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150 people have been fired from Xsolla – a game payment company used by Steam, the Epic Games Store and other game developers – via a controversial email from CEO and founder Aleksandr Agapitov.
Agapitov contacted 150 fired employees through email on August 3, stating that “my big data team analyzed your activities” and accused them of being “unengaged and unproductive employees”.
The email starts by saying:
“You received this email because my big data team analyzed your activities in Jira, Confluence, Gmail, chats, documents, dashboards and tagged you as unengaged and unproductive employees. In other words, you were not always present at the workplace when you worked remotely.”
Agapitov also states, “Many of you might be shocked, but I truly believe that Xsolla is not for you” and that employees would receive help through separate HR companies. The email ends by listing the names of everyone who has been fired, and says “If you want to stay in contact with me, please write me a long letter about all your observations, injustice, and gratitude”.
Въебывайте или уебывайте!
— Shurick Agapitov (@agapitovs) August 4, 2021
All of the fired employees were based in Xsolla’s office in Perm, Russia. In a follow-up press conference reported by App2Top, Agapitov claimed that the layoffs were due to the company no longer showing 40 per cent growth.
After the press conference, Agapitov posted a Tweet which Game World Observer reports as translating to “Work your fucking ass off or get your fucking ass out”.
Xsolla has been accused of spying on employees to gather the metrics they were judged on – HR expert Alyona Vladimirskaya has argued that monitoring productivity like this is “extremely ineffective” and encourages fired employees to sue.
Xsolla provides payment services for large companies in the games industry, including Valve, Twitch, Epic Games and Ubisoft.