Roblox, the $19 billion gaming giant, has joined the growing list of tech companies to ditch remote working—and employees who don’t want to work at the company’s physical office in California at least three days a week (which means relocation for some) will have to find another job, its CEO and founder David Baszucki has warned.
“Join our three-day, in-office schedule (Tues.-Thurs.) or take a severance package,” Baszucki recently wrote in a memo to staff.
Employees have until mid-January to mull over the ultimatum and make a decision. But whether they like it or not, the company will now be “transitioning away from remote work” Baszucki said, with a hard start to in-person working for most of the week on July 15, 2024.
Roblox reassured that those needing to relocate closer to the company’s San Mateo head office in order to comply with the company’s new policy will be given assistance with relocation costs.
Meanwhile, employees who are unable to relocate will have a further three months, until April 15, to job hunt—or as Baszucki put it, “transition out of their roles as full-time employees”.
Roblox didn’t immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Roblox CEO: office return is necessary for innovation and virtual workspaces aren’t good enough—yet
Like most tech companies, Roblox went fully remote at the start of the pandemic in March 2020. Although Baszucki said that he was initially “impressed” with how staff took to working from home, it wasn’t long before he said he was dissuaded by “Zoom fatigue” and the lack of shadowing opportunities for new hires.
“During this time we had numerous deep discussions and we kept coming back to the notion that, ultimately, Roblox is an innovation company and we needed to get back to working in person,” he wrote.
Baszucki added that it was the company’s first post-quarantine in-person meeting that opened his eyes up to what his business was missing out on by connecting solely through a screen.
“Within 45 minutes I came away from three separate conversations with spontaneous to do’s and ideas to put in motion, something that hadn’t happened during the past few years of video meetings,” he added.
Plus, despite Roblox’s foray into the metaverse—the company recently launched virtual job centers where job candidates can step inside an immersive reimagining of its headquarters to see for themselves what it would be like to work there—even Baszucki isn’t quite convinced that it can currently compare with real-life.
“While I’m confident we will get to a point where virtual workspaces are as engaging, collaborative, and productive as physical spaces, we aren’t there yet,” he insisted.
CEOs issue ultimatums—but not without risk
Baszucki isn’t the first CEO to take a firm stance on returning to work. Tesla CEO and Twitter (now X) owner Elon Musk was among the first of the tech leaders to issue workers with a hard-line threat to commit to the company’s new “hardcore” work environment or leave, last year.
“If you don’t show up, we will assume you have resigned,” he wrote in an email to Tesla staff, before issuing X employees a similar mandate later last year.
At the time, the bold move was met with backlash, but since then others have followed.
Most recently, Amazon’s exasperated CEO Andy Jassy told workers who had for months been pushing back against the company’s return-to-office mandate, to get on board with the new rules or move on.
“If you can’t disagree and commit, it’s probably not going to work out for you at Amazon,” he said, adding it wasn’t right for some employees to be in the office three days a week while others refuse to do so.
Grindr also issued a similar ultimatum to staff just last month. But the aggressive tactic is not without risk. Grindr’s executive team soon found out the hard way that staff can call their employer’s ultimatum.
The dating platform lost almost half of its workforce in two weeks, including most of its engineering team, causing the company to reckon with technical issues as a result of its aggressive RTO order. Meanwhile, Twitter (now X) operations were put at risk last year when more workers than expected chose to take up Musk’s call to quit.