[HN Gopher] EA: The Human Story (2004)
___________________________________________________________________
EA: The Human Story (2004)
Author : antiverse
Score : 160 points
Date : 2022-07-15 14:59 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ea-spouse.livejournal.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ea-spouse.livejournal.com)
| kache_ wrote:
| Vote with your feet
|
| Quit your job
|
| Seriously..
| chubot wrote:
| FWIW I was part of the class in the resulting class action
| lawsuit, and got a settlement check for about $30K in 2005
|
| I also got a ~$5K settlement check from Google around 2012 due to
| the illegal Steve Jobs - Eric Schmidt anti-poaching agreement,
| another class action lawsuit
| wanderingmoose wrote:
| I was part of both as well.
|
| I don't condone any of EA's behavior at the time, but the
| lawsuit benefited the lawyers way more than the artists and
| developers. I wish there was a resolution to the situation that
| allowed EALA to continue as a major studio. The talent there
| was amazing. Some of the blue sky projects that never made it
| to production were really interesting.
|
| Unfortunately -- lawyers got paid. EA made some rule/structure
| changes. And EALA lost most of its square footage to a 24 hour
| fitness. Makes me sad everytime I drive by.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| This post is from 2004.
| jolux wrote:
| Needs a (2004).
| spiderice wrote:
| I wondered why she was referencing games such as Madden 2005
| Beltalowda wrote:
| It was released two months before this post was made.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| I thought the decade-plus age would be obvious from the fact
| that it's a LiveJournal entry. :)
| probably_wrong wrote:
| And precisely because it's from 2004 there are plenty of
| developers who may be hearing this story for the first time.
|
| This story, perhaps more known as "EA Spouse", was eventually
| attributed to Erin Hoffman [1] and made quite a splash. It
| gained EA a bad reputation for excessive overtime that, AFAIK,
| they retain to this day. It's not the only reason why EA was
| named the "worse company in America" in 2012, but it was among
| them.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Hoffman
| m0llusk wrote:
| Disabling the back button on my browser limited my sympathies.
| egypturnash wrote:
| That's thanks to the many ways Livejournal has gone to shit in
| the eighteen years since this post was written - its creator
| sold it, it went through several owners, and ultimately ended
| up in Russian hands who have been slowly shitting it up in the
| many ways modern sites are garbage.
| dsr_ wrote:
| To a first approximation, everyone who didn't want to be part
| of LJ's practices moved to DreamWidth.
| pvg wrote:
| _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
| [deleted]
| 0x500x79 wrote:
| 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 keeping players happy (we need to deliver this by
| this date so you have to crunch). The hiring pool was primarily
| people that played the games we developed and there was some
| psychological warefare going on that attempted to prevent
| attrition based on building what you loved.
|
| The quote from the article is: > No one works in the game
| industry unless they love what they do.
|
| This is pretty true and can be very toxic in your "job". My
| advice: Don't love what you do for work THAT much. Keep a bit of
| a disconnect and live your life still. In the modern tech
| industry you can leave, you can find a job that treats you well,
| don't make your identity a "video game developer on X game"
| because that is a recipe for burnout.
|
| The issues that stemmed from this are impossible to outline.
| People made subpar decisions, dealt with inhumane conditions and
| harassment, took lower pay, and at the end of the day has caused
| REAL harm in the industry (suicides, trauma, etc). We need to be
| better and hold these companies accountable from every aspect of
| not buying games, not working there, and attempt to make the
| industry better.
|
| I left my stint at video games and went to a different company.
| The pay is better, the working conditions are better, my thoughts
| are not stifled because of internal politics.
|
| The industry has changed quite a bit since 2004. During that time
| publishers were key and many times deadlines were set by the next
| "drop" for the publisher, but many of the problems with the
| industry have stayed around and video games are not worth it.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| put another way, video games are addictive and people in the
| industry are not immune to addiction life paths
| peytoncasper wrote:
| 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.
| syntheweave wrote:
| I also spent time in the industry, and would agree. There are
| much better industries to work in to make a paycheck, and games
| can be sustainable if you approach them with an eye towards
| hobby-scale production. But 20-year-old me would probably still
| disagree because he lacked for ideas of how to approach a
| career. It is hard to see your options properly when you're
| starting out and most "helpful advice" from elders amounts to
| "I did this and it worked for me(in a completely different
| economy 30 years ago)" or "the good jobs are in X".
