Why is every game dev company ending remote work?

get terrible quality games and constantly delay shit because the worthless women you hired keep getting distracted by their pets, kids, house tasks etc

force everyone back so that freeloarders can't just slackoff anymore

based companies that do this

t. slacker

They also don't want to pay for offices they're not using

Why not save more money by downsizing the offices?

I can’t wait for all these urbanite scum from libtard states to get fucked and have to go back to working in the office. All you disgusting creatures who moved to rural areas need to get back to your containment zone. Lmao get fucked.

Nah, he's right. Sometimes the higher up individuals are control freaks, and they fear that if they let up on their control, people will find out they're frauds and not adding all that much value. And I've been a manager before, there are LOTS of things a good manager can do for you (even if you're remote) but there are a lot of managers who basically need to know exactly what you're doing so they can copy and paste up the chain.

office ownership/leases are capital that has value so the cost is not as bad as salaries

Remote work failed as a concept. It has been costing corporations money, so they are ending it. No further explanation needed. Stay frosty wagies and keep working hard.

My office did that. Then, when they tried to get everyone to come back to work in the office, they realized they didn't have the space.

After several years of doing remote work, I've come to realize most people are terrible at doing remote work. A lot of them are bad in-person too, so I'm not sure how much it matters. But to really be decent working from home you need to be a basement-dwelling permavirgin like myself who grew up on IRC. Nobody communicates properly on Slack. In the rare times that people send messages, no one is even reading them.

same as everywhere else: commercial real estate said so

Turns out about a fourth of the real state market are office zones.
The usual suspects started having cold sweats about being left holding that bag, so they started the great wagie wrangling

THANKS TRUMP

Back to the cagie, wagie.

because remote work is a contradiction in terms

You don't have them enough

middle managers' only job is to organize endless and useless meetings and make themselves look important in the office, something you can't do remotely

I choose to believe this shit about retail spaces, because that's hilarious if true

you could try working during business hours. employees have a fidelity obligation.

robot take our jobs

What's your job? I want to work from home when I graduate uni too.

After several years of doing remote work, I've come to realize most people are terrible at doing remote work.

this marks as at least two SDs more either intelligent or honest than most remote workers

A lot of reasons, most of them gay and retarded. Some places were forced into full remote work when they didn't have the infrastructure or management in place for it, and they've mistaken the issues caused by that situation to just be inherent properties of WFH. You have a lot of really poor managers who don't even understand what productivity is who will use the first scapegoat they can when they need it, and "everyone is slacking off at home" is an easy one. You have a lot of people comparing a fantasy dream vision of the office to WFH, which is probably the most common problem, you see this a lot with retards complaining that someone is watching youtube at home as though reddit wasn't filled with people posting from their office, people planning lunch, talking about Game of Thrones or whatever the show was, and all that shit. And there's just a type of person that really gets off on dressing up and being 'at the office', and that's also the sort of person who sort of selects into management.

Neutralising leak risks. The Last of Goys Part II was leaked by a remote worker.

Why did they bother trying to get everybody to come back?

my sister works remotely for some insurance company, during a family event she brought one of her coworkers and we talked, she found it amazing how much work my sister get done while working. I know for a fact my sister puts in 2-3 hours worth of work the rest of the time she is messing around on her phone or doing chores because we used to play stardew valley together.

The problem with this idea is that I was in an office for ten years, and 99% of communication was done the exact same way it was at home - messages on teams (webex/slack/whatever), emails, conference calls. I'm not convinced the clarity of my email is improved by the location in which it is written.

productivity drops like a brick with wfh, you have no control or oversight over employees, people like to justify wfh by saying they save money on transport and its helps with the kids etc but the company loses money for subpar work. glad i never took up the opportunity for wfh during covid because those who did are easier to let go because all their shit is already out of the office(and half of them have been let go already) while i persevered and stayed in office climbing the ladder and putting in honest work

Every single WorkFromHome person I know spends 90% of their time playing games when they should be working. EVERY SINGLE ONE.
My WoW guild that had people come back that hadn't played the game in a decade and they would clock in 16hours a day of play time when I, being a NEET, could play at most 12hours.
WFH is a fucking joke for the majority of people, if you're one of the 0.0001% of people that actually work from home the entire time it's sad that you're getting fucked but there is no way that shit was sustainable anyway

office managers are retarded and think if you're in the office then you'll definitely do more work instead of look at your phone while you wait for janet to respond to the email you sent before lunch

Literal shill

maybe now they'll get something done properly

fucking lol at anyone defending wfh slacking with "i don't work at the office either"

Because everyone else around them started to and they thought they needed to as well. Also because they started to catch people using mouse wiggle things to fake system into thinking they were active.

hoping that wagies will voluntarily quit before they start making layoffs with redundancy payments.

