[hvs]

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.

[swivelmaster]

Some places are still like this. EA is not. I worked at a company that was acquired by EA in late 2011 and stayed until 2016. Post-acquisition, EA's HR folks made sure that a whole bunch of the studio's staff were properly classified (salary vs. hourly) and that the studio was following proper procedure regarding timecards and overtime. The studio also hired on some senior staff to deal with operations and production practices.

There were still some bad times - politics outside of the studio forced staff into some do-or-die milestones that required crunching for a week or two at a time, but nothing like the kind of sustained months-to-years crunch I've heard about in other places.

The funny thing about EA is that even though it has such a bad rap for making big mistakes in the past, they made them FIRST and have managed to learn. A lot of other major publishers that grew to comparable size more recently are still making them.

[system16]

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.

[thematrixturtle]

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

[IntelMiner]

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

[solardev]

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

[IntelMiner]

Lemon Sky is an outsourcing studio based in SouthEast Asia

[solardev]

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

[IntelMiner]

4:45 talks specifically about Lemon Sky

[yelnatz]

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.

[maccard]

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, but 8ts not this!

[elabajaba]

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).

[maccard]

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.

[Tiktaalik]

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).