Do part-time employees usually get offered severance packages or is this (kinda ghoulish) business as usual?
by design part-time employment usually does not confer the benefits of full employment, no. that's part of why so many unions seek to either upgrade part-time workers to full time workers or limit the number of part-time/subcontracted workers that a company is employing–otherwise you basically have an underclass of people who can get totally fucked at any time.
That's what I thought, but I wasn't sure if the game industry had different standards to other fields for that kinda stuff. Sacking a bunch of QA agents does not sound promising for the games they're working on…
by design part-time employment usually does not confer the benefits of full employment, no. that's part of why so many unions seek to either upgrade part-time workers to full time workers or limit the number of part-time/subcontracted workers that a company is employing–otherwise you basically have an underclass of people who can get totally fucked at any time.
That's what I thought, but I wasn't sure if the game industry had different standards to other fields for that kinda stuff. Sacking a bunch of QA agents does not sound promising for the games they're working on…
QA people being mistreated is very, very common. They'd likely rehire some when required or use contractors.