People almost nobody working from home is actually working more than 30 minutes per day

Backdoor layoffs, or just management being bad. Some KPI or another goes down 2%, you have to give an action plan, you're unqualified and talking out of your ass, so you pull out "well we need to go back to the office". When that doesn't work it'll be because we need more mandatory fun, or we need to hire the lean consultants to come in again, etc. People have a competence fantasy about how businesses work and how management makes decisions. Even the C suite is just ass pulling.

Yeah. It was better when I was in a room with ~10 other people, and we could literally just ask questions out loud and start conversations. But within the company, we would still use chat and people would be bad at it. But also there are a lot of companies that just have individual pods or otherwise make it unreasonable to speak out loud so they get no benefit over WFH. Most people are just bad in general. It's why game studios fall apart once they get past ~30 people because there's not enough good people in the world to fill a 200+ person team (my studio is about 250 people).

They are greedy and want maximum exploitation under capitalism.

anon has the whole boot in his mouth

replacement by unlimited indians.

Any competent team tracks their employee's work with some sort of ticket system.

My team operates on two-week sprints. At the start of each sprint we write up new tasks or pick something from the backlog, estimate effort required for each item, and dole out the tickets. What matters most to management is that we complete our tasks on time. That's the way it was before covid, and the way it is now. If anybody's productivity drops, it's incredibly easy for managers to pick up on.

Some higher-ups are just booty-bothered about seeing empty desks at the office. Site Manager Grug look at empty desk and think "empty desk = no work done". They're generally extroverts and think that if they drive in to the office then everyone else, including all the introverted autistic devs who look at server code all day for 1/3rd their salary, should too.

t. EA employee

Management doesn't understand their employees nor customers.
If they did they would be working those jobs instead.
This is the answer no matter what industry or era.

employers realised that the increased productivity was temporary, as soon as people got used to not having someone watching over them making sure they're working a significant percentage of them had their productivity fall off a cliff.

Any competent team

Vanishingly rare

I like how the underlying assumption here is that the H1Bs they're importing don't consistently do an abhorrent job that needs to be redone from scratch 75% of the time. what's actually happening is companies have realised it's cheaper to have a hundred jeets shart out unusable code and then have 3-4 overworked competent technicians go in and redo it than it is to have a hundred competent technicians do it right the first time.

Ive met two people that wfh
One of them I saw at the cinema when i went to watch an anime movie and he said he was on the clock while there and decided to catch this movie on his "lunch break"
Another will go to the local arcade and while there will go "i gotta clock out"
Wfh are people literally leeching these companies hard and honestly, good.

boomers run it all and still think offices are "mandatory". productivity is usually the main excuse, but no one does shit in the office either. they get their work done in a couple of hours and stare at the screen the rest of the day.

Too much freedom for the proletariat is a bad thing. Have to reign them in.

Control, honestly. Management and middle management are useless, remote work exposed them as useless, but being higher up on the food chain means they dictate worthless shit that others have to adhere to, like awful retarded mandatory check-in zoom meetings that accomplish nothing. Pay somebody their paycheck, give them a tangible clear task and deadline by which to achieve it, and most times you'll get a competent person who just does the work. But the middle management retards need to feel important so all the red tape and bullshit are mandated into the mix as well.

I don't miss working corporate. It's a good place to make money but is filled top to fucking bottom with powerful retards with self esteem issues.

I find it hard to believe that EA of all companies is so lenient in their labour systems.
That actually sounds like a great place to work.

Middle management and HR. For a while nearly all companies have been downsizing. Middle management and HR want people back in the office so they can tell Shaniquea not to dress like a prostitute and tell Tim he needs to be onsite while his boss works from home. Basically HR and middle management want to tell their bosses they're doing things when really they're the biggest wastes of life on the planet and should be killed off.

Cause covid has been over for years

I was working from home for years before covid, that was just an excuse for the other office drones

Not possible to force unpaid crunch hours on people who are at home. Everyone else in this thread has no clue and does not work in the industry.