|
| Really, though. The people who do best in games tend to come in
| with a specific specialty skill that they enjoy and is
| transferrable, deploy it for a brief tour, then exit. Everyone
| tasked with arbitrary production-as-a-whole functions gets
| wrecked at some point. And it doesn't get better at indie
| scale, because accountability is even lower in a tiny studio,
| and the producers will tend to achieve results by repeatedly
| finding new people to do free work, gaslighting them and then
| tossing them aside when they stop delivering. And if it's a
| true go-it-alone, then you can end up self-imposing crunch when
| you sense the game isn't shaping up like it should, and it's
| easy to stay there indefinitely until you break because game
| scoping can get out of control so easily.
|
| Like, you can make indie stuff work. I know folks who have. But
| they have a _very_ tight grasp on the kind of thing they are
| aiming to achieve, and categorically aren 't doing "game
| productions" in the sense of spending most of the cycle
| fumbling around figuring out how to make the game and worrying
| about how to make characters successfully interact with doors.
| It's basically always a narrow genre entry like "Sokoban
| puzzle", and the dev specialized into doing only that genre so
| that more of their work and skillset transfers between
| projects. And you can do great work this way and truly achieve
| mastery over the subject matter because with such a narrow
| scope, the code and assets can be iterated over a ton, without
| much deadline stress. But "the industry" as a whole is
| blatantly against respecting that process since it's normalized
| stealing as much as possible from last year's trends and then
| pushing all remaining effort into a wider marketing funnel, and
| in doing so, creating a raft of challenging technical problems.
| So for as much sheer effort the industry puts in, most of it is
| wasted.
| [deleted]
| branon wrote:
| 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 become apparent to me only recently. I was aware,
| in a peripheral sense, that some singleplayer games required an
| Internet connection to run. But this never mattered to me because
| the pirates patch that stuff out.
|
| Lo and behold, I'm sitting in a hotel last night trying to play
| Mass Effect Legendary Edition, and the thing refuses to function
| because I'm not connected to the Internet. I was astounded. This
| has never happened to me before. Why am I subject to this as a
| customer? If I steal the game, I receive a product without this
| glaring defect (I believe the defect has a name: "Origin").
|
| Missteps and antipatterns like this are rife within the games
| publishing industry so it's no surprise that employees are
| treated even worse than customers.
|
| I must admit I do not understand the industry, but I don't see
| why competent studios like Blizzard/BioWare/Id could not simply
| self-publish their games. What exactly does EA add to the
| equation? Seems like it would not be a particularly monumental
| task to cut them out.
| snet0 wrote:
| 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 the US
| release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store,
| then the pirate's service is more valuable."
|
| I'd almost never pirate a game that was available on Steam.
| There are games I want to play that I don't see myself playing
| (unless I can be bothered to pirate), just because they're on
| some ugly, useless, slow, cumbersome and frankly worse-than-
| literally-nothing "launcher". I'd rather play a game through
| Steam than just through an executable, but I can't say the same
| for literally any other launcher/game service.
| goosedragons wrote:
| TBF Valve and Steam were IIRC the first or very close to
| first to have a game that required online activation (not
| including like MMOs) with Half-Life 2. Steam was incredibly
| frustrating for me as a kid stuck with dial up as the offline
| mode was tremendously broken and the install DVDs always
| fetched large portions (for dial-up anyways) of the game from
| some server. Plus you had to update games upon install even
| if you didn't want to which meant longer downloads.
| mouzogu wrote:
| Afaik only GOG sells games without DRM. I have bought
| EA/Ubishit games on Steam which when you open the game, it
| installs Origin/UbiWhatever and then run through them only.
| cruano wrote:
| Steam doesn't force you to be DRM-free like GOG, but they
| definitely do have DRM-free games. You can launch them from
| the .exe without internet or Steam installed, but it's up
| to the publisher
| nu11ptr wrote:
| +1 for GOG. I don't play games much anymore, but I still
| collect some of the older ones I enjoy on GOG knowing that
| there is no DRM. I tried steam and purchased a few games,
| but honestly I prefer to just have the game flat out
| without needing a "client" to get them, so while many
| people praise Steam... I'll pass.
| [deleted]
| dleslie wrote:
| A few years ago Steam began showing labeling on store pages
| for games that use third party DRM; and if you buy a game
| that has it and you did so unwittingly, then you can return
| it without issue provided you played less than two hours
| and you bought it within the last two weeks.
| karpierz wrote:
| This return policy is true regardless of whether it has
| DRM or whether you knew.
|
| You can return any Steam game, for any reason, provided
| you've played it fewer than two hours and purchased it
| within the last two weeks.
| sorry_outta_gas wrote:
| the refund policy is one of the reasons I buy games on
| steam first over other stores, I tend to buy a lot of
| games for whatever reason and end up refunding 5-6 a year
| for various reasons after playing under two hours
|
| Microsoft only allots you one or two a year or something
| which isn't enough considering how misleading game
| marketing is mixed with the prices
| georgeecollins wrote:
| 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.
