This is insane. It's YOUR studio, you make the damn rules, if 18 months is disruptive....change the rules, you don't have to go through an act of Congress or something, you're a corporation, just change the rules to make this shit work.
Or, simpler, just hire people, pay them, give them solid benefits, and treat them like actual people and not cogs. But, that's just me.
This is common in software development - we’ve had contractors working for years at a time.
The problem is the contractors get paid more because they’re transient labor and so don’t get full “benefits”. That pisses off the permanents who take home pay is less, and the contractors go out of their way to stay in the job and ride the gravy train.
How do they do that? They write code that is impenetrable. As a young software engineer I was given contractor’s code to finish - it was like they’d made a puzzle instead of a product. Get paid more, then make themselves indispensable. If they’re let go it takes significant effort to work on their stuff - their goal is to make it cheaper to keep them on.
So now we got all these stupid development regimes, code reviews blah blah all that time and effort, just to make sure everyone is producing code that meets the company guidelines.
Guess what happens if you’re on an 18 month window? You go out of your way to write shit - what difference does it make anyway? You get paid regardless.
Guess who wants the 18 month limit? The permanent staff - the same ones pissed off at being paid less. And those same permanents will try to get unions in to enforce that.
The corporate managers would be happy if everyone was a contractor on an unlimited timescale - they can be let go easily.