IGN has spoken to 26 current and former employees that have worked at Bungie within the last decade. Their accounts of the studio’s work culture encompass a wide range of experiences. They span overt sexism, boys’ club culture, crunch, and HR protection of abusers, as well as more complex stories of microaggressions, systemic inequalities, and difficulties in being heard. However, interviewees also include a number of more recent employees who, despite their own hurts, truly believe the studio is slowly but steadily improving, are candid about the immense challenge of trying to turn such a massive ship in a better direction, and whose accounts of change line up with statements made to IGN by Parsons in response to this piece.
… When people objected to his demeanor, he told them they needed thicker skins, and to learn how to take criticism. He called one woman on the team an “unmanageable bitch.” Another source said he was “literally the worst person I’ve ever worked for.”
He was eventually let go, but was replaced by what our sources say were similarly antagonizing men. One lead frequently made sexist remarks, but also complained about “reverse sexism” and on at least one occasion made homophobic remarks to a queer colleague. He would openly mock his team members’ ideas in meetings then play his mockery off like a joke, and would frequently take credit for work others had done. …
It seems like the company genuinely tried to change, but some of the old guards, the old employees (not only the execs) are still racists / transphobes / misogynists. While the PR touts that it’s diverse and a safe workplace is not in line with the actual things happening. It reeks like a boys club. That was in 2021, probably going to take more time for the company to change and remove those festering toxic people.
Just a few months into her employment, she says she was instructed to investigate the performance of a particular employee, referred to as “James Smith.” But when she sat down to speak with Smith, he allegedly pointed out that he was the only Black employee on a team of 50 individuals, and expressed that he felt he was being singled out and racially targeted by his supervisor.
Alm goes on to say that she shared this information with her supervisor and recommended that Smith’s supervisor receive diversity training, but alleges that her recommendation was met with “hostility and denial.”
So she just took the allegedly under performing employees word and recommended diversity training without any further investigation? I hope the article is leaving something out.
Did you read the rest of the article? It talks about how she talked with others in the company about this, someone above her took it very personally as suggesting he was racist, and her prompt firing. It also highlights how bungie was exposed for both racial and gender bias by reporting just a few months before she was hired, indicating that these exposed problems likely still existed.
I don’t mean any harm when I say this, but why would you jump to the defense of a company in the first place, dismissing claims of racism or other forms of bigotry? The world is incredibly biased, and regular large-scale studies on company culture (and social culture) reveal widespread bigotry in our world. Simply assuming the status quo absent enough evidence on either side to clearly paint a picture is more often than not correct. What purpose does trying to discredit her accomplish here? How do you think it makes black people feel to see the only reply in a thread is an attempt at discrediting her?
Did you read the rest of the article? It talks about how she talked with others in the company about this, someone above her took it very personally as suggesting he was racist, and her prompt firing. It also highlights how bungie was exposed for both racial and gender bias by reporting just a few months before she was hired, indicating that these exposed problems likely still existed.
Yes. Her superiors disagreed that the supervisor needed diversity training just because that one person who received a bad review said he was being racially targeted. The article doesn’t say that she made any attempt to talk to that Black employee’s immediately coworkers. She just talked to him and decided the supervisor needed diversity training. So it’s not surprising that her supervisors reacted critically.
I don’t mean any harm when I say this, but why would you jump to the defense of a company in the first place, dismissing claims of racism or other forms of bigotry? The world is incredibly biased, and regular large-scale studies on company culture (and social culture) reveal widespread bigotry in our world. Simply assuming the status quo absent enough evidence on either side to clearly paint a picture is more often than not correct. What purpose does trying to discredit her accomplish here? How do you think it makes black people feel to see the only reply in a thread is an attempt at discrediting her?
I’m not siding with the company. I’m siding with the employee who was treated like a racist because one person who may have been underperforming said he was without any further investigation. That’s ridiculous.
You seem to keep making a lot of assumptions about what happened, absent any evidence that it did. Why do you assume that she didn’t make ‘any attempt to talk to that Black employee’s immediate coworkers’? Why do you assume she ‘just talked to him’? Why do you assume there was no ‘further investigation’?