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| >Lo and behold, I'm sitting in a hotel last night trying to
| play Mass Effect Legendary Edition, and the thing refuses to
| function because I'm not connected to the Internet. I was
| astounded. This has never happened to me before. Why am I
| subject to this as a customer? If I steal the game, I receive a
| product without this glaring defect (I believe the defect has a
| name: "Origin").
|
| And that's why I still haven't bought "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater
| 1+2" _two years later_.
| LocalH wrote:
| This is just a side effect of hypercapitalism at play. Aspects
| of capitalism aren't bad, but when capitalism is the _single
| biggest driving force of your society_ , things like this are
| bound to happen, because the endgame that gets rammed down
| everyone's throat is "making money is your life's purpose".
|
| These types of things have happened across how many industries
| at this point, historically? Practically _all_ of them.
| markdestouches wrote:
| Such issues are solved with proper regulation and effective
| antitrust laws. Unfortunately, if you lose the moment and
| allow the companies to gain enough power, it becomes
| incredibly difficult to push back against that. That's
| basically the state of things in the US
| whatshisface wrote:
| What's the alternative to capitalism, PBS but for video
| games?
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| 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
| whatshisface wrote:
| Gamepass would be cable for videogames, PBS for
| videogames would be a government agency that made them.
| dleslie wrote:
| The government of Canada funds the development of a fair
| amount of video games through the Canadian media fund.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Are the results of that fund designed for compulsion to a
| lesser degree than most games made with similar sized
| budgets?
| thewebcount wrote:
| 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...
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Game pass is more like the Netflix of gaming. Not all the
| content you want but at a reasonable price. Stuff gets
| removed a lot and there's lots of fragmentation with
| competing services.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >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.
|
| If you are buying games/software as used, do the original
| creators see a dime of that purchase or is it just as if you
| never did pay for it?
| Jenk wrote:
| 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?
| chucksmash wrote:
| > 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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
| mos_basik wrote:
| 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 "used" game; since
| about 2011 when i gained access to stable internet every
| game I've purchased has been a digital purchase from an
| official distributor or directly from the creators.
|
| There are other discussions to be had about whether
| digital purchases with online drm are truly purchases or
| rather subscriptions, and whether the cost of a AAA title
| should still be as high as it is given that you can't
| resell it the way you could when they were physical (and
| how inflation plays into things), etc, but those are out
| of scope here.
|
| And then there's unauthorized resellers like g2a. I'll
| admit I've bought from there in the past, but I stopped
| after reading a great breakdown of how these hurt game
| developers more than piracy. These are a little like the
| used market for digital (certainly the creators don't get
| any of the money changing hands). But there are
| differences - since usually, once a key is consumed to
| play a game, it can no longer be resold. I assume this
| affects the market to look quite different from, say,
| gamestop.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >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?
| babypuncher wrote:
| Mass Effect Legendary Edition should only require an internet
| connection the first time you run it on a new PC. After that it
| works offline.
| mattnewton wrote:
| > I must admit I do not understand the industry, but I don't
| see why competent studios like Blizzard/BioWare/Id could not
| simply self-publish their games. What exactly does EA add to
| the equation? Seems like it would not be a particularly
| monumental task to cut them out.
|
| I don't know what it's like at all for those larger studios,
| but for smaller studios EA will basically give all this
| infrastructure to you for free or even pay you to use it if you
| become a timed exclusive on their platform. I believe they are
| effectively in the market for buying origin installs to compete
| with steam.
| Thaxll wrote:
| > I must admit I do not understand the industry, but I don't
| see why competent studios like Blizzard/BioWare/Id could not
| simply self-publish their games. What exactly does EA add to
| the equation? Seems like it would not be a particularly
| monumental task to cut them out.