Lenient, yes. All-forgiving, no. Recall how many studios they've killed (and are on the cusp of killing, like Bioware).
They were successfully sued in the early 2010's for the crunch culture of employees working months on end with no weekends (salary, no overtime pay) to finish projects. Since then it's been pretty nice.

EA has changed a lot since the EA Spouse story

Based, we like this. We in the Video Games Movement hate the idea of working from a computer. We love going into the office and giving a firm handshake with the scrim meeting and rubbing elbows at the water cooler. That’s the video game industry we know.

However, this does NOT apply to outsourced labor. We like having them far away from us because we love and respect their talent. They are irreplaceable. We love seeing Rajesh and Pajeet in the credits of every game despite how they don’t have to go to HQ yet we do. That’s our video games. We like this.

Because every desk job cunt I know keeps bragging about how they get groceries, do laundry, or just fuck about in video games when they're supposed to be working.

No sympathy from this wagie who hasn't had a lunch break or paid sick leave in 8 years.

Power tripping boomer management basically
You ever wonder what they do when they're not in the office micromanaging? Literally nothing.

I’m remote because there isn’t enough space for everyone

Working in a cool studio seems lit.

They know people are lazy af at home

hasn't had a lunch break or paid sick leave in 8 years

Nigger why do you keep this shit job? Is the pay that good?

Holy fuck, imagine working such a shit job. Why do you do that to yourself?

I'm those people you hate, I finish all my work in 2-3 hours. I make $120k, 4-10 schedule, remote, and I get great 401k and medical.

B
I was born there, it was pretty good. Would do it again.

wageslave humiliation ritual, get up at six wagie we're a family!

Jews and boomers. Anyone saying remote work led to less of the job being done is a jew or a boomer.
Every single study provide the opposite is true but these demons want to lord their status over you and force into cuck boxes where you spend your money and waste your life.

People who like work from home come in two flavors:

bragging about how much they are slacking off and how little work they are doing

being very offended over people suggesting that it might be less efficient while quoting some made up study

I think that's the issue.

WAGIE WAGIE
RETURN TO CAGIE
8 HOURS EVERYDAY
COMMUTE AND MICROMANAGING ARE HERE TO STAY

EA employee

I jog past your office every weekend. I'm gonna hop in and kick your Kirkland ass, anon.

All those tikshit retards showing off them doing nothing at megacorps or work from home really came to bit them in the ass now that remote work is dead(good thing btw)

If you run an organization where do-nothing employees go unnoticed, that's on the org, that's on the team. Where's the accountability? I worked at a very small company once (which EA is not, obviously) and if people weren't doing jack shit everyone noticed right away and they got canned the same week.

I worked remotely for six years and just this calendar year went back to work in person at a new job. I had one good remote job with a fun team and all of the other ones were a fucking boring slog. There is something to working in a place with real people that is not emulatable remotely. But the idea that people are going to uproot their lives and move across the country just to work a job...I just can't wrap my mind around it. And there are so many incentives to living in a big city, where retail office space is, but going there to get a job is not one of them.

these mega companies need to justify their retarded office spaces and run their teams poorly, but at least when they run them poorly in-office, there's the veneer of work being done because people are sitting at desks.

I guess. I don't know. I've worked at companies where they have all the gay perks like ping pong tables and free snacks and whatever other goofy shit--which is a waste of employee time, a waste of company money, and just boils down to mandatory fun type shit. I don't mind the occasional company outing where you all get driven around on a bus in Rome for a week and drink all day long, but I could easily live a long happy life without another icebreaker/team lunch zoom call or its in-office pizza party equivalent. Anyway long story short is that the only people who are doing nothing in WFH are doing nothing in-office too, and it's all the middle management people and execs--not the people actually contributing. If you have deliverables that don't get delivered, it doesn't get missed.

Remote work isn't dead, the economy is dead. There are 50 billion jobs to do that all pay $12/hr. Check this out. If I could make $28/hr working at the hardware store or at Chipotle, I'd be there with a smile on my face. It's not the work that sucks--it's the being exploited that sucks.

keep fucking that chicken though.

I'm that 0.0001% and it's infuriating. WFH is a godsend for a autistic loners like me.

I'm kind of picky about the office perks like that. About the only sort of thing I liked the company to do was the monthly safety meetings because it was an hour and a half of everyone getting an actual good and free meal while we did something no one cared about anyway.

