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Author Topic: The professional game developer slavery by EA  (Read 5636 times)

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McCoy

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The professional game developer slavery by EA
« on: November 14, 2004, 03:06:31 AM »

Look at this blog article, written by a spouse of an EA employee. It tells how employees are caged in the office for 90 hours a week with no compesation pays, or extra free time, or anything.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/ea_spouse/274.html

And by the comments, it seems it's same in a lot of ther big game companies (Atari for example). I don't know what to think... I really want to become a professional game developer someday, but if the working conditions are this crap... I don't know. I knew it involves a lot of work and dedication and passion (wich I think I have), and time expent at the office, but not THAT much, that's inhuman. I'm thinking that maybe the indie game developing is the way to go  ??? a lot of doubts are rising upon me.

But it seems the employees are taking back:

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2004/11/11/news_6112998.html

Let's see what's the result... I'm really expecting about it.
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Jerrot

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Re: The professional game developer slavery by EA
« Reply #1 on: November 14, 2004, 01:47:25 PM »

It tells how employees are caged in the office for 90 hours a week with no compesation pays, or extra free time, or anything.

Compensation pays ? Extra free time ? Bwahaha. Ha. Hm...

I really want to become a professional game developer someday, but if the working conditions are this crap... I don't know.

Welcome to the world of IT professionals then. I'm not surprised about those conditions at all, only 90 hours seems to be a little exaggerated to me, although I had some of those weeks. And now think of "harmless" software cracks and copies again...  :-\
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Re: The professional game developer slavery by EA
« Reply #2 on: November 14, 2004, 06:19:50 PM »

I don't think that conditions like that are usual, even in the game industry. Sure, you have to work more than in other branches, but 90 hours per week over a long time are just insane. Plus, it lowers the quality of your work a lot. When we have to do a lot overtime in our company, for example before Cebit-time, you can see that the number of bugs rising quickly after one or two weeks - and soon you come to point where you have to spent a lot of your normal working time to correct the bugs you invented during overtime the day before. Implementing a cool new feature at 1 o clock in the night isn't the best idea you can have :-)

If companys force their employees to work that much, they seem to have serious organisational problems.
 

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