We don’t have any of this information. It’s not fair to assume anything about whether they happened or not. Why are you making all of your assumptions in the direction of discrediting this individual? The article that is linked here links another article exposing a pervasive issue of gender and racial bias at this company, so it seems rather odd to be assuming that they had completely fixed this issue by the time of her hiring, a mere few months later, and that it was not at play in this situation. However, even if this article was not linked and this company was not specifically exposed for these issues, it seems odd to me to assume in the direction that research on bigotry in the workplace also does not support.
Why do you feel compelled to jump to the defense of someone you do not know, over an accusation which doesn’t affect you and you have no stakes in nor any knowledge of the circumstances?
Just want to hop in and also point out the vastly different costs of being wrong in each case.
On one hand, we have a supervisor having to take a diversity course, and an employee getting a written warning about their performance. On the other hand, a person is losing their income and health insurance. If the evidence equally supported both sides and we had to guess, the detrimental effect of incorrectly supporting one side is vastly more significant than incorrectly supporting the other.
And that assumes a hypothetical where the evidence doesn’t support either side, something I do not think is the case. I think the article supplies enough information to support Alm’s case.
On one hand, we have a supervisor having to take a diversity course, and an employee getting a written warning about their performance. On the other hand, a person is losing their income and health insurance. If the evidence equally supported both sides and we had to guess, the detrimental effect of incorrectly supporting one side is vastly more significant than incorrectly supporting the other.
Yes, but don’t you get it? Someone might be getting called racist when they’re not, and that’s obviously the worst thing in the whole big wide world! And on top of that case, a black person will get to under perform in the workplace! Oh the humanity! Will no one think of the children?!?!?!
I for one am thankful we were born and raised in a society with no racial biases that could seep in to my work. Now, if you excuse me, I have to go back to writing up the only black person on my team for underperforming at the video game company with a history of racism and sexism B)
Notably, Alm was hired at Bungie just five months following an IGN report on the company’s work culture. In it, over 25 employees alleged the company had a history of allowing toxic culture to fester, including racial and gender bias, with those who reported such instances to HR alleging their reports were frequently dismissed or even turned against them. Following this report and prior to Alm’s hiring, Bungie’s former HR head stepped down from her role. IGN understands from its sources that following its 2021 report, Bungie also hired a number of new HR personnel in an effort to address the issues from the article, amid some pressure from its new parent company Sony.
All the best workplaces that don’t have a racism problem are the ones where lightly suggesting diversity training is met with hostility, denial, and sacking of the person suggesting it. Such actions really highlight how seriously said company takes concerns of bigotry at the workplace and proves they’re giving it their all to make it as inclusive as possible.
I’m siding with the employee who was treated like a racist
Proving how incredibly not racist I am by taking incredible, personal offense at the suggestion of checking possible biases I may have as manager at a company with a history of racial biases, because I care about combating racism just that much
I’m siding with the employee who was treated like a racist because one person who may have been underperforming said he was without any further investigation.
It’s so poignant that you tell on yourself with this statement.
When someone is hired to address discrimination and someone reports that they are still being discriminated against, I would hope that the person hired to address discrimination would assume the report of coninued discrimination is correct.
Assuming the best when that is crealy not the situation is just shoving your head in the sand.
I would hope that the person hired to address discrimination would assume the report of coninued discrimination is correct.
They should assume it’s true for the purpose of more investigation. Then decide if the facts support or disprove the claim. That’s much different than hearing it from one person, and then concluding that it’s true.
Note that they believed it enough to raise the concern to someone higher up and that person took the existence of the complaint personally. That is doing exactly what you said, taking the complaint seriously enough to look into it.
Not sure about other companies, but at the one I work at, recommending a training doesn’t mean a whole lot except “this might be relevant to your work”. For example, in this case an employee expressed concerns of being discriminated against, so it makes sense to recommend training on how to identify and address those kinds of problems (even if no such situation is actually occurring) so that you’re better prepared to handle it.
They don't want to dig into the spaghetti code to make it work.
And considering the lukewarm response to the shitty San Andreas port, they probably don't want to risk more bad publicity by farming it out to the lowest bidder... again.
