Epic Games will hire hundreds of contract workers as full employees

nme.com:

Epic Games will be making hundreds of temporary testers into full employees with benefits.As reported by The Verge, Epic Games will be hiring its US-based temporary staff full-time, complete with benefits.

This will be offered to quality assurance testers and other “eligible” contract-based employees.The news comes about from an employee-facing memo, where the Fortnite developer wrote that it will “offer full-time at-will employment to eligible US-based contingent workers” and that “many of those offers will be effective April 4th, 2022.” The memo does also note that some will not receive the offer, saying, “there are a few exceptions in which it makes sense for both the worker and Epic to maintain contingent worker status.”Elka Looks, a spokesperson for Epic Games, told The Verge that the developer will hire “a few hundred” of its contracts, and that “most but not all” are QA testers.

Looks also confirmed to The Verge that all the workers will be eligible for Epic Games’ US employee benefits plans, and will be directly employed by the company.Looks did also make a point that Epic Games will still hire temp workers for “short-term needs.” But Looks did not provide information on who of those outside of QA will be offered full-time work, or who were excluded.

In other news, the most recent Steam Next Fest is live and has “hundreds” of playable demos for players to choose from.There are action games like the speedrunning FPS Neon White, sim games like Food Truck Simulator, or SNES-like RPGs such as Small Saga to choose from, with many more divided up amongst a variety of other genres.