I've been at EA for about 1.5 years now and have never enjoyed working somewhere as much as this. Their devotion to D&I, their culture around management (and the thorough training each manager gets), career progression, and feedback, their flexibility for each individual (even given their size), how frequently we actually get to speak with SVP-level leadership to ask questions/voice opinions, their flexibility around WFH, and how everyone is pleasant to work with make it very easy to talk about how nice it is to work at EA. On top of all of that, benefits and pay are competitive (especially benefits).
EA's a big company, and I'm in EADP, which is an org that builds the back-end services for the games, rather than the games. But I've never been asked to work more than 8 hours in a day. Whenever I have chosen to work more, I've been specifically told by my manager or his that it's not required and that I can pick it up again tomorrow. They meant it.
I read this post before joining EA and was somewhat concerned, but was told by people I trust that it no longer applies. From my perspective, they're absolutely right.
As others mentioned, EA has undergone new leadership since this post was written. It was also nearly two decades ago. At this point, it's likely more of a good cautionary tale of how things can get than an accurate rendering of how things are.
To clarify, EA changed solely because of this post. It was a very dirty open secret that suddenly became incredibly public, and the backlash at that time was vociferous.
Ultimately (unless I’m mistaken) EA was forced to pay back pay plus overtime and stopped all crunch for some time. There was a lot of talk of congressional regulation at that time if I remember correctly, too.
From Wikipedia:
“Hoffman's actions, in part, led to the filing of three class action lawsuits against EA and some changes throughout the industry at large, such as the reclassification of entry-level artists as hourly employees, thus making them eligible for overtime under California law.[8] Her fiancé, EA employee Leander Hasty, was the main plaintiff in the successful class-action suit on behalf of software engineers at EA, which in 2007 awarded the plaintiffs $14.9 million for unpaid overtime.[9]”
>I've been at EA for about 1.5 years now and have never enjoyed working somewhere as much as this.
Her story is part of an ongoing labor movement. People dismissed it back in 2004, but it's led to change. The practices she describes used to be more common, especially in gaming companies.
The change happened because of the labor movement. If you aren't ownership, then you are a worker and you should have solidarity with all the other workers.
I suspect that your experience comes from working at EA in a leadership capacity, whereas the toxicity complaints come from the front-line workers (IE, SWE, QA).
EADP is one of the central teams within the company. By far, they have a much better experience than any of the product teams (less OT, lower expectations, less funding). Product teams are responsible to deliver on timelines regardless of the support they can get centrally, so teams like EADP get more opportunity to push back, and that pushback turns into OT on the product teams.
tl;dr: Central Team experience at EA is VASTLY different than being on a game team. It's great if you're on a central team at EA, but I'd never work on a game team if I enjoy seeing my family (plus EA pays at least 50% less than similar roles with skills that would still be needed outside of gaming)
This blog post is from 18 years ago so I'd be curious if any game developers can speak to the current state of affairs in the industry. It's always been notorious for overworking employees, but I'm not sure if it's to the same scale described here.
Some places are still like this. EA is not. I worked at a company that was acquired by EA in late 2011 and stayed until 2016. Post-acquisition, EA's HR folks made sure that a whole bunch of the studio's staff were properly classified (salary vs. hourly) and that the studio was following proper procedure regarding timecards and overtime. The studio also hired on some senior staff to deal with operations and production practices.
There were still some bad times - politics outside of the studio forced staff into some do-or-die milestones that required crunching for a week or two at a time, but nothing like the kind of sustained months-to-years crunch I've heard about in other places.
The funny thing about EA is that even though it has such a bad rap for making big mistakes in the past, they made them FIRST and have managed to learn. A lot of other major publishers that grew to comparable size more recently are still making them.
In the years following this, a lot of the big game developers (especially mobile) opened offshore studios in SE Asia and Eastern Europe where endless crunch like is described in the legendary ea_spouse post is still very alive and well. Basically orders come down from "HQ" which is typically the home office in Western Europe or US/Canada, and the overseas studios follow their marching orders. Added bonus for the company: much lower employee salaries and lax or non-existent labour laws.
Source: worked for a major game developer at one of their SE Asia studios for a while.
I left last year after working there for ~8 years.
It's night and day; EA when I left was a great place to work at. Work life balance was a priority, a lot of communication from execs, coworkers were great.
My only gripe with them is the revolving door of contractors, QA and devs alike.
