Epic Games is making hundreds of temp testers into full employees with benefits

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The US-based contingent workers are being hired full-time and with benefits, according to the company. Quality assurance (QA) testers, as well as other contract-based employees, are being extended the offer by the developer.

The news was first reported in an employee memo. The company will offer full-time at- will employment to eligible US-based contingent workers, and many of those offers will be effective April 4th, 2022, according to the memo.

Most but not all of the game developer's contractors will be quality assurance (QA) testers. All the workers will be eligible for the company's US employee benefits plans, and will also be directly employed by the company. The studio contracts out workers through temp agencies.

The company will still hire contingent workers for short-term needs. She didn't specify which workers were excluded from the offer, and she didn't give any additional information about the other types of contingent workers.

Tensions between workers and major game development studios are high, not to mention that it is a huge step towards improving working conditions for workers. The organization of the Game Workers Alliance union was formed in December after the layoffs of a dozen quality assurance testers at Raven Software.

The game industry has become known for forcing workers to work incredibly long hours duringcrunch periods, and this is no exception at Epic. The long workdays that go into keeping the wildly-popular battle Royale, "Fortnite", on track with fans' expectations was the subject of criticism in 2019. The studios were closed for two weeks in response to employees' concerns.

Employees were upset when the policy of taking every other Friday off was ended last year. The four-day workweek has been adopted by a number of independent developers.