Team17 is a large UK games publisher and developer. They recently lowered staff morale and angered studios they work with by announcing NFTs. If you want to know more about NFTs I recommend this long video essay from Folding Ideas.
Here are excerpts from Eurogamer's “Inside Team17, following the Worms NFT firestorm” (written by Tom Phillips). The whole article is recommended reading:
The company's annual bonus has recently become a point of contention, as staff said they had become used to putting in extra hours in the hope of being recognised and rewarded as a result. However, last year's bonuses were abruptly slashed – some by more than £1000 versus what staff were used to – despite Team17 publicly declaring record profits for the first half of 2021. Staff who questioned the sudden reduction in their bonus were told it was a result of first-party titles that had underperformed. “This is something greatly out of our control,” one staff member told me. “A lot of people relied on that. Even those who put in extra hours or worked to the extremes got a substantially reduced bonus.” Before then, many staff had not compared bonuses. Now, suddenly without money they relied on for Christmas expenses, they did so – and found others struggling too. “It certainly caught people by surprise,” one person said, saying they had initially thought they had missed an email explaining where the rest of their usual bonus was. Another person said they felt they had been “small-printed”: their bonus mostly gone, and the full explanation left buried.
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“There's no way she hasn't seen people complaining about their wages – people who maybe can't afford to turn their heating on, have three meals a day. I've got friends who had, during the pandemic, a leak in their flat – and they had to get a second job. It's the same stories which come out over and over again and – nothing. Is she truly unaware, is no one telling her? Or does she just not care?”