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Not my experience of working at EA for four years. There is a copyright assignment clause in the employment contract, and as unfortunate as that is, it is fairl
by SeanBoocock 8y ago
Not my experience of working at EA for four years. There is a copyright assignment clause in the employment contract, and as unfortunate as that is, it is fairly common across the software industry. There was an internal process by which EA legal would clear personal projects, for which you would then have the copyright, but I never availed myself of it.
As to crunch most teams I worked for at EA did not crunch in the sense you're suggesting. There was widespread recognition within the company that long term crunch was both deleterious to productivity and morale. Studios were increasingly adopting a system called "focus mode" - a short period of focused work towards a specific goal (milestone/demo/etc) where non-essential meetings were cancelled, lunch catered, and distractions eliminated - which purported to produce better results without more than standard hours.
Studios at EA are fairly free to operate autonomously and they each have different cultures. Some were slower to adopt better practices around crunch, and even within the same team some disciplines would often crunch while others worked normal hours. Still, there was recognition of what better looked like in terms of production and will at all levels to make it happen. Not what I would call an "inherently abusive company".
- Kurtz79 8y agoEA has a history of acquiring previously very successful, well-loved game studios and running them to the ground. After acquisiton, key people start leaving the studio, games released end up being rushed/crappy, and in the end they are closed. Bullfrog, Maxis, Westwood, Origin to cite the more known ones, too many to be a coincidence. As of now, I wouldn't be sitting comfortably if I were working at Bioware .
- Thaxll 8y agoMost studios killed themself by releasing crapy games tbh. Do you think it's the interest of EA acquiring studios and shutting them down? Take for example BioWare, they were acquired 3 years before their best game release: ME2 then they released ME3 an other excellent game then ...
- SeanBoocock 8y agoI worked at Bioware. I worked directly with people who worked previously for Bullfrog, Westwood, and Origin through the EA acquisitions. I also know people who work(ed) at Maxis. The narrative around EA's acquisitions is a gross mischaracterization. Each acquisition and its eventual outcome had a number of confounding factors. In many cases the studios were acquired because they were in financial straits and wouldn't have survived otherwise. Key people leaving after an acquisition isn't surprising: your studio was acquired because it made X type of game or franchise and maybe you don't want to continue doing that; your retention stock vested, time to try something new; you're entrepreneurial at heart and want to start a studio again after a (successful) exit. Maxis and Westwood (EA LA) went on to make their most successful titles and decade plus runs as EA studios. Likewise DICE, Bioware, Tiburon, Pogo.com and several mobile studios.