Last October, indie publisher Armor Games offered its employees to temporarily switch to a four-day working week. The experiment was supposed to end on December 31, but the company considered such a schedule convenient and decided never to work on Fridays again.
This was announced on Twitter by the general director of the publishing house John Cooney (John Cooney). Such a decision did not arise out of nowhere — Armor Games regularly interviewed employees about their attitude to the four-day working week. During the last survey, 87.5% of people said they were always ready to work only four days or 32 hours a week (for comparison, in November only 25% of Armor Games employees agreed to this).
Armor Games is moving permanently to a four-day workweek after a 3 month trial.
After our latest survey 87.5% of employees were ready to implement the workweek permanently. 100% of employees felt their productivity was the same (or better) than a 5-day workweek. https://t.co/7cVfn3CAR6
— John Cooney (@jmtb02) January 12, 2022
According to Kuni, during the experiment, absolutely all employees of Armor Games were able to maintain or even increase their productivity
However, it was not without problems. The main one is that the rest of the world continued to work on a standard schedule. Therefore, at least in November (Cooney did not share more recent data), some employees had to work on Fridays.
Cooney also noted that not all processes in Armor Games benefited from the transition to a four-day schedule. He did not explain what exactly the difficulties were with. But Cooney promised to prepare a large report on the experiment later.
Armor Games is not the only gaming company that has tried to switch to a four-day week. In September, the workflows were reviewed by Young Horses, known for the game Bugsnax, and the mobile developer Fingersoft. A month later, the schedule change was also announced by Eidos Montreal, which became the first AAA studio to switch to a “four-day”.
Armor Games was founded in 2004. The company started with the publication of Flash games (for which it launched a special Armor Games platform). Now she also publishes titles for PC, consoles and smartphones. Among the most famous projects of the company are GemCraft, Kingdom Rush and The Last Stand: Aftermath.