This is a communication from our union section at Spiders.
On July 17, the COO and de facto director of Spiders announced a plan for layoffs. Presented to workers’ representatives the day before, it planned to fire 9 workers, exactly the number to, in theory, avoid having to negotiate with unions.
On August 18, after changes and talks with workers’ representatives, the « restructuration » plan at Spiders includes 7 layoffs and the overall cut of 25 jobs, which where either vacant at the time or which workers left voluntarily. These layoffs and cuts include the only UX/UI designer position, half of the managers in the Art and Design teams, the financial director position, nearly half of all environment artists and animators… These cuts add to the long list of workers leaving the company in the past year.
This layoffs plan has been prepared in secret and still lacks justification. A few months ago, Anne Devouassoux was still reassuring workers, looking them right in the eye, telling them not to worry even though it appears layoffs were already being planned. No one at the company, including managers, was informed of the layoffs more than a few days in advance. To this day, the company still refuses to communicate the details of this ongoing plan, even to the people at risk of being laid off !
On July 24, more than half of the workers at Spiders took part in meetings on Spiders’ future. These were organised in the context of a strike to demand the cancellation of the layoffs. The discussions proved, once again, that everybody is aware of Spiders’ problems and wants to change things, and has been for year. Sadly, workers are constantly refused the opportunity to do so, and instead continue to endure errors in management from Spiders and Nacon.
The value of a company lies in its workers, who are actually creating games. Laying them off is unacceptable and something which, considering the bad management, we oppose strongly. Workers at Spiders must not suffer from the ill-advised decisions of its COO and the Nacon group. Workers’ demands about the layoffs and the mismanagement of the studio, drawn up during the July 24 strike but similar to demands from the past years, have been sent the next day to management but are still waiting for an answer from the company.
Despite a harrowing production on GreedFall 2, and the cancellation of a promising project which finally brought necessary changes, Spiders’ workers are confident in their ability to create good games at Spiders. We hope that the COO and Nacon share the workers’ desire to make the company durable and the productions better. They will not prove it by treating workers this way, by laying them off and by degrading their working conditions, but by ceasing to create barriers to their work.
For the time being, you can help workers at Spiders by expressing your support, and by sending words of encouragement at . We ask you to please be polite and to not insult, harass or threaten anyone, at Nacon or at Spiders, our community manager colleagues have a hard enough job already.