Homeworld 3 and Hardspace studio switching to four-day working week

rockpapershotgun.com:

Blackbird Interactive, the makers of Homeworld 3 and Hardspace: Shipbreaker, have announced plans to switch to a four-day work week for all employees. They join a small but growing number of game studios aiming to actively combat burnout by giving employees more time to themselves. Like many others who've tried a four-day week, they say that not only were people happier, productivity was not harmed. Cool. Who's next?

The Canadian studio announced last week that following trials of the four-day week on two of their projects, they'll take the whole studio to four days in April. They say they gave it a go after asking staff for ideas to help keep people at the studio, and this idea proved popular. They're also planning to offer "extreme work location flexibility", which sounds wikkid sikk.

"Without our crew we are nothing. They are the most important asset to our studio and their mental health is the most important thing to them and therefore to us. Burnout in our industry is real and a common problem. Even worse, it's a problem that can't be effectively treated, only prevented," Blackbird CEO Rob Cunningham said in their announcement. "So we did a four-day work week trial with multiple project teams and collected every bit of before and after data we could: code and content submits, task estimates vs. actuals, mental health surveys, verbal comments, interviews, and monitored the outcome closely. The results were stunning. Productivity did NOT drop and literally everything else improved: quality, effectiveness, efficiency, morale, interpersonal relationships and so on. It was an overabundance of positivity. Making a four-day work week our new policy moving forwards was an absolute no-brainer."

The Hardspace: Shipbreaker