Report: Team17 staff detail poor working conditions
Danielle Partis
News Editor
Thursday 10th February 2022
An investigation into working conditions at independent publisher Team17 has unveiled instances of poor pay, long hours and concerns about upper management spanning several years at the company.
The report saw Eurogamer speak to 12 current and former employees across both its Wakefield and Nottingham offices, who confirmed that the company has been rapidly shedding team members as a result of the company's failure to address concerns. It also detailed the fallout following Team17's MetaWorms NFT project.
The developer unveiled its MetaWorms project on January 31, which was swiftly cancelled one day later following a slew of criticism. Eurogamer reported last week that many teams within the company had no knowledge of the project prior to its public announcement.
Staff told Eurogamer that the cancellation was shared in a town hall meeting, with employees likening it to a "political apology" as they were told the project was planned as well as it could have been.
"If it was the people in the office who swayed them -- if it had been the employees -- they wouldn't have done it," an employee told Eurogamer. "Instead, they did it, and they left it for a day and a half to simmer and see what would happen... It wasn't even that people might lose their jobs [if developers pulled their games], or that the company was going downhill.
"It was that the managers were doing something so monumentally stupid without a thought for those who would actually bear the brunt of it. They didn't apologise to staff, even the community managers who were subjected to a barrage of abuse because of it."
Employees told Eurogamer that they felt Team17 had signed too many games over the last couple of
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