Xbox layoffs: for Rami Ismail we need to review the relationships between employees and employers

“The video game industry needs to reset the relationship between employee and employer,” he began Rami Ismailindependent developers among the most representative voices in the sector, commenting on the Xbox layoffswhich affected almost two thousand people and which were announced in the last few hours, without any notice given to the workers.

“Currently people are scared when it doesn't charge Slack. They feel guilty about keeping their jobs. They click on a tweet about layoffs in a panic to read the bio and find out if they are next.” What Ismail describes is an unfortunately very common situation within gaming companies, where job stability is minimal and the constant fear of being fired.

An explosive situation

Never problems they don't end there: “People work on a game for years without being sure if it will launch or if they will be fired before they are credited. If they can use it to find a new job, any job. They pack up their lives to find where to go to survive and find out how long it can last.”

In short, the world of video game development is increasingly growing precarious and the much-vaunted consolidations seem to have only made the situation worse: “it's not acceptable. We deserve a video game industry that takes care of the people who love this medium, that allows us to work to the best of our ability, to make the best games that we can, to live stable lives with stable jobs, creating large amounts of revenue.”

In short, for Ismail, “Doing the work we love, within specialized and multidisciplinary teams that we love, with people we love, on projects we love, for players we love, should not lead to so many worries and fears and traumas just to raise the shares of a $3 trillion company down half a percentage point for a week or two.”

So ours concluded: “If the industry does not want to give us the foundations of mutual respect, we must change it together. We deserve better. The students who graduate in this chaos deserve better. Our colleagues deserve better. Our families they deserve better. We have to take a stand, because we can't continue like this.”