Beyond that, I like the small things companies I've worked for have done, like Thanksgiving/Christmas dinners for people who got stuck at work on the holidays (Back when I worked at a plant that needed 100% uptime), pizzas/burgers/etc sent to departments when a major project was completed or the group got stuck with a lot of overtime for a while, things like that. It's really small and petty, but I'm more inclined to stick around somewhere that at least says thank you for your work on occasion than just expect you to show up and leave while reminding you that anybody can be replaced at any time.

No, remote work is dead. There’s still a lot of good jobs available but they’re not remote anymore

being born in k

implying

There’s still a lot of good jobs available

lol
I mean sure if you count the nepotism only and 150+ years of experience positions

Coof is dead

A can be born in Africa, Latin America, and Cuba

B can be born in Mexico

the highlights of C are the worst parts of Europe and three countries where killing yourself are normal: Finland, Japan and South Korea

D is awful

K means even if you aren't white, you've won, unless you're an Aborginal

Everywhere else is 100% hell.

Current job is wfh only

sucks to suck

There never was a thread in whole history of Anon Babble that glowed more than this one.

I hate working remote. It's so much harder to be productive and focus. And it feels much more isolated.

It is soft layoffs, they just hope as many people as possible quit as result.

there are many factors, but mainly, if you can do your work from home, a bunch of pajeets can do it from india at a fraction of the cost, or at least, accounting seems to think so

Same the company I work for has an "office" but it's literally optional to go there. They may hold a yearly gathering to meet your coworkers in person but everything is WFH and project based. I can't imagine working some cuck 8 hour mandatory in person job. When I can work a job that is all project based some days I only work for like 3 hours total some days I work more than 8 to get stuff done. Having to show up in person is modern day slavery that forces you stretch work out.

I specifically avoided working remote because I know the temptation of video games would be too strong. I ended up subbing to Eve Online during the meme lockdowns and my productivity plummeted instantly. But since it's mostly an AFK game, I was still doing "some" work in between Eve clicks.
I hated it so much.

The irony of you posting

libtard

And posting Stone Cold at the same time.

I'm so glad Mr. Goldshekelbergstein is gonna be able to afford his 5th yacht!!!

Why is Anon Babble like this?
Oh, right.

do wfh work

end up spending most of it milling about on 3ds

how do I fix myself bros, I don't want my bad habits catching up to me

Be factory worker cuck slave

Actually have to work constantly for entire shift with brainwashed cattle co-workers who drag each other down constantly to please higher-ups that would fire them the moment a number tells them it's profitable to

All for less pay than people doing less work

God I envy office workers.

I'm going to be honest, my productivity on wfh days is way lower than the days that I'm in the office. It sucks that one of the good things that came out of the pandemic is getting rolled back but I understand why it's happening.
At least my work is on a hybrid schedule which I honestly think is the best solution.

E is definitely decent if you can pinpoint your spawn spot.

Because they don't hire white men, and other demographics have the same mindset as the white NEETs on here: the nigger mindset.

brainwashed cattle co-workers who drag each other down constantly to please higher-ups

this still happens in offices and perhaps even worse because everyone is constantly talking shit about others in emails/slack/whatever

The directors want to use their nerf guns in the office

my sis' work is hybrid and anytime she has home office she's just chilling on her underwear in the sofa before and after I come back from work. as great as it is remote "work" is a meme that has to go

Get back to your wage cage retards.

As long as the jew employers pay for your travel costs and time sure

Parasitic managerial scum need to justify their worthless fake jobs.

the benefit of remote work is the elimination of the commuting time. I used to work 4x11 and going to the office and back takes a total of 2.5 hours of commute.

doing remote work frees me 2.5 hours every day so i can rest better, though i understand a lot of people abuse remote work to slack off.

i will advocate for complete remote work if the employees are responsible enough to not slack off too much

game devs remote work for 5 years

no games come out for 5 years

hmmm maybe this was a bad idea and it kills productivity.

I've definitely had some goon seshes on the 'cord with a couple of fellas saying they should be doing WFH.

I became irreplaceable at my warehouse and now I'm making $30/hour. You just need to find a good place, actually be good at what you do, and have a little luck.

most people won't do any work unless they have someone looking over their shoulder.

These are the people telling you "learn a trade"

my company has a manager named exactly janet and she doesn't answer my email before lunch.

while reminding you that anybody can be replaced at any time.