|
| Indeed you don't understand it because BioWare etc ... are just
| studio name it's all EA right. People at Bioware are EA
| employees they're not Bioware employees. btw EA purchased BW
| before ME2 even released so it has been 15years+.
|
| As for the rest EA is one of the best place to work for in the
| video game industry, they're pretty good with their employees (
| working hour, perks etc ... ).
|
| Regarding the legendary edition it's playable offline so I not
| sure what you're talking about.
| cupofpython wrote:
| >I don't see why competent studios like Blizzard/BioWare/Id
| could not simply self-publish their games
|
| related to this is how the games are managed once installed as
| well. Each studio is moving towards each having their own "Hub"
| for their games. Usually it is referred to as a "Launcher", but
| I dont think it is going to end there.
|
| For example, Blizzard has "Battle.net". You open battlenet, log
| in to battle net, and then select a game to play from your
| battlenet library.
|
| Games I used to be able to just launch from Steam, now open up
| a separate UI where I have to login and launch the game from
| there (Larion Studios).
|
| I imagine a future where I come home from work, login to my
| housing account, login to my computer, login to the 1 of 5+
| games marketplaces to access my purchased library, select the
| game i want to play, login to the publishers account, login to
| my game studio account, login to my game-specific user account,
| login to the 3rd party server running the game instance backend
| for my session, then download a 32gb update and not be able to
| play until tomorrow
| xmprt wrote:
| That's the "future" that we already have except things like
| OAuth and single sign on make that transparent to the user.
| dleslie wrote:
| That's not the future, that's basically now for any Ubisoft
| games.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Buy on gog instead :) They don't DRM.
| [deleted]
| djcannabiz wrote:
| at this point it feels like its immoral to not pirate AAA games.
| its kinda like buying products that contain palm oil. see
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_oil#Social_and_environmen...
| gameman144 wrote:
| I know that this wasn't the main point of your post, but palm
| oil production has actually become _substantially_ more
| defensible in the past decade (i.e. deforestation and worker
| exploitation are by _far_ the exception instead of the rule).
|
| All that to say that the moral thing to do might change with
| time.
| denimnerd42 wrote:
| you can rip my cetyl alcohol based cleanser products from my
| cold dead hands..
| djcannabiz wrote:
| i am definitely a bit of a hypocrite here- in most of my hair
| products there are ingredients that use palm oil as
| feedstock. I just try to avoid it in food products.
| [deleted]
| Jeaye wrote:
| (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 opinions, their flexibility around WFH, and how
| everyone is pleasant to work with make it very easy to talk about
| how nice it is to work at EA. On top of all of that, benefits and
| pay are competitive (especially benefits).
|
| EA's a big company, and I'm in EADP, which is an org that builds
| the back-end services for the games, rather than the games. But
| I've never been asked to work more than 8 hours in a day.
| Whenever I have chosen to work more, I've been specifically told
| by my manager or his that it's not required and that I can pick
| it up again tomorrow. They meant it.
|
| I read this post before joining EA and was somewhat concerned,
| but was told by people I trust that it no longer applies. From my
| perspective, they're absolutely right.
|
| As others mentioned, EA has undergone new leadership since this
| post was written. It was also nearly two decades ago. At this
| point, it's likely more of a good cautionary tale of how things
| can get than an accurate rendering of how things are.
| nhunter wrote:
| EADP is one of the central teams within the company. By far,
| they have a much better experience than any of the product
| teams (less OT, lower expectations, less funding). Product
| teams are responsible to deliver on timelines regardless of the
| support they can get centrally, so teams like EADP get more
| opportunity to push back, and that pushback turns into OT on
| the product teams.
|
| tl;dr: Central Team experience at EA is VASTLY different than
| being on a game team. It's great if you're on a central team at
| EA, but I'd never work on a game team if I enjoy seeing my
| family (plus EA pays at least 50% less than similar roles with
| skills that would still be needed outside of gaming)
| ironlake wrote:
| >I've been at EA for about 1.5 years now and have never enjoyed
| working somewhere as much as this.
|
| Her story is part of an ongoing labor movement. People
| dismissed it back in 2004, but it's led to change. The
| practices she describes used to be more common, especially in
| gaming companies.
|
| The change happened because of the labor movement. If you
| aren't ownership, then you are a worker and you should have
| solidarity with all the other workers.
