers than me.

In hindsight, the writing was already on the wall; I'd simply chosen to ignore it. I was one of the many testers who worked on the oft-maligned Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, an infamous financial flop and a victim of the floundering hate campaign that calls itself "GamerGate 2.0." That's not a secret — I'm in the credits and the game's out, so I can talk about at least that much. It was supposed to be Warner Bros. Games' big Games-as-a-Service (GaaS, also known as "live service") title that would rake in the big bucks and secure the future of Suicide Squad as a viable IP.

I know that sounds ridiculous, and even I laughed a bit thinking about it, but before the game launched in February 2024 I genuinely wanted the game to do well and thought it would at least rake in good money. It was heartbreaking seeing the game launch to middling-at-best reviews and dismal sales, and have to listen to all the internet dumbasses talk about how "woke" and therefore automatically bad the game is over the mere inclusion of people of colour and LGBTQIA+ topics — "a fucking pride flag in the Hall of Justice? Those damn queers at Sweet Baby Inc. have gone too far!" — and for a while I seeped back into that crevice I thought I'd managed to crawl out of, where I thought about killing myself on an almost ten-times-daily basis.

But I decided to stick through it, because the project had a year's worth of post-launch content to release and I felt like I had to hold the fort. A good friend of mine on the project left basically the exact day we launched to the public, and others left (either to other projects or leaving the company entirely) in the months after, but we eventually got whittled down to a small team of tightly-knit testers who all knew each other well. We were locked-in, in our element, not thriving but making do. It honestly became enjoyable work, because our per-person workload decreased even as testers slowly drifted away, and I found solace in the fact that my coworkers were all great, lovable folks.

If you followed the news for this game after launch, you likely know about the layoffs that happened at Rocksteady in August of 2024. I personally had to see off developers and dev-QA testers I'd grown to love even if we butted heads sometimes, saying goodbye to them in Zoom meetings — I wish I could've flown all the way over to London and given them all big hugs — and it tore me up from the inside. I still wonder where they all went after that, whether they went to new companies in the industry, took a break, or left it entirely; regardless, I hope they're all doing well in their endeavours.

In the months after that, I really should have seen this coming. Our project wasn't even the only one that did poorly, though I can't name any names; Amenities from Warner Bros. that were (in my opinion) trivial, like free nuts or baked goods on some days, would be denied us because we weren't Warner Bros. but Keywords employees; and leadership was suddenly far more watchful of what the testers were doing at their desks. We were constantly told in our biannual town halls that no need to worry, our jobs were secure! and that we had soooooo many new projects lined up for testers coming off of sunsetting ones!

What a load of horseshit that was. I'd say "shame on me" for believing it, but while I was working there we were told this five (5) times.

For full disclosure, I have no intention of shooting the messenger here. I have no bad blood with anyone in the HR department, and I don't envy them for the displeasure of having to tell 99 people that they're losing their jobs. Someone had to do it, and if anyone else did it the same reactions would have been had. They could have put it in more tactful terms, but it's really hard, if not impossible, to put this sort of thing nicely.

There isn't much more that I can say on this that hasn't been said already. As I write this (December 10th, 2024), I've still got a bit under eight weeks to come to terms with what's about to come and make an action plan. There's a whole load of stuff that I can't talk about, whether because of NDAs (games industry standard, don't worry about it) or because of other potential legal issues that would understandably crop up around a mass layoff.

I have a vague plan on where to go from here, but the future is still uncertain; I plan to apply for employment insurance and do some job hunting (which will be difficult, because this is the only "real" job I can put on my CV), and I'm hoping that either this year or the next I can get into university to do either a computer science or cyber-security degree (alongside a potential minor in creative writing, if I can justify it). I'll use the sudden free time I have to finally enjoy video games in earnest again, and get to work on all the personal projects that I've been putting off because this job is soul-sucking. I might even take language classes, because I've had my eye on learning Japanese and Mohawk (my ancestral language, as I'm First Nations). I've started connecting with other testers outside of work, so I can keep up with them even after we're out of the studio for good.

The future is looking bleak, but I can't lose face now — I cannot afford to fall into that hole of self-loathing, existential dread, and suicidal ideation again, especially not at such a vulnerable moment in my life. I can only move forward, because the only way to know what the future holds for me is to be there when it happens. And for anyone out there going through a similar situation, just know that I feel your pain.

This is AzureZero, signing off.