Recent Layoffs at BHVR
This topic might not be allowed for multiple reasons, but I’m willing to take a hit.
Basically, while I cannot confirm the exact amount, a rumoured 95 BHVR employees were laid off this morning.
Can now confirm it's indeed 95 employees, as per this announcement:
I’ve already seen multiple now ex-BHVR employees confirm that they were laid off.
https://twitter.com/the_mermae/status/1798014938486841681?s=46&t=MOM9e-MaWyIGCyqm4Ri7dwI don’t know of any major ‘faces’ as of writing but that may change as more news develops, as they say. Regardless, QA or Community, such layoffs are outrageous.
Needless to say, I am deeply disappointed.
Comments
When this stuff happens there's always a lot of confusion and assumptions as to why it happened and also people expressing reasons why they think it shouldn't have happened. I would guess efforts were made to try and avoid this which is why I don't want to assume Behavior was in the wrong here. Could it have been handled better? Maybe. But you know as much about this situation as I do.
I will say though I think no one should have to live in the fear of worrying if today will be their last day working at their job. How that is handled is something that'll have to change within the industry.
no, in addition to letting go of staff where there was bloating, there were other cost cutting actions taken like advising GMs to be more mindful of their staffing levels at stores (why schedule 10 people on a less busy day when most will sit on their phones and there's a manager available who is salaried?); we took a deep look at what services we were paying for and what ultimately could be done away with or sourced elsewhere for less - you'd be surprised how much redundancy might exist in areas that no one is ever taking a look at.
firing people is not the only option but eliminating a 100k salaried individual makes more sense than simply saying let's cut back on some spending guys and see how things shake out…
It's the real world, companies don't care about the people, everyone is expendable from the top to the bottom, this isn't news, but to suggest people are always fired in the name of profits is a silly generalization to make when there are stuff behind the scenes that you'd be none the wiser to. Again, if our lender called the full loan due or a payment of a few hundred thousand to be made - now it's not a few people being let go, now we're probably to go into an even more aggressive cost cutting campaign. Or we scrap our plans to open all of the stores we had in mind this year and all of the jobs that would have came with those stores.
Business is business, your employer does not owe you unconditional employment just cause it's 'not nice' to let you go, circumstances constantly change, adapt or die as a business.
When covid hit and many businesses slowed down, should they have just kept their expenses the same while revenue clearly declined??
so you had people on payroll with 100k salaries?
yea. this confirms there were options. probably some better than what I'm thinking right now.
but firing a bunch of people sure cuts the spending fast huh?
I do wonder what makes some of the people at bhvr feel disappointment and anger. - I also find the "restructuring" press release… very corpo and thus inhererently unlikeable and appearing dishonest. I don't know the full story - or have any other kind of inside knowledge that would help make more sense of it though, so what do I know.
That being said, I think there is, imo, one reality and one thing to judge any company by. The reality is that there are ups and downs. Sometimes you can start new projects and people are hired for these projects and sometimes projects end and no comparable new project is in the pipeline. Sometimes business isn't giong the way it should, projects lead nowhere or people that were hired turn out to be different from what the company needs going forward - and probably many other things. And the one thing to judge any company by is how they treat the people they let go. Any company that cares about their employees and values them and genuinely wants the best for their future will have a budget and a plan to help them during their time of transitioning between jobs and help find them a new job by giving them referrals and using their network.
Does bhvr do that? I have no clue. I do hope they do though.
sure, there are c-suite execs w/ 100k+ salaries. There are people involved in necessary positions that are not c-suite but are critical to operations who are in the lower 100k range. You want to attract good talent then you be competitive in your offers to these people with years of experience and knowledge. I'm certainly not gonna chastise someone who has spent years proving their worth either.
really hope your idea is not to ask the c-suite to take cuts in the name of cutting costs, commendable but that's a hard sell and a bandaid anyway. If you can run a leaner operation then why wouldn't you? Circumstances change, need for services/goods declined during covid then when it picked up it did so in unprecedented fashion, it was bound to normalize.
you don't seem like you have much real world experience to see past 'fire ppl, bad!'
I kinda hopethe devs put a good word with these people to help them get good positions in the future
I'd assume the 95 that had positions were deemed as redundant or were overlapping with other positions when it came to the restructuring.
Even their own employees are outraged by their "behavior" lol sorry I had to, but on a serious note while not doing or saying anything that will get me in trouble, this company has a upper management that is totally out of touch with their community and they have a track record of making decisions for the wrong reasons, I've heard what this was about from a reliable source that works there and I'll go on and say the outrage is justified, they deserve more in my opinion but unfortunately that's all I can say due to me being on my last leg in these parts as is
We don't have enough context to know why this decision got made or how things went down in the company — could be totally evil or not.
I'm sorry to the 95 people who lost their jobs — it's a scary time to work in the gaming industry, and I hope they're able to find something else with the minimal amount of struggle.
"If you can run a leaner operation then why wouldn't you?"
because the people at the top want more money. so the cuts happen bottom up.
this IS the real world. companies usually suck, even if the people immediatly around you in it do not. just because you think you have the perfect utopic company that would never do such a thing, doesn't mean you do.
Apparently they fired all the people involved into the rainbow and people that did lgbtq pride work