| [deleted]
| karpierz wrote:
| I suspect that your experience comes from working at EA in a
| leadership capacity, whereas the toxicity complaints come from
| the front-line workers (IE, SWE, QA).
| drakonka wrote:
| I worked at EA for almost eight years as an SE individual
| contributor and it was honestly great. Don't get me wrong,
| the place had its issues, but from the perspective of my
| specific job, coworkers, work-life balance, benefits, etc, it
| was excellent and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it. But I
| think I really lucked out with my studio, line managers, and
| TDs. At such a huge company there will be a whole range of
| positive and negative experiences across locations and teams.
|
| Edit: there was definitely plenty of overtime though. Just
| wanted add this to make sure I didn't paint an overly
| idealistic picture despite my overall positive experience.
| babypuncher wrote:
| In the last decade EA has actually built a decent reputation
| as a good place for developers to work. The article posted
| above is from 2004. It was a pretty big scandal at the time,
| and it actually did lead to meaningful reforms at EA. EA has
| had their fair share of other scandals. Rushing unfinished
| products to market, sleazy monetization schemes, etc, but
| developer crunch is not one that has really come up in a long
| time.
| mehlmao wrote:
| > in the last decade
|
| So since Riccitiello left?
| highwaylights wrote:
| To clarify, EA changed solely _because_ of this post. It was a
| very dirty open secret that suddenly became incredibly public,
| and the backlash at that time was vociferous.
|
| Ultimately (unless I'm mistaken) EA was forced to pay back pay
| plus overtime and stopped all crunch for some time. There was a
| lot of talk of congressional regulation at that time if I
| remember correctly, too.
|
| From Wikipedia:
|
| "Hoffman's actions, in part, led to the filing of three class
| action lawsuits against EA and some changes throughout the
| industry at large, such as the reclassification of entry-level
| artists as hourly employees, thus making them eligible for
| overtime under California law.[8] Her fiance, EA employee
| Leander Hasty, was the main plaintiff in the successful class-
| action suit on behalf of software engineers at EA, which in
| 2007 awarded the plaintiffs $14.9 million for unpaid
| overtime.[9]"
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Hoffman
| droptablemain wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| NonNefarious wrote:
| On a tangent: Why does LiveJournal hijack the browser's Back
| button?
|
| That's scummy malware-site-style shit.
| [deleted]
| pvg wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32110743
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| This is fairly old. I have no idea whether or not it still
| applies.
|
| I have also found that discrete teams, within a company, can have
| radically different cultures.
|
| That said, game development has long been known as a "labor of
| love," with emphasis on " _labor_. "
|
| In the 1980s(!). I was recruited by Sierra Online. Even though I
| thought it would be cool, I consulted enough game developers to
| get talked out of it.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| Thought this was about Effective Altruism to start with! Would
| have been nice if this called out that it was from '04
| mysterydip wrote:
| "Press Reset" by Jason Schreier is a great look at the human side
| of the industry in general. The crunch, layoff, move to a new
| studio, repeat is all too common. EA was on a whole other level,
| though.
| TheWoodsy wrote:
| Anyone curious to find out their browser wants to talk to russia
| via 91.192.149.121 UDP port 3478?
| [deleted]
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _My [husband] works for Electronic Arts, I 'm ... a disgruntled
| spouse. (2004)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1454102 -
| June 2010 (105 comments)
| maximilianburke wrote:
| Good grief, this post is nearly old enough to vote.
|
| EA has changed a lot in those years, mostly for the better. I
| spent 13 years there from 2005-2018 and it was a great place to
| work; the people were great, the problems were interesting, and
| the hours were normal.
| kevinh wrote:
| This is being posted because people have their knives out for
| Unity at the moment, and this occurred while Riccitiello
| (current Unity CEO) was the CEO at EA.
| maximilianburke wrote:
| Yeah, I'm aware that Riccitiello was the CEO of EA; he was
| also the CEO of EA from 2007 until 2013, when a lot of the
| behavior that was called out in the EA Spouse essay was
| fixed.
| synu wrote:
| This was while John Riccitiello was running EA. I was there at
| the time and it was crazy how many people were being driven so
| hard. You may recognize his name now from the recent
| Unity/malware merger news, or maybe from calling developers who
| don't extract maximum value through microtransactions "fucking
| idiots."
| [deleted]
| ncr100 wrote:
| [the 'fucking idiots' discussion
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32097752]
| antiverse wrote:
| Yup, this ties into the recent happenings with Unity and
| ironSource.