I worked in this little burger joint and the owner the first two weeks was very nice and helpful but after week three started putting pressure on me to prep/cook/run the register to cut back on labor costs. His goal for me was "to do the job of three people and only pay one person". Everyday day after that I would get paranoid and he would walk up to me and say that if he put up a help wanted sign that their would be a line around the block for my job. On the last day I worked for him I took him up on his offer and told him to prep that sign up as I quit (I didn't have the mental fortitude). He struggled for awhile and even lost another cook because I accidentally talked him into finding a job closer to his home instead of traveling three buses to get to this job.

I talked him into finding a job closer to his home instead of traveling three buses to get to this job.

Good. I remember having to take the bus for work, I can't imagine three. That's gotta be like 2 hours travel time.

smaller mom and pop places are uniquely vulnerable to replacing a key employee, but larger corporate entities can just indefinitely grind through money hiring and firing until they get someone with baseline competency.

Slavery.

update tasks for everyone on Mondays

do a weekly follow up on Thursdays

set deadlines

part of the pay based on performance

Mouse jiggler would be busted very quickly

It's crazy because I was supplementing my income doing food delivery and in one of the restaurants I picked up from. He looked at me and smiled thanking me for showing him a different path. He mentioned that he was paid the same and working less hours with lower transportation times.

I agree because at the current place I work for. People get hired and if they don't meet the standard they get let go and when they meet the standard they realize that they can do better so they leave and eventually you'll get people that feel "comfortable" and don't want to progress and those people are the corks that plug up an organizations holes.

Very few people are good at wfh. I do but we had to fire like 60 percent of our employees because they were so bad at working from home. They were sort of bad/average when we worked in the office too but they're just 100 percent dead weight in a wfh environment. There are people who are just as good if not better from home but they're rare.

zoomers think they can just browse reddit in their underwear at home and get paid

get back to work, you're the reason we are losing to china

What performance plans do you recommend? I'm starting out in HR and would love any tips I can get from seasoned professionals

We have some of that going on at my current workplace, not so blatant as to tell people they're replaceable to their face but they are constantly repeating to the staff, "You guys need to learn how to do more with less." We're simultaneously getting complaints that our department isn't responding fast enough to service calls while when we lose someone their position gets closed instead of looking for someone else.

I've inadvertently convinced two of our guys to quit already and am on my way out as well. There's no reason to stay in a place with no future.

Micromanagers basically

Every corporation is doing this, because it’s a form of soft-layoffs. The economy is in a poor spot right now, so companies need to trim the fat where they overextended themselves when investment and free VC money was flowing in like water.

Doing real layoffs makes them look weak and makes their share values go down, so mandating “return to office” is a way around that: majority of people who work remote are probably not living in a city where an EA headquarters is located, so they’ll have no choice but to quit or get fired for not obeying the mandate.

By the way, how do employees not hate the word “obey?” What are you, kids afraid of getting yelled at by the teacher? I will never understand people with an employee mindset.

That's what gets me about those small places. They need someone more than anywhere that can wear many hats and juggle different tasks competently but they're just as prone to thinking anyone can do the job for the places they hire for. It's really telling when they get furious when you finally do leave and try to tell you wouldn't make it elsewhere, like they were doing you a favor.

Not to mention that companies over-hired like you wouldn’t believe over the past decade when said free investment money was flowing in. They over-hired like crazy because it was a way to fake-signal “growth” and boost their share value, and bait even more investment money.

I could never do factory work. Working an assembly line is soul draining and I feel terrible a good portion of the population will be stuck doing it.

I've worked in factories before, but it's always been as a support staff, either their computer guy or radio man. I've been able to roam around the place mostly freely so long as my work gets done.

The situation I can get from this scenario is that management isn't focusing so much on the problem but is trying to pass off the blame to other people. They should work on a system that instead of just telling workers to work with less, come up with solutions to show what they can do with actual plans in place.

The truth is, all employers—big and small—have the same mentality where they view themselves as your masters and you’re just their slaves. You are way too low on the food chain and they can’t fathom that you would be able to eke out an existence without selling yourself into servitude to their benevolent powers.

For someone who feels guilty for slacking off, I feel like wfh increased my workload by a hundredfold while I make basically the same. Going back to the office would be a lot better for me because then I'd have to cope with travel time between meetings again, attend to in office ceremonies, which often take more time, personally walk to people's desks and whatnot