Spiders staff to go on strike, open letter released about studio issues

thesixthaxis.com:

Staff at development studio Spiders, developers of Greedfall and Steerlrising, have released an open letter to state they will be going on strike next week. The reasons for the strike action include management ignoring staff requests, pay disparity based on gender, high turnover, and poor employee support. In addition, staff have stated that the environment had led to problems on the development of Greedfall 2 and another, yet to be announced project.

The letter from the Spiders team, which can be read below, has been published by STJV, an independent French union which represents people working in the videogames industry.

This letter to our management follows an earlier open letter and a strike on January 19, which management has chosen not to ignore. Since then, new negotiations have begun on wages, and conditions in the studio have continued to deteriorate. Today, it is with regret that we speak out publicly, in the hope that this will finally push management to act in the best interests of employees and the company.

This document covers several years of known problems, which have been greatly amplified over the past year with the arrival of the current head of the company : instability, opposition to anticipating problems and securing working conditions, global mismanagement, turnover and recruitment problems, unacceptable delays in achieving gender equality and parity, important lack of transparency, denial of problems, refusal to acknowledge worker representation and blocked negotiations.

As of August 27, 2024, this letter has been signed by 44 workers at Spiders, out of 95.

We had demanded that the head of the company receive a delegation of Spiders’ workers to discuss all these points. She accepted, the delegation came to a meeting on August 27 and then waited in vain for the management to come, which it never did.

In light of management’s continued refusal to discuss, take the problems raised seriously and act to rectify them, we are calling on Spiders