| xbar wrote:
| He is why I never worked at EA.
| sascha_sl wrote:
| When I interviewed at a medium sized game studio, mostly known
| for their graphically impressive engine, I asked to have another
| offer (different industry) matched. The recruiters response was
| that they couldn't do it, but they know I'll still choose them
| "because making games is cool".
|
| Suffice to say I didn't take that offer. Studio tour was fun
| though.
| nu11ptr wrote:
| This should have a "(2004)" suffix on the title. I thought this
| was current and only accidently noticed the date later.
| [deleted]
| silentsea90 wrote:
| Great call out. I was confused why Madden 2005 was being
| referenced but it makes more sense (note: madden 2005 launched
| in 2004)
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| silentsea90 wrote:
| Why does game dev take so long? I assume most of the physics,
| game dynamics etc are standardized. Artwork, building a story,
| designing the game etc sure require work per game. I ask as a
| noob, not expressing an opinion at all.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| justinhj wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| AlbertCory wrote:
| 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
| shp0ngle wrote:
| please put (2004) in the title
| hvs wrote:
| 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.
| yelnatz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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).
| system16 wrote:
| 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.
| IntelMiner wrote:
| 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
| swivelmaster wrote:
| 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.
| pizzathyme wrote:
| Funny story: I know one of the engineers who was on this exact
| team being written about who was still at EA years later. I asked
| him why he didn't leave, and he said "I didn't really mind. I got
| a settlement from the lawsuit and bought a nice car. Then I went
| back to work."
| daveslash wrote:
| This was one of the posts selected for inclusion in Spolsky's _"
| The Best Software Writing"_, a book that I very much enjoyed and
| recommend.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Best-Software-Writing-Selected-Introd...
| barrysteve wrote:
| That ea_spouse post is best seen on the internet, to the OP's
| link. Why would we buy a book to read free internet posts?
| Isn't that going backwards?
|
| Also it's a bit crass to copy/paste someone's story of
| victimization, health-failing story of suffering, intro'd with
| some math about sweat-shop productivity and sell it as part of
| a random software article jambalaya for $9 a pop.
|
| What does selected for inclusion even mean? Joel saw this story
| explode back in 04 so he copy/pasted it into Notepad++ "for
| inclusion"? It's not like he's an art curator who does the work
| of sorting wheat from the chaff. Google and social media
| aggregators do most of the work on that for internet writing.
|
| Ugh, I guess it's enough hackernews for me, for a while.
| Everything is a product and even the "greats" like joel are
| trying to sell the pixels I saw last week, copy & pasted back
| to me in paper form. Virtue ain't in this post.
| dijit wrote:
| > Their devotion to D&I
|
| I worked for a competitor and this is single-handedly the most
| frustrating thing I had to deal with honestly.
|
| Not because it's not a noble objective, but because it was
| weaponised by a minority of people to control the studio in
| various ways, it was bullying in its purest form and extremely
| toxic - the environment felt really hostile, like saying
| something even moderately wrong would lead to an incursion.
| Saying anything against that behaviour meant you were somehow
| anti-feminist or misogynist or racist, even defending yourself.
| They were the arbiters of what D&I means and they can do no
| wrong.
|
| To give you an example of what I mean: during the start of the
| pandemic the managing director of the studio said "we don't know
| if this virus will be nothing, or the next Spanish flu, so we
| should take all necessary precaution in the worst case" - he was
| dragged publicly by our internal D&I delegation about the sheer
| racism of saying "Spanish" flu.
|
| So, I treat _strong_ D &I initiatives as a red flag, personally.
|
| But I agree that EA is considered one of the better employers in
| the industry, even if the games are aggressively monetised, it
| seems that they try to take care of employees.
| dang wrote:
| (We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32109896.)
| sangnoir wrote:
| To be purely pedantic: Spanish flu was only called that because
| Spain was the only large country reporting accurate infections
| and deaths. It ought to have been named American flu, since
| that's were it originated, but the US was intentionally
| underreporting (war time rules and all).
| dijit wrote:
| Yeah. That's the history, and widely understood. At least in
| Europe (incl. UK)
|
| Only a fool would think that it was because the Spanish we're
| dirty or adversely affected.
