I have been busting my ass as a remote contractor for a mobile game company for nearly two years now after leaving Blizzard Entertainment where I had worked for close to three years. And today I found out that my contract will not be extended.
I do email support for a mobile game company mostly dealing with account and payment issues. I am leaving out their name because I only have four weeks left to find a new job and still have to work there for those four weeks until I can find something else.
When I started, I was hired on completely remote and have never once stepped into the office that they have been trying to push us to return to. The office is based in Austin, TX and only making $16 an hour was not sustainable for me to continue living there due to the dramatically increasing housing costs, and for personal reasons I moved to another state. I stuck with it, despite the account tools constantly breaking (they are dev tools, never intended to be used for cs) and zendesk malfunctioning every day since we switched to that system, the game always being bugged in new and exciting ways, and piss poor communication and understanding from leadership. When an issue arises, we try to bring it up but are often dismissed and brushed off and instead of fixing the issue, we instead have to take on more work to address it ourselves while struggling to keep up with the queues that are consistently on fire from the game breaking or from the latest unannounced offer being implemented with no communication to us and zero accountability from the marketing and dev teams who are also dealing with staffing and budget issues and burnout. We have been understaffed since I was first hired and despite watching many coworkers across the company leave over the years for better paying gigs with better work/life balance and benefits, I stuck with it. I volunteered my holidays and so much fucking overtime just so we had queue coverage and so my coworkers would have that time to enjoy when they tried to force blackouts during busy periods and holidays. I cant even recall how many times I tried to be proactive in getting policies made for issues we KNEW were soon to come, only to be dismissed, and those policies would end up being made weeks and even MONTHS after we started getting tickets about those same issues.
My coworkers and I have been dealing with the burnout, inflated queues, terrible communication from management, broken tools, low wages, game bugs, understaffing, all with an ever-expanding workload. And when trying to address these concerns, we instead are fed bs about them wanting to address “work culture.”
I had been asking my managers for months if they would convert us to employees or extend our contracts and was told “we don’t know yet” every single time. When we were all pulled into a group meeting thinking we were finally getting answers about our contracts, they instead bragged to us about how they were opening another cs office in another country.
I can go on about the shit we have put up with, but my phone is typing slow. But despite my record productivity and going above and beyond for this company, after they conveniently set up their other office (still no hires and still with everything on fire and still with major burnout across the team), they announced that none of the contractors, myself included, would have a job past March.
Thanks to anyone who read through my rant, I really just needed to vent about how “company loyalty” gets you nothing but disappointment in return.