Just this weekend I had a dinner with a friend of mine who works for (a Canadian office of) EA. I mentioned this exact blogpost and he said he read it. And then he added that nothing had changed.
Overtime is factored into the development plan from the very beginning, and the overtime period typically starts 6 months before the project deadline. They will compensate with an occasional day off and the work schedule will be lax after the release, but people are really squeezed out before that.
I guess it must be working for them business-wise, but it's had a pretty negative effect on retaining even top talent, who also feel burned out by the constant crunch times / ridiculous overtime / etc. I mean Will Wright can probably do whatever he wants, but basically anyone who isn't him seems to feel harried. I've talked to designers at conferences who got dragged back from the middle of a conference where they were actually presenting because of some "emergency" or "crunch". I mean sure, sometimes there are emergencies and crunches, but EA seems to use them constantly as a normal development process (if your company's having 20 emergencies a year, either it's crashing and burning, or you misdefined "emergency").
Most people don't like to burn bridges and go public with why they left, but if you look at top designers, programmers, etc. at EA over the past 10 years, a large number have left, and often without even having new jobs lined up--- basically went indie or went to start consulting firms rather than continue under those working conditions.
I'd been wondering. EA claimed they were cleaning stuff up, if I remember right, but I never really heard much follow-up on whether the game industry (and EA in particular) had improved. Thanks for telling.
The thing I can't understand is that this goes against almost every productivity study I've come across. Most productivity articles I've read seem to state that yes, you can productivity work more than 40 hours but only for a few weeks. After that time, you start getting burned out and the gain in productivity starts to nosedive until it is worse than if you just worked normal hours.
Is there something I'm missing? Is there an actual business benefit for having people work all the time?
If you're an incompetent manager looking for a way to advance, then you WANT people working overtime. It means to your (incompetent) superiors that you are a good leader, and that you need more people, which means more responsibility, and therefore a raise -- if not where you are now, then at your next job (I managed a team of 40 poeple!).
Keep in mind your friend is at one studio of many under the EA umbrella. Just like the entire game industry, some studios are a mess. Unfortunately (and probably unfairly) EA takes the brunt of the bad PR.
However, EA and most other studios industry wide have taken great strides to improve the treatment of employees since the EA Spouse ordeal. There will probably forever remain bad/overworked studios, but I see plenty of those outside of the game industry as well in environments even less enjoyable/creative/fun.
It's quite possible it's improved, but it seems there's still a culture of: developing this game will be your life. Almost every single acceptance speech at this year's Game Developer's Choice awards involved the team thanking their family for their understanding / apologizing for not being around for the past 6 months / etc. After hearing that over and over from the acceptance speeches in succession, it gave a pretty strong impression of the industry still being a pretty oppressive place to work.
(The IGF segment, for indie-game awards, seemed to involve much happier devs, except that many thanked their families for indulging their unfunded, nonsalaried quest.)
And I don't think the apologizing to families and stupid hours will ever completely go away because working in games for many is a big part of their life/identify/pride for better or worse. Given 1 year or infinite years, some people will choose to make their current project their life. Just as many choose to make their startup/band/sport/passion their life.
The only problem comes when the studios, like EA Spouse, get abusive and ridiculous due to incompetent management. However, over the last 5 years of being tangentially and directly involved in games, I see this happening less and less.
There is no "works directly for EA" unless you're a high-level executive or possibly marketing (not sure on that one). EA is split into studios and cross-studio departments, each with very different cultures.
EA was once well-known for acquiring companies and then assimilating them into the EA machine, often with disastrous results. In the years since my studio was acquired, it's been entirely different, with the executives having a hands-off-by-default position, only intervening when there's trouble of one sort or another. While EA HR takes standard of living issues seriously, each studio is given a lot of latitude in how they manage projects and employees. One place that the organization as a whole did improve thing was moving the bulk of the employees (at least all entry-level ones) over to hourly wages, so the company has to pay overtime.
In my experience, EA's not bad about overtime and such, but I can't speak for every studio, and neither can your friend.
> There is no "works directly for EA" unless you're a high-level executive or possibly marketing (not sure on that one). EA is split into studios and cross-studio departments, each with very different cultures.
If you're working at one of the newly acquired studios like Bioware, that's probably true. The older studios like EAC in Burnaby or EARS are so close to the EA corporate that it's hard to say that his friend doesn't "work directly for EA".
> In my experience, EA's not bad about overtime and such, but I can't speak for every studio, and neither can your friend
> If you're working at one of the newly acquired studios like Bioware, that's probably true. The older studios like EAC in Burnaby or EARS are so close to the EA corporate that it's hard to say that his friend doesn't "work directly for EA".
But the whole point is that EA is made up of many studios, not all of which share a monolithic culture. If you want to argue EARS and EAC have a similar culture, that's fine, but it still doesn't mean that the majority of us share it.
Overtime is factored into the development plan from the very beginning, and the overtime period typically starts 6 months before the project deadline. They will compensate with an occasional day off and the work schedule will be lax after the release, but people are really squeezed out before that.