EA: The Human Story (2004)

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.

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]”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Hoffman

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.”

the refund policy is one of the reasons I buy games on steam first over other stores, I tend to buy a lot of games for whatever reason and end up refunding 5-6 a year for various reasons after playing under two hours

Microsoft only allots you one or two a year or something which isn't enough considering how misleading game marketing is mixed with the prices