Former quality assurance testers who worked on Dragon Age: Dreadwolf are preparing to picket outside Bioware’s Edmonton offices after being laid off earlier this year. Electronic Arts tried to block the protest but the developers prevailed in a ruling by the Alberta Labour Relations Board in Canada.
BioWare laid off 50 employees in August, including some longtime developers whose tenure goes back to the beginning of the Dragon Age series. It also cut its contract with Keywords Studios, which was supplying quality assurance testers on in-development sequel Dragon Age: Dreadwolf. Those same testers had unionized just a year earlier. Last month, they were laid off from Keywords as well, with the outsourcing company blaming it on the loss of the BioWare contract.
Now, as first reported by Game Developer, those former Dragon Age testers say they’re planning to picket outside BioWare’s office on November 7 around noon. EA was far from happy about the decision, however. The publisher tried to force the laid-off developers to take their protest elsewhere, noting that, as fully remote staff, they never technically worked inside BioWare’s Edmonton office.
Instead, EA tried to convince the Alberta Labour Relations Board to make them picket outside their homes. The regulators were unmoved, ultimately siding with the workers. “We view this Labor Board ruling as a huge win for not just us, but remote workers everywhere in Canada,” former Keywords tester James Russwurm told Game Developer. “Workers can now go ‘oh, I can picket my employer’s offices downtown even though I didn’t work in the office.’”
The ex-testers had been contracted to work at BioWare beginning during the pandemic, first on Mass Effect Legendary Edition and later on Dragon Age: Dreadwolf. When BioWare moved to force staff back into the office, the group successfully unionized to try and keep their remote status and improve pay. The Keywords developers were laid off before they could finish bargaining their first contract.
EA said at the time that it had previoulsy renewed its contract with Keywords and not doing so in September had nothing to do with the group unionizing. But the publisher has never made clear why it cut staff on a highly anticipated game like Dreadwolf that is still deep in development following several reported internal delays. EA and BioWare did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The once-beloved RPG studio and its parent company are also currently dealing with a lawsuit by other laid off Dragon Age developers who say they are being denied their full severance benefits under Canadian labor law. “While we remain supportive of the game we worked so hard on, and of our colleagues continuing that work, we are struggling to understand why BioWare is shortchanging us in this challenging time,” one of them said in a press release last month.