Things have dramatically improved in the last 18 years. That's not to say that crunch doesn't happen, or that there aren't studios that abuse their employees, but large companies like EA have all moved past this death march for months model. Ubisoft is generally considered to be an excellent employer - reasonable pay, good work life balance and career/progression systems available for everyone. It's still not perfect, but 8ts not this!
I personally haven't worked a day of overtime since around 2009.
I know that there are shops where overtime has lingered around. I know from speaking with ex-employees that Microsoft's Coalition did severe, brutal overtime in developing Gears of War 4 and 5. My impression overall though is that the amount of overtime in general in the video game industry has dramatically decreased since this article was written (at EA as well).
FWIW I was part of the class in the resulting class action lawsuit, and got a settlement check for about $30K in 2005
I also got a ~$5K settlement check from Google around 2012 due to the illegal Steve Jobs - Eric Schmidt anti-poaching agreement, another class action lawsuit
I don't condone any of EA's behavior at the time, but the lawsuit benefited the lawyers way more than the artists and developers. I wish there was a resolution to the situation that allowed EALA to continue as a major studio. The talent there was amazing. Some of the blue sky projects that never made it to production were really interesting.
Unfortunately -- lawyers got paid. EA made some rule/structure changes. And EALA lost most of its square footage to a 24 hour fitness. Makes me sad everytime I drive by.
Good grief, this post is nearly old enough to vote.
EA has changed a lot in those years, mostly for the better. I spent 13 years there from 2005-2018 and it was a great place to work; the people were great, the problems were interesting, and the hours were normal.
This is being posted because people have their knives out for Unity at the moment, and this occurred while Riccitiello (current Unity CEO) was the CEO at EA.
I organized a softball game between my startup and EA in 1984 or so, as described in [1]. Trip Hawkins hit a monstrous home run. Our president hit into a double play.
The fact that they've even lasted this long is some kind of tribute. Trip's idea at the start was to build games like a movie studio: have outside companies take all the risk of building the thing, and just assign an in-house "producer" to help them.
If an EA employee said, "Hey, I want to build games myself!" he'd say, "OK, you can give up your stock options and your job security, and in exchange you can get all the royalties that a game developer gets." Most of them thought better of the idea.
So now, it's... what? They work employees like game developers but don't pay them like that? Why would you do that?
The game industry changed a lot since 1984 (almost 40 years ago!) and EA went through multiple changes in leadership in the meanwhile.
There’s probably not a single person you know from that time still working there.
All the big studios/publishers (including those with very deep pockets from parent companies like Microsoft Studios) bought a lot of dev studios for vertical integration. Almost all of EA’s studios were companies they bought rather than founded themselves.
I see that "Vote with your feet" got downvoted in the thread, but it's true. I worked for another one of the large game studios in the US for a long time. The practices employed at the game studio were built around keeping people attached to their jobs because they love video games and loved the games we built. It was weaponized excessively.
Almost every town-hall, all-hands, etc was framed around the product and keeping players happy (we need to deliver this by this date so you have to crunch). The hiring pool was primarily people that played the games we developed and there was some psychological warefare going on that attempted to prevent attrition based on building what you loved.
The quote from the article is:
> No one works in the game industry unless they love what they do.
This is pretty true and can be very toxic in your "job". My advice: Don't love what you do for work THAT much. Keep a bit of a disconnect and live your life still. In the modern tech industry you can leave, you can find a job that treats you well, don't make your identity a "video game developer on X game" because that is a recipe for burnout.
The issues that stemmed from this are impossible to outline. People made subpar decisions, dealt with inhumane conditions and harassment, took lower pay, and at the end of the day has caused REAL harm in the industry (suicides, trauma, etc). We need to be better and hold these companies accountable from every aspect of not buying games, not working there, and attempt to make the industry better.
I left my stint at video games and went to a different company. The pay is better, the working conditions are better, my thoughts are not stifled because of internal politics.
The industry has changed quite a bit since 2004. During that time publishers were key and many times deadlines were set by the next "drop" for the publisher, but many of the problems with the industry have stayed around and video games are not worth it.
I also spent time in the industry, and would agree. There are much better industries to work in to make a paycheck, and games can be sustainable if you approach them with an eye towards hobby-scale production. But 20-year-old me would probably still disagree because he lacked for ideas of how to approach a career. It is hard to see your options properly when you're starting out and most "helpful advice" from elders amounts to "I did this and it worked for me(in a completely different economy 30 years ago)" or "the good jobs are in X".
