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EA: The Human Story (2004)

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Re: EA: The Human Story (2004)

#61

Post by yelnatz »

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 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.

Re: EA: The Human Story (2004)

#62

Post by AshamedCaptain »

> 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.

Re: EA: The Human Story (2004)

#63

Post by dylan604 »

chucksmash wrote: post #56
Jenk wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't say used. Also that is such reductive argument. When I sell my furniture to someone else am I supposed to pity the carpenters and whatnot? How about when I sell my house, should the developers who built it get a cut?

> How about when I sell my house, should the developers who built it get a cut? Only a matter of time? Some NFTs used this as (an additional) money grab - every time the NFT is resold, N% of the purchase price goes to devs - so the idea is definitely out there in other forms today.

Book publishers were hot on this too some time back expecting used book stores to kick back up the chain. It came around again with eBooks. It's definitely not a new thought to be sure.

Re: EA: The Human Story (2004)

#64

Post by justinhj »

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.

Re: EA: The Human Story (2004)

#65

Post by AlbertCory »

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?

[1] https://www.albertcory.io/the-big-bucks

Re: EA: The Human Story (2004)

#66

Post by system16 »

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 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.

Re: EA: The Human Story (2004)

#68

Post by thewebcount »

whatshisface wrote: post #29
thatguy0900 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

would gamepass be the closest to that? The other alternative would be games being small indie projects or huge community things. The mods people release for free are sometimes pretty insane in scope, even if Noone ever paid for a game again we'd still get some decent games at least

Gamepass would be cable for videogames, PBS for videogames would be a government agency that made them.

PBS is not a government agency. According to [0] they get about 13% of their budget from the federal government and 5% from state governments. So less than 20% of their funding is from the government.

[0] https://www.quora.com/How-much-support-does-the-U-S-governme...

Re: EA: The Human Story (2004)

#69

Post by kmeisthax »

This is from 2004, and we know so much more about the games industry that stories of overworked QA testers and programmers seem utterly quaint. Every company in the business[0] is run by a yet-to-be-convicted sex offender or enabler of such. Activision is currently involved in one of the biggest equal-opportunity lawsuits in history, which is only eclipsed by the legal fight between US EEOC and California DFEH[1] over who gets to prosecute them and how far they should go in doing so.

At the time I assumed that this behavior was enabled by a high churn rate - i.e. companies hiring junior developers unaware of the awful practices of the games industry and wearing them down until they left. However, this turned out to be naive. That's the Amazon approach - and Amazon is actually going to start running out of people to churn through soon. The games industry hasn't.

What I can only assume now is that the games industry does not churn through developers as much as they mould them into paragons of toxicity. Anyone who does churn out is just a normal human being, and those who stay are either already toxic or get moulded by the system into being as such.

[0] Nintendo is an interesting case. Management has actually been pretty opposed to crunch time and confident in delaying games until they're ready. However, there has been reports of overworked contractors from time to time. No reports of sexual harassment, yet.

[1] At one point California tried to file an intervening motion on the US EEOC's settlement agreement, and the US EEOC responded by alleging conflicts-of-interest that would have dynamited both parties' cases.

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