According to foreign media gamesIndustry, the "Homeland" series game developer Deserts of Kharak Studio announced that the team will change to four days a week in April, in addition to allowing employees to choose office space flexibly. And these changes stem from employee feedback rather than leadership initiatives.
Pam Lee, director of human resources at Deserts of Kharak, said working four days a week is by far the most popular when they ask employees to provide feedback to their superiors on some reserved ideas. CEO Rob Cunningham noted that the shift was also affirmed after a series of aggressive trial runs. He also explained that they conducted a four-day-a-week trial with multiple project teams and collected all the data before and after the implementation of the system, including code and content submissions, task estimates and fact sheets, mental health surveys, oral comments, interviews, and monitoring. The results are shocking, productivity hasn't declined, and everything else has improved, such as quality, efficiency, morale, relationships, and so on. This is a positive shift.
Previously, The veteran free Flash mini game development studio Armor Games and SE's Eidos Montreal Studio also announced a four-day work week, and Microsoft Japan also conducted a four-day week work trial in 2019, which found that this increased productivity and reduced paper and electricity consumption.
Incidentally, Deserts of Kharak's new RTS title Homeworld 3 is scheduled to go on sale in the fourth quarter of 2022. The game is now available on Steam, with support for Chinese.
