Please, call a job cut a job cut

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Bioware released a statement yesterday. It talked of “turning towards the future”. It dreamed of “a more agile, focused studio”. Nowhere in the post did the word “layoffs” appear. But this is what the post was actually about. The closest it got to addressing the facts of what happened to an unspecified number of workers is the phrase: “we don’t require support from the full studio.”

It’s one of the most disingenuous announcements of job cuts in a recent and plentiful history of job cuts. A weirdly impressive feat from BioWare, considering the last two or three years have seen some spectacular verbal gymnastics from games companies when it comes to shitcanning people. Let’s take a look at some of our “favourite” mealy-mouthed press releases in which people have their jobs poetically “sunsetted” rather than, say, dropkicked out the window.

In April last year GTA publishers Take-Two Interactive said they were “rationalizing” their workforce, a strange way of announcing roughly 550 people would soon be out of work. Meanwhile, Microsoft called cutting thousands of jobs throughout 2024 an act of “aligning”. Riot said they were “evolving” in a year when almost 600 of their workers were shown the door. Evolving. Like an alligator, into a slightly smaller alligator.

On some occasions statements like this will be clearer and say “eliminating” or “reducing headcount”. But they more often use language like “restructuring” or “transitioning” or “repositioning”. This downplays the true impact of such cuts. The phrase “laid off” is itself a softly worded way of saying “this person got deleted from the office”. But it at least exists as a recognisable legal term that describes a specific type of job cut, performed when a company wants to save money (see also “consultation”, or when a company does into “administration” – words that have concrete legal meanings). The least BioWare could have done in their recent statement is to use something – anything – that plainly said what they had done. Instead, they chose to “reimagine” the studio.

To put aside the kneejerk annoyance for a moment, I do understand why this lingual perfuming happens. On a human level, being a manager having to write a statement like this is probably not easy. In the case of BioWare, General Manager Gary McKay has signed this statement, although such posts are often drafted or handled by comms teams. But whoever does it, I don’t envy the author. Nobody wants to write this kind of thing. It’s a thankless task that labels you as the “bad person” in a complicated system of money, work, and management. It must feel crappy to be the one signing a document that puts you against one wall even while you captain the firing squad that is aiming towards another.

That uneasy feeling is real and (despite how easy it is to disregard in the painful aftermath) worth understanding. I’ve been laid off by a manager whose voice audibly shook when he delivered the bad news to me. He seemed more worried about the whole thing than I was. So yes, I can see how fear of inevitable backlash may make a manager writing these statements want to hide the hurtful reality of jobs being axed behind words that feel softer, safer, cosier. In BioWare’s case, some of the reticence to admit to layoffs might come from a desire to avoid reductive “go woke, go broke” arguments from certain spittle-stained corners of the internet, which have started to infect industry decision-making. But whatever the motivation for couching layoffs in linguistic playdough, a difficult and uncomfortable truth is being avoided. If you must give the command to “fire”, do not shout “sunset!” instead. Do not make weasels out of words. A job cut is a job cut.

Journalists like us will translate the meaning of these baroque statements no matter how much they try to hide behind euphemisms and blue sky chat about the future. If company representatives equate the mass laying off of workers as a grand opera of “reimagining” we will come for those metaphors with our own slabbering, rabid horde of words and tear such statements to pieces. Say what you mean and we won’t need to make irritable posts like this one that simply draw more attention to the dryrot in your paragraphs. Use plain language and you can keep ownership of your own words, however tough they must be to say.

But any one of the writers BioWare just threw out the door could tell you this.

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