Really, though. The people who do best in games tend to come in with a specific specialty skill that they enjoy and is transferrable, deploy it for a brief tour, then exit. Everyone tasked with arbitrary production-as-a-whole functions gets wrecked at some point. And it doesn't get better at indie scale, because accountability is even lower in a tiny studio, and the producers will tend to achieve results by repeatedly finding new people to do free work, gaslighting them and then tossing them aside when they stop delivering. And if it's a true go-it-alone, then you can end up self-imposing crunch when you sense the game isn't shaping up like it should, and it's easy to stay there indefinitely until you break because game scoping can get out of control so easily.
Like, you can make indie stuff work. I know folks who have. But they have a very tight grasp on the kind of thing they are aiming to achieve, and categorically aren't doing "game productions" in the sense of spending most of the cycle fumbling around figuring out how to make the game and worrying about how to make characters successfully interact with doors. It's basically always a narrow genre entry like "Sokoban puzzle", and the dev specialized into doing only that genre so that more of their work and skillset transfers between projects. And you can do great work this way and truly achieve mastery over the subject matter because with such a narrow scope, the code and assets can be iterated over a ton, without much deadline stress. But "the industry" as a whole is blatantly against respecting that process since it's normalized stealing as much as possible from last year's trends and then pushing all remaining effort into a wider marketing funnel, and in doing so, creating a raft of challenging technical problems. So for as much sheer effort the industry puts in, most of it is wasted.
This was while John Riccitiello was running EA. I was there at the time and it was crazy how many people were being driven so hard. You may recognize his name now from the recent Unity/malware merger news, or maybe from calling developers who don’t extract maximum value through microtransactions “fucking idiots.”
And precisely because it's from 2004 there are plenty of developers who may be hearing this story for the first time.
This story, perhaps more known as "EA Spouse", was eventually attributed to Erin Hoffman [1] and made quite a splash. It gained EA a bad reputation for excessive overtime that, AFAIK, they retain to this day. It's not the only reason why EA was named the "worse company in America" in 2012, but it was among them.
That ea_spouse post is best seen on the internet, to the OP's link. Why would we buy a book to read free internet posts? Isn't that going backwards?
Also it's a bit crass to copy/paste someone's story of victimization, health-failing story of suffering, intro'd with some math about sweat-shop productivity and sell it as part of a random software article jambalaya for $9 a pop.
What does selected for inclusion even mean? Joel saw this story explode back in 04 so he copy/pasted it into Notepad++ "for inclusion"? It's not like he's an art curator who does the work of sorting wheat from the chaff. Google and social media aggregators do most of the work on that for internet writing.
Ugh, I guess it's enough hackernews for me, for a while. Everything is a product and even the "greats" like joel are trying to sell the pixels I saw last week, copy & pasted back to me in paper form. Virtue ain't in this post.
Funny story: I know one of the engineers who was on this exact team being written about who was still at EA years later. I asked him why he didn’t leave, and he said “I didn’t really mind. I got a settlement from the lawsuit and bought a nice car. Then I went back to work.”
When I interviewed at a medium sized game studio, mostly known for their graphically impressive engine, I asked to have another offer (different industry) matched. The recruiters response was that they couldn't do it, but they know I'll still choose them "because making games is cool".
Suffice to say I didn't take that offer. Studio tour was fun though.
I worked in the game industry for over twenty years as an engineer. Most of the time the work was fun, the projects were interesting and the money was okay. Eventually I needed more stability, better pay and work life balance, and I went into business software, a decision that I wish I had made earlier.
I think that the game industry has some issues that are very difficult to solve caused by various compounding factors, and for these reasons there will always be below market pay for engineers, crunch and studio closures/mass layoffs. The factors are 1)games are a creative endeavour subject to fashion. There is no guarantee that your star team that made Space War 1 will make hit sequel nor that people will be into space war games in 5 years. 2)project management is extremely hard when you have 200+ people across the world working on complex systems and a varying product description 3) the combination of uncertain delivery and high marketing spends required for a AAA title, and other hard dates like thanksgiving or a sports season beginning, means that crunch is almost guaranteed. 4)the cool factor of working in games means a supply of young people that can be taken advantage of. below market pay, unpaid OT and little structured career development.
In my time I saw project managers come from academia and from government or military contractors and none of them could tame the endemic issues that come with this industry.
Not all of these problems exist at all developers, there are bright spots and it’s possible to have a long and lucrative career. Just have your eyes open.
