BigKid.com.au

It was bound to happen though. With so much of the gaming industry employees accepting and willingly ‘crunching’ to get their games as good as they can and onto the market, it’s only a natural progression when a major company (or corporation?) will come to expect this as natural practice on all of their projects. But that ‘crunching’ is different, what this person is describing is just plain slavery, especially without overtime or comp time (time in leiu). Does the Gaming Industry even have unions? If not, I think it’s a serious consideration if this journal is any indication.

And to think, EA has just announced reduced prices for their EA Sports series… now we know how they are cutting costs.

This is really just a direct consequence of the industry’s money and profit-centric view now. There are so many evils, big and small, that the corporatization of the games industry brings - the greatest of which is the effect on the games themselves. Money is a lousy bottom line in creative industries (nothing wrong with making it, it’s just a destructive final arbiter). The people who are profiting from games now couldn’t give a rats ass about the games, or the people who make and play them.

Thankfully this sort of exploitation is coming to light and hopefully there will be change. It’s up to the people who work in the industry to bring that change about, however. It’s not going to happen by default. EG. Agreeing to work crazy hours and expecting the same of your coworkers is part of the pathology of exploitation that has been cultivated by publishers.

Here’s another good post by a former EA employee…

LINK

Normally I would never post anonymousely but thers a 1st for everything.

The overtime isn’t even the biggest problem for me, its the lies told by management to the rest of the team. There is simply no excuse for these bare faced lies that are told to professional workers, children at playgroup are treated with more honesty and respect

The other thing about it that just makes me scream is that anyone with half a brain can see that practices like this reduce rather than increase productivity. A happy, well treated and well paid team will always produce better quality titles on time. I agree with Ken though that this isn’t going to stop untill people refuse to be exploited and refuse to follow the example of the martyr’s who will work crazy hours as some kind of stupid macho challenge.

Some kind of usnion would be an awesome idea, but I think we are all too lazy :)

Heres looking forward to a golden age of sanity in the games industry, its coming to a head now, change will hopefully be forced to follow.

Thanks for the link, but I wanted to point out that I was not a manager for EA. I was a free-lance developer and a employed technical director. I managed for other software companies, including Adobe.

As Bill Volk (former VP, Activision) pointed out in a comment at my site, the problem is one of preferring the appearance of working hard to the reality of working. Apparently so long as it looks like people are busting ass, that’s all that counts. The fact that it’s getting less done to work those kinds of hours is immaterial to EA management.

I have to post anonymously as well, just for my own peace of mind.. but yeah, I know of a place that works a lot like “the appearence of busy is more important than the work produced”..

It got a lot better the last project I worked on, because my lead got sick of that attitude and only asked us to work when really needed it, which I was happy to do..

The first year I worked at this company, overtime was something I wanted to do, to get the game finished on time.. it wasn’t continuously required, just a few late nights (or a few in a row) around crunch time. But then crunch time started expanding into “always in crunchtime. There’s a milestone we have to meet that was just made up on the spot, and so you’ll all have to work extra hours”… which got a bit frustrating these past few months, to say the least.

But with the slowly changing attitudes of some of the management, and my lead.. I think things will be better this project. We’ll see I guess =)

The bag has been opened

follow up ariticle created in light of the EA_Spouse Article

http://www.livejournal.com/users/joestraitiff/

This type of bullshit is illegal and we should all bash the shit out of Producers and HR people who think this was is correct.

your violent little coder
Rak

so who’s the worst in Australia?