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EA: The Human Story (2004)

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Re: EA: The Human Story (2004)

#141

Post by Mockapapella »

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.

Re: EA: The Human Story (2004)

#142

Post by thematrixturtle »

system16 wrote: post #66
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.

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…

Yup. Ubisoft Singapore hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons just last year: https://kotaku.com/the-messy-stalled-reckoning-at-an-assassi...

Re: EA: The Human Story (2004)

#143

Post by 1ark »

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.

Not sure what your profession is, SE? Anyway, just creating the thousands of assets that go into a production takes a long time. Characters should be modeled, textured, rigged and animated; same as in a Pixar animation. It usually turns out to some ratio of artists per engineer. Games run on a single machine and in realtime, so you might need simplified versions of those before mentioned assets. Resources are limited, so there are engineers working on only rendering for example, ie. the end of the pipeline before an asset hits the screen. It is complicated and you have to catch up with whatever Nvidia puts out there for you to work with etc.

But we have not talked about how things should even work in a specific game yet. It could maybe be seen as glue, and you need a lot of it. All the thousands of rules that needs to be programmed and fit together. A physics engine only deals with physics. Even an AI engine is discrete. It needs to fit with the game in mind.

And what is the game in mind, is it fun? That whole process of creativity to figure that out also takes a lot of work and time. The game designer's job. Then the tweaking of values, how much damage should the attack of enemy B take?

It is an enormous art and engineering puzzle that is solved together from usually a pretty blank canvas.

Re: EA: The Human Story (2004)

#144

Post by ido »

AlbertCory wrote: post #65

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…

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.

Re: EA: The Human Story (2004)

#145

Post by ido »

Mockapapella wrote: post #141

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…

There are better ways to develop than crunch, but Minecraft is an outlier (literally the best selling game of all times https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_gam...) that shouldn’t be used as a replicable example.

Re: EA: The Human Story (2004)

#146

Post by ido »

justinhj wrote: post #64

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 facto…

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).

Re: EA: The Human Story (2004)

#147

Post by maccard »

elabajaba wrote: post #118
maccard wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Quite a few studios still crunch (eg. Naughty Dog and CD Projekt are some big ones), and a lot of studios that claim they don't crunch outsource their crunch (eg. Insomniac outsources to Lemon Sky Studios in Malaysia, and Lemon Sky is well known for both their crunch culture and for not paying overtime).

As I said in my previous comment:

> 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.

Of course there's exceptions.

Re: EA: The Human Story (2004)

#148

Post by chubot »

wanderingmoose wrote: post #32
chubot wrote: post #14

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 was part of both as well. 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…

Hm interesting, I didn't know of the effect on EALA. I was at EARS, but I had already left by the time the lawsuit was settled. The people were great but the structure of the industry was still messed up IMO

Re: EA: The Human Story (2004)

#149

Post by denimnerd42 »

djcannabiz wrote: post #28
denimnerd42 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can rip my cetyl alcohol based cleanser products from my cold dead hands..

i am definitely a bit of a hypocrite here- in most of my hair products there are ingredients that use palm oil as feedstock. I just try to avoid it in food products.

yeah when I researched what cetyl alcohol is it actually made me feel bad but what am I going to do... there's not an alternative that works for me

Re: EA: The Human Story (2004)

#150

Post by solardev »

IntelMiner wrote: post #136
solardev wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Lemon Sky is an outsourcing studio based in SouthEast Asia

I see, thanks. I take it EA mistreated them during the development of the re-released Command & Conquer? What happened?
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