Disclaimer: I now run my own studio but I worked as an employee not that long ago and have been working in games for almost 13 years now.
It really depends on the role. Programmers and producers are the best paid disciplines. And while there’s a lot of junior people competing for entry level jobs it’s hard to find senior talent. As a specialist programmer with 10+ years of experience you’ll have very good job security and will be better compensated than most anyone aside from maybe upper management (you’d still get better pay at Google, Facebook or Microsoft though).
> When the next news came it was not about a reprieve; it was another acceleration: twelve hours six days a week, 9am to 10pm.
What amazes me is that there's someone out there who thinks that this type of "crunchs" would improve performance. Do they ever really improve actual performance ?
I have been in (non-videogame) software companies that did this (never as an employee though), and I literally saw people staring at their computer screens doing absolutely nothing. Not even browsing Facebook or whatever, just... staring. They would do that for the majority of the day. Probably sleeping with their eyes open.
I have the impression that adding hours like this is like adding manpower as in The Mythical Man-month way... it can only slow down the project, never speed it up.
"Press Reset" by Jason Schreier is a great look at the human side of the industry in general. The crunch, layoff, move to a new studio, repeat is all too common. EA was on a whole other level, though.
I used to work with a very experienced SE (something like 20+ years) who worked at EA a little after this article was written. Man I thought it was just a reddit bandwagon to hate on EA but hearing a first hand account of how his managers treated him and the rest of his team was jaw dropping. Manager walking back and forth with a bullhorn shouting about bugs that needed to be fixed at midnight on a Saturday, firing a (according to him) great dev weeks before his wife was going to have their child, the constant backstabbing politics, driving someone to suicide (though he felt very uncomfortable expanding on that).
Though reading this I can't help but wonder if there is a better model for releasing games to avoid crunch -- something like what minecraft did. Give access to an unfinished game, then do a rolling release and slowly make it better and better.
I chat with people at EA Canada from time to time and the impression I get is that it's a very good place to work (the people always try to lure you there!) with none of the sort of brutal overtime issues expressed. It's commendable that EA would have steered the ship around from 2004 and ended these awful practices.
[+] [-] Jeaye|3 years ago|reply
I've been at EA for about 1.5 years now and have never enjoyed working somewhere as much as this. Their devotion to D&I, their culture around management (and the thorough training each manager gets), career progression, and feedback, their flexibility for each individual (even given their size), how frequently we actually get to speak with SVP-level leadership to ask questions/voice opinions, their flexibility around WFH, and how everyone is pleasant to work with make it very easy to talk about how nice it is to work at EA. On top of all of that, benefits and pay are competitive (especially benefits).
EA's a big company, and I'm in EADP, which is an org that builds the back-end services for the games, rather than the games. But I've never been asked to work more than 8 hours in a day. Whenever I have chosen to work more, I've been specifically told by my manager or his that it's not required and that I can pick it up again tomorrow. They meant it.
I read this post before joining EA and was somewhat concerned, but was told by people I trust that it no longer applies. From my perspective, they're absolutely right.
As others mentioned, EA has undergone new leadership since this post was written. It was also nearly two decades ago. At this point, it's likely more of a good cautionary tale of how things can get than an accurate rendering of how things are.
[+] [-] highwaylights|3 years ago|reply
Ultimately (unless I’m mistaken) EA was forced to pay back pay plus overtime and stopped all crunch for some time. There was a lot of talk of congressional regulation at that time if I remember correctly, too.
From Wikipedia:
“Hoffman's actions, in part, led to the filing of three class action lawsuits against EA and some changes throughout the industry at large, such as the reclassification of entry-level artists as hourly employees, thus making them eligible for overtime under California law.[8] Her fiancé, EA employee Leander Hasty, was the main plaintiff in the successful class-action suit on behalf of software engineers at EA, which in 2007 awarded the plaintiffs $14.9 million for unpaid overtime.[9]”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Hoffman
[+] [-] ironlake|3 years ago|reply
Her story is part of an ongoing labor movement. People dismissed it back in 2004, but it's led to change. The practices she describes used to be more common, especially in gaming companies.
The change happened because of the labor movement. If you aren't ownership, then you are a worker and you should have solidarity with all the other workers.
