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EA: The Human Story (2004)

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Re: EA: The Human Story (2004)

#91

Post by georgeecollins »

snet0 wrote: post #27
branon wrote: post #3

EA perpetuates practices that hurt customers, too. I used to unapologetically pirate video games and only within the past two years have I finally come full circle and begun purchasing games, both new titles and older ones I had played in the past but never paid for until now. Steam has been the tool of choice for this reconciliation process. As a result, some of the hardships that paying customers encounter have bec…

This reminds me of something Gabe Newell famously said about Steam. > "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after t…

Steam has DRM, the Apple Store has DRM and other services like GoG don't. Where do game developers put their games? The places with DRM.

Unpopular opinion, down votes incoming: Just because you don't like the way a company chooses to distribute software doesn't make piracy right or justified.

Re: EA: The Human Story (2004)

#92

Post by droptablemain »

Under capitalism, the nature of the relationship between productive employees and the employer is exploitative (while simultaneously being mutually beneficial). It is in the employer's interest to extract as much surplus value from the employee as possible.

"Consider the human"-type messages do not appeal to CEOs, and if they did, he would ultimately be replaced because dehumanization is baked into the core of the system.

Re: EA: The Human Story (2004)

#93

Post by peytoncasper »

mistrial9 wrote: post #49
0x500x79 wrote: post #40

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 kee…

put another way, video games are addictive and people in the industry are not immune to addiction life paths

I disagree with your interpretation of OP's comment. Sure you can argue that playing a video game can be addictive to some people. But game developers are not getting addicted to playing the games they make.

Creating a video game is probably as close as you can get in the software space to art. It's the culmination of hundreds of different skills into a single package that has the off chance to shift and affect culture across the globe. Its exciting, and has the potential to fill someone who works on it with an intense amount of pride. That, in my opinion is not addiction.

Unless you consider artists, musicians, designers, actors and hundreds of others who work in purely creative mediums, addicts.

There is a lot to be proud of by shipping something that is used by hundreds of thousands if not millions of people and especially more so if it makes people happy. It's that intangible feeling of creating and seeing it successful that keeps people working in the video game industry despite the very obvious downsides.

For a lot of people, it's attempting to create something for players that fills them with as much emotion as they once experienced playing another game.

Re: EA: The Human Story (2004)

#94

Post by [deleted] »

droptablemain wrote: post #92

Under capitalism, the nature of the relationship between productive employees and the employer is exploitative (while simultaneously being mutually beneficial). It is in the employer's interest to extract as much surplus value from the employee as possible. "Consider the human"-type messages do not appeal to CEOs, and if they did, he would ultimately be replaced because dehumanization is baked into the core of the sy…

[deleted]

Re: EA: The Human Story (2004)

#96

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: EA: The Human Story (2004)

#97

Post by pvg »

m0llusk wrote: post #15

Disabling the back button on my browser limited my sympathies.

Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: EA: The Human Story (2004)

#98

Post by dylan604 »

mos_basik wrote: post #90
dylan604 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I guess it reads like that's what I was implying. I was just asking if original creators get a cut of the used price. I had seen discussions around that before, but didn't know if it ever became a thing or not. Just a simple question. Wasn't trying to be reductive and did not mean to piss in your cheerios this mornign

Op didn't say "new and used"; they said "new and older". Since the context is that of piracy, I think it's most likely that op wasn't saying he used to buy bootleg physical DVDs for a console, but rather that they used to download executables for a personal computer. If so, I've also come around to buying games in about the same manner as OP describes. Your question sounds odd to me, because I've never purchased a "u…

>Your question sounds odd to me,

Really? GameStop and other extinct companies made an entire business model of selling your used games to them and then selling those at cheaper prices to new customers. That sounds odd to you?

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