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EA: The Human Story (2004)

ea-spouse.livejournal.com

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Re: EA: The Human Story (2004)

#131

Post by solardev »

IntelMiner wrote: post #128
system16 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comp…

The last EA game I picked up was the Command & Conquer remastered collection. I even went as far as to buy the physical box set from LimitedRunGames Hearing how they treated LemonSky absolutely soured me on playing it in the end however https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bm7KUE1Kwts

What is a lemon sky? Your YouTube link just talks about outsourcing.

Re: EA: The Human Story (2004)

#132

Post by jhhh »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #121
dijit wrote: post #80

> Their devotion to D&I I worked for a competitor and this is single-handedly the most frustrating thing I had to deal with honestly. Not because it’s not a noble objective, but because it was weaponised by a minority of people to control the studio in various ways, it was bullying in its purest form and extremely toxic - the environment felt really hostile, like saying something even moderately wrong would lead to a…

> So, I treat strong D&I initiatives as a red flag, personally. Based off the general vibe of your comment, those companies don't want you. D&I driving away people who are made uncomfortable by D&I is working exactly as designed. Somehow I have managed to be employed at a number of companies for decades without once been in fear about being bullied by false accusations of being misogynistic or racist. I've never seen…

> I've never seen another white person bullied under the pretense of having been racist or misogynistic.

And yet,

> My guess is that you don't see 'light' racist, misogynistic, or homophobic behavior as problematic

Re: EA: The Human Story (2004)

#133

Post by 1ark »

mehlmao wrote: post #109
babypuncher wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the last decade EA has actually built a decent reputation as a good place for developers to work. The article posted above is from 2004. It was a pretty big scandal at the time, and it actually did lead to meaningful reforms at EA. EA has had their fair share of other scandals. Rushing unfinished products to market, sleazy monetization schemes, etc, but developer crunch is not one that has really come up in a long…

> in the last decade So since Riccitiello left?

Indeed.

Re: EA: The Human Story (2004)

#134

Post by didip »

Jeaye wrote: post #41

(opinions are my own and not EA's) 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…

What is the tech stack of EADP?

Re: EA: The Human Story (2004)

#136

Post by IntelMiner »

solardev wrote: post #131
IntelMiner wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last EA game I picked up was the Command & Conquer remastered collection. I even went as far as to buy the physical box set from LimitedRunGames Hearing how they treated LemonSky absolutely soured me on playing it in the end however https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bm7KUE1Kwts

What is a lemon sky? Your YouTube link just talks about outsourcing.

Lemon Sky is an outsourcing studio based in SouthEast Asia

Re: EA: The Human Story (2004)

#137

Post by hoot »

kevinh wrote: post #119
maximilianburke wrote: post #45

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.

The article mentions that Larry Probst was ceo at the time fwiw.

Re: EA: The Human Story (2004)

#138

Post by Tiktaalik »

hvs wrote: post #12

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.

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).

Re: EA: The Human Story (2004)

#139

Post by Tiktaalik »

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.

Re: EA: The Human Story (2004)

#140

Post by Tiktaalik »

silentsea90 wrote: post #74

Why does game dev take so long? I assume most of the physics, game dynamics etc are standardized. Artwork, building a story, designing the game etc sure require work per game. I ask as a noob, not expressing an opinion at all.

It's not standardized or if it arguably is, only in the last couple of years since Unreal and Unity took over, and even then, many will say that Unreal is only really saving you heaps of time if you're making a FPS/3rd person game and if you're doing anything else you're swimming against the current.

Then of course every few years the platforms change and that throws a wrench in the works.

Things take so long because so often everything is built from scratch and got to the point where it just barely works for ship, and then ship happens, everyone moves on (teams break up!), and the bespoke tech hyper narrowly optimized for the specific game is unusable for anything else.

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