Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft are asking staff to work from home

It'll be interesting to see if teams push for something closer to full remote wherever it worked well (or if some employees will want it, having not realized what it was like).

Plausibly teams that it works well for will have greater ammunition to push for it, since they have the past experience with it.

The company makes video games and as you can probably guess being creative is very important. Working from home reduces the creativity of every employee not just because the existing tools for telecommute are insufficient to create a good work environment but also because it prevents people from socializing with spontaneity. Add to this the fact that many of the game developers and designers need special hardware (different game consoles, VPN routers, high speed Internet, interactive pen displays, additional software licenses, etc) that the company would have to buy for every single person to maintain the quality and development speed they have from working on-site.

The founders were forced, due to CORVID-19, to implement an emergency protocol in case we have to move all operations off-site. The IT department was already tasked to setup VPN access for all employees, to buy a bunch of expensive equipment, to spend countless of hours training senior programmers and artists in the arts of online meetings, network troubleshooting, activation of software licenses and who knows what else.

I worked for a remote-first company for roughly five years and it was great, but the business was completely different. My team was responsible for the provisioning and management of different cloud services, in fact all our products were Software as a Service (SaaS) so having a reliable Internet connection and a good enough computer was enough to do our job including leadership, management, marketing, engineering, sales, support, etc.

I cannot see this happening in a game studio, it just doesn’t work. I may be wrong but I think there is not a single game studio in the industry with a fully remote work policy. If there are, I bet their success cannot compare with studios of the same size working all on-site.