[+] [-] karpierz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nhunter|3 years ago|reply
tl;dr: Central Team experience at EA is VASTLY different than being on a game team. It's great if you're on a central team at EA, but I'd never work on a game team if I enjoy seeing my family (plus EA pays at least 50% less than similar roles with skills that would still be needed outside of gaming)
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] didip|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hvs|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swivelmaster|3 years ago|reply
There were still some bad times - politics outside of the studio forced staff into some do-or-die milestones that required crunching for a week or two at a time, but nothing like the kind of sustained months-to-years crunch I've heard about in other places.
The funny thing about EA is that even though it has such a bad rap for making big mistakes in the past, they made them FIRST and have managed to learn. A lot of other major publishers that grew to comparable size more recently are still making them.
[+] [-] system16|3 years ago|reply
Source: worked for a major game developer at one of their SE Asia studios for a while.
[+] [-] yelnatz|3 years ago|reply
It's night and day; EA when I left was a great place to work at. Work life balance was a priority, a lot of communication from execs, coworkers were great.
My only gripe with them is the revolving door of contractors, QA and devs alike.
[+] [-] maccard|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tiktaalik|3 years ago|reply
I know that there are shops where overtime has lingered around. I know from speaking with ex-employees that Microsoft's Coalition did severe, brutal overtime in developing Gears of War 4 and 5. My impression overall though is that the amount of overtime in general in the video game industry has dramatically decreased since this article was written (at EA as well).
[+] [-] chubot|3 years ago|reply
I also got a ~$5K settlement check from Google around 2012 due to the illegal Steve Jobs - Eric Schmidt anti-poaching agreement, another class action lawsuit
[+] [-] wanderingmoose|3 years ago|reply
I don't condone any of EA's behavior at the time, but the lawsuit benefited the lawyers way more than the artists and developers. I wish there was a resolution to the situation that allowed EALA to continue as a major studio. The talent there was amazing. Some of the blue sky projects that never made it to production were really interesting.
Unfortunately -- lawyers got paid. EA made some rule/structure changes. And EALA lost most of its square footage to a 24 hour fitness. Makes me sad everytime I drive by.
[+] [-] maximilianburke|3 years ago|reply
EA has changed a lot in those years, mostly for the better. I spent 13 years there from 2005-2018 and it was a great place to work; the people were great, the problems were interesting, and the hours were normal.
[+] [-] kevinh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlbertCory|3 years ago|reply
The fact that they've even lasted this long is some kind of tribute. Trip's idea at the start was to build games like a movie studio: have outside companies take all the risk of building the thing, and just assign an in-house "producer" to help them.
If an EA employee said, "Hey, I want to build games myself!" he'd say, "OK, you can give up your stock options and your job security, and in exchange you can get all the royalties that a game developer gets." Most of them thought better of the idea.
So now, it's... what? They work employees like game developers but don't pay them like that? Why would you do that?
[1] https://www.albertcory.io/the-big-bucks
[+] [-] ido|3 years ago|reply
There’s probably not a single person you know from that time still working there.
All the big studios/publishers (including those with very deep pockets from parent companies like Microsoft Studios) bought a lot of dev studios for vertical integration. Almost all of EA’s studios were companies they bought rather than founded themselves.
[+] [-] 0x500x79|3 years ago|reply
Almost every town-hall, all-hands, etc was framed around the product and keeping players happy (we need to deliver this by this date so you have to crunch). The hiring pool was primarily people that played the games we developed and there was some psychological warefare going on that attempted to prevent attrition based on building what you loved.
The quote from the article is: > No one works in the game industry unless they love what they do.
This is pretty true and can be very toxic in your "job". My advice: Don't love what you do for work THAT much. Keep a bit of a disconnect and live your life still. In the modern tech industry you can leave, you can find a job that treats you well, don't make your identity a "video game developer on X game" because that is a recipe for burnout.
The issues that stemmed from this are impossible to outline. People made subpar decisions, dealt with inhumane conditions and harassment, took lower pay, and at the end of the day has caused REAL harm in the industry (suicides, trauma, etc). We need to be better and hold these companies accountable from every aspect of not buying games, not working there, and attempt to make the industry better.
I left my stint at video games and went to a different company. The pay is better, the working conditions are better, my thoughts are not stifled because of internal politics.
The industry has changed quite a bit since 2004. During that time publishers were key and many times deadlines were set by the next "drop" for the publisher, but many of the problems with the industry have stayed around and video games are not worth it.