They have consistently done the second, which makes absolutely no sense to me since doing it right would mean they could bring great old games to a new audience. All they need to do is increase framerate caps (and fix bugs caused by that), increase render resolution, and improve texture quality. They should have all of the original files, so this shouldn’t require a ton of effort, even if the code is a mess.
GTA SA and friends was terrible because it didn’t look anything like the originals since it was a mobile port. Nobody asked for big changes, just a few QOO updates. The same is true for RDR, we just want to play it on PC with higher FPS and whatnot, we don’t expect anything groundbreaking. If it’s easier, they could port the campaign to RDR2 (they already have a lot of the models) and then not have to maintain the older codebase. Surely that’s an option too.
Yeah, have no clue why people don't think they are just doing this. They literally did this with RDR 2. Like we aren't in the days of the 360 and PS3 where consoles were very weird architecturally. Things have been mostly smoothed out and porting while can be quite a task especially if you want to do it right (however Rockstar hasn't done great with doing it right) but its far more trivial compared to the past.
This article isn’t entirely accurate. Trials will still require playing with other characters, and the three 24-person Crystal Tower raids that are a requirement for progressing the story also must be played with other people.
Take it slow at a lower level dungeon to get the feel for things. Sastasha and Tam Tara are great ones to start on. Go in with duty support NPCs if you are nervous about performing with others. In my experience, if you preface the instance with “hi bear with me, I’m new to tanking”, people are very forgiving and will even give pointers :)
“They say the old caretaker of this place went absolutely crazy. Chopped up his entire staff. Of robots. All of them robots. They say at night you can still hear the screams. Of their replicas. All of them functionally indistinguishable from the originals. No memory of the incident. Nobody knows what they’re screaming about. Absolutely terrifying. Though obviously not paranormal in any meaningful way.”
Ive only seen the haunted police car once in my game, and it was after someone complained about it with a post on here. It made me crack a smile. I hope it stays.
I booted up 2.0 Sunday night and had a nice laugh when I called my car to my location. It wedged itself under a car in traffic and threw that car violently into pedestrians on the sidewalk. The jank is still there, it’s just at a tolerable level.
Article only mentions dungeons. Did they add it for story trials too? As far as I know that's only available for early 4-player trials and a couple of very recent additions. The Chrysalis, Steps of Faith, etc can still wipe a group of human players easily if their mechanics are ignored.
No shit a Final Fantasy 14 player was the first to earn all achievements in Final Fantasy 14. Wake me up when an Everybody’s Golf player is the first to earn all achievements in White Knight Chronicles 2.
<span style="color:#323232;">Name omitted to respect privacy but if you really want to know they're easy to find on both Lalachievements and FFXIVcollect. Here's a picture of what this insanity includes:
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> Completed all five ultimate raids.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> Cleared all three Deep Dungeons solo.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> Discovered at least 20000 hoards from said Deep Dungeons.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> At least 2000 successfully completed mentor roulettes.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> At least 3000 victories in Frontline.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> At least 1000 victories in Rival Wings.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> At least 5000 victories in Crystalline Conflict or The Feast.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> Completed every levequest achievement, which due to time-gating takes a minimum of SEVEN years.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> Fully cleared all treasure dungeons at least 20 times, including the Hidden Canals of Uznair, which was a notoriously impossible achievement for many years and requires about 2000 Thief's Maps on average.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> Obtained every single relic weapon from ARR to EW.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> All extreme trials and final savage raid bosses from ARR to ShB cleared as BLU.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> Killed at least 5000 rank S marks and at least 10000 rank A marks and obtained every Hunt mount.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> All Firmament/Diadem achievements including 500,000 skyward score as every DoH/L for the Pteranodon mount.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> Obtained all ocean fishing bonuses and caught every fish.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span>
Can confirm most of these are mind numbingly boring and mundane. I could barely get through the slog of ONE ARR and HW relic for starters. I’m also not ashamed to admit I’ve paid for bot programs to avoid doing a few of these tasks because of how tedious they can be. (Even just normally. I never went out of my way to try and complete any of these achievements.)
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