| _gabe_ wrote:
| > but because it was weaponised by a minority of people to
| control the studio in various ways
|
| I've also run into this. It can quite literally feel like I'm
| walking on eggshells. And it's not because I'm deeply racist or
| misogynistic (at least I think I'm not and I sure hope I'm
| not), but I literally just cannot voice any of my concern or
| dissent for any of my company's politically motivated
| initiatives. I would prefer my workplace to be devoid of
| political topics, and focused on meeting the business
| objectives, but that's not the reality.
|
| So I agree. I also treat strong D&I initiatives as a red flag.
| I don't care what people's race, ethnicity, gender, or
| ideologies are. If you can do your job well and be a generally
| (we all have bad days) pleasant coworker, then awesome. If you
| act like a jerk, that's just acting like a jerk regardless of
| any immutable characteristics.
| mywittyname wrote:
| > even if the games are aggressively monetised, it seems that
| they try to take care of employees.
|
| These are probably related attributes. It's hard to take care
| of your employees when your company is operating game paycheck
| to game paycheck.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| > So, I treat strong D&I initiatives as a red flag, personally.
|
| Based off the general vibe of your comment, those companies
| don't want you. D&I driving away people who are made
| uncomfortable by D&I _is working exactly as designed._
|
| Somehow I have managed to be employed at a number of companies
| for decades without once been in fear about being bullied by
| false accusations of being misogynistic or racist. I've never
| seen another white person bullied under the pretense of having
| been racist or misogynistic.
|
| I have, however, seen blatantly homophobic and racist behavior
| - some of it violent (in a professional workplace) and seen it
| covered up by management.
|
| My guess is that you don't see 'light' racist, misogynistic, or
| homophobic behavior as problematic - "can't make a joke these
| days" - and therefore see the people who are disciplined for
| such behavior as "bullied."
| dijit wrote:
| Everything is contextual, there probably is racism in my
| company, somewhere. Calling it out when seen is something
| that has been pretty normal in my professional life.
|
| Maybe it's because my first CIO was gay, or that I was
| working in a metrosexual community.
|
| Same with racism, I grew up shoulder to shoulder with south
| Asians and black people because that's just how life is when
| you live in a multicultural society and they haven't been
| adequately scapegoated.
|
| I can't convince you that you're wrong about this, because
| you're not in most circumstances; but good people, in my
| experience, do not do nothing in the face of bigotry in the
| workplace.
|
| The difference, however, is that there is an _unmitigated_
| independent group who have decided what utopia means and can
| not care about the means to their end.
|
| The unfortunate situation I'm in is that I support their
| cause, but they're bringing the movement down.
|
| Addendum: you're also subtly implying the MD was somehow
| guilty of being against D&I, as he was dragged publicly,
| despite _literally spearheading_ these initiatives and
| winning many awards for his work in promoting D &I in the
| industry and independently in the region. I find that kind of
| a reach honestly.
| Mezzie wrote:
| The problem with D&I initiatives is that, ironically, they end
| up spearheaded by extremely privileged people. Those people
| usually have one (or MAYBE 2) main axis/axes of marginalization
| (see: upper-middle class/well off white trans women, rich
| straight POC, etc.). They then proceed to speak for every
| member of group X and/or declare that their problems are the
| only ones that matter.
|
| The other problem is that such initiatives are naturally going
| to tend towards rewarding/biasing towards visible and apparent
| differences. (Which is why race, sex, and gender take so much
| center stage). "Diversity" basically only means 'diversity we
| can see'/skindeep diversity.
| ldlddldljsne wrote:
| ldkdjdosk wrote:
| [deleted]
| kmeisthax wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| zac23or wrote:
| The gaming industry is weird. The industry "forces you" to use
| pirated games.
|
| 1. I have a PS3, and I tried to use the Playstation Store, I
| didn't pirate anything, despite the PS3 Store being slow as hell.
| But Sony basically closed the PS3 Store (you have to put money in
| your wallet on your computer and make purchases on your PS3).
| This makes the purchase a much more complex act. I will sell the
| PS3 or unlock it.
|
| 2. Mobile gaming today is gambling, focusing on sick people,
| addicts, and you're "an idiot" if you don't do this.
|
| 3. To buy 100% of some games, you need thousands of dollars.
|
| 4. Many important fixes are from the community such as Resident
| Evil Crack which fixes stuttering or slow GTA JSON parser.
|
| Look, if GTA or Resident Evil isn't important enough for the
| industry to be careful about... the industry is broken in the
| roots.
|
| In the end, pirated games are better than most legally purchased
| games.
| [deleted]
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