[+] [-] syntheweave|3 years ago|reply
Really, though. The people who do best in games tend to come in with a specific specialty skill that they enjoy and is transferrable, deploy it for a brief tour, then exit. Everyone tasked with arbitrary production-as-a-whole functions gets wrecked at some point. And it doesn't get better at indie scale, because accountability is even lower in a tiny studio, and the producers will tend to achieve results by repeatedly finding new people to do free work, gaslighting them and then tossing them aside when they stop delivering. And if it's a true go-it-alone, then you can end up self-imposing crunch when you sense the game isn't shaping up like it should, and it's easy to stay there indefinitely until you break because game scoping can get out of control so easily.
Like, you can make indie stuff work. I know folks who have. But they have a very tight grasp on the kind of thing they are aiming to achieve, and categorically aren't doing "game productions" in the sense of spending most of the cycle fumbling around figuring out how to make the game and worrying about how to make characters successfully interact with doors. It's basically always a narrow genre entry like "Sokoban puzzle", and the dev specialized into doing only that genre so that more of their work and skillset transfers between projects. And you can do great work this way and truly achieve mastery over the subject matter because with such a narrow scope, the code and assets can be iterated over a ton, without much deadline stress. But "the industry" as a whole is blatantly against respecting that process since it's normalized stealing as much as possible from last year's trends and then pushing all remaining effort into a wider marketing funnel, and in doing so, creating a raft of challenging technical problems. So for as much sheer effort the industry puts in, most of it is wasted.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] mistrial9|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] synu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ncr100|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antiverse|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xbar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jolux|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] probably_wrong|3 years ago|reply
This story, perhaps more known as "EA Spouse", was eventually attributed to Erin Hoffman [1] and made quite a splash. It gained EA a bad reputation for excessive overtime that, AFAIK, they retain to this day. It's not the only reason why EA was named the "worse company in America" in 2012, but it was among them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Hoffman
[+] [-] AdmiralAsshat|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spiderice|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daveslash|3 years ago|reply
https://www.amazon.com/Best-Software-Writing-Selected-Introd...
[+] [-] barrysteve|3 years ago|reply
Also it's a bit crass to copy/paste someone's story of victimization, health-failing story of suffering, intro'd with some math about sweat-shop productivity and sell it as part of a random software article jambalaya for $9 a pop.
What does selected for inclusion even mean? Joel saw this story explode back in 04 so he copy/pasted it into Notepad++ "for inclusion"? It's not like he's an art curator who does the work of sorting wheat from the chaff. Google and social media aggregators do most of the work on that for internet writing.
Ugh, I guess it's enough hackernews for me, for a while. Everything is a product and even the "greats" like joel are trying to sell the pixels I saw last week, copy & pasted back to me in paper form. Virtue ain't in this post.
[+] [-] pizzathyme|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|3 years ago|reply
My [husband] works for Electronic Arts, I'm ... a disgruntled spouse. (2004) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1454102 - June 2010 (105 comments)
[+] [-] sascha_sl|3 years ago|reply
Suffice to say I didn't take that offer. Studio tour was fun though.
[+] [-] justinhj|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ido|3 years ago|reply
It really depends on the role. Programmers and producers are the best paid disciplines. And while there’s a lot of junior people competing for entry level jobs it’s hard to find senior talent. As a specialist programmer with 10+ years of experience you’ll have very good job security and will be better compensated than most anyone aside from maybe upper management (you’d still get better pay at Google, Facebook or Microsoft though).
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] AshamedCaptain|3 years ago|reply
What amazes me is that there's someone out there who thinks that this type of "crunchs" would improve performance. Do they ever really improve actual performance ?
I have been in (non-videogame) software companies that did this (never as an employee though), and I literally saw people staring at their computer screens doing absolutely nothing. Not even browsing Facebook or whatever, just... staring. They would do that for the majority of the day. Probably sleeping with their eyes open.
I have the impression that adding hours like this is like adding manpower as in The Mythical Man-month way... it can only slow down the project, never speed it up.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mysterydip|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mockapapella|3 years ago|reply
Though reading this I can't help but wonder if there is a better model for releasing games to avoid crunch -- something like what minecraft did. Give access to an unfinished game, then do a rolling release and slowly make it better and better.
[+] [-] ido|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|3 years ago|reply
I have also found that discrete teams, within a company, can have radically different cultures.
That said, game development has long been known as a "labor of love," with emphasis on "labor."
In the 1980s(!). I was recruited by Sierra Online. Even though I thought it would be cool, I consulted enough game developers to get talked out of it.
[+] [-] Tiktaalik|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atlasunshrugged|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]