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EA: The Human Story (2004)
- m0llusk 4y agoDisabling the back button on my browser limited my sympathies.
- egypturnash 4y agoThat'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_ 4y agoTo a first approximation, everyone who didn't want to be part of LJ's practices moved to DreamWidth.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pvg 4y agoPlease 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- jolux 4y agoNeeds a (2004).
- spiderice 4y agoI wondered why she was referencing games such as Madden 2005
- Beltalowda 4y agoIt was released two months before this post was made.
- AdmiralAsshat 4y agoI thought the decade-plus age would be obvious from the fact that it's a LiveJournal entry. :)
- probably_wrong 4y agoAnd 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Hoffman
- branon 4y agoEA 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.
- LocalH 4y agoThis 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.
- whatshisface 4y agoWhat's the alternative to capitalism, PBS but for video games?
- thatguy0900 4y agowould 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
- atlasunshrugged 4y agoThought this was about Effective Altruism to start with! Would have been nice if this called out that it was from '04
- synu 4y agoThis 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.”
- hvs 4y agoThis 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.
- maccard 4y agoThings 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 4y agoQuite 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).
- maccard 4y agoAs I said in my previous comment: > 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. Of course there's exceptions.
- swivelmaster 4y agoSome 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.
- kache_ 4y agoVote with your feet Quit your job Seriously..
- chubot 4y agoFWIW 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 4y agoI 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.
- chubot 4y agoHm interesting, I didn't know of the effect on EALA. I was at EARS, but I had already left by the time the lawsuit was settled. The people were great but the structure of the industry was still messed up IMO
- djcannabiz 4y agoat 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_environmental_impacts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_oil#Social_and_environmen...
- denimnerd42 4y agoyou can rip my cetyl alcohol based cleanser products from my cold dead hands..
- djcannabiz 4y agoi 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.
- denimnerd42 4y agoyeah when I researched what cetyl alcohol is it actually made me feel bad but what am I going to do... there's not an alternative that works for me
- gameman144 4y agoI 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.
- mysterydip 4y ago"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.
- 0x500x79 4y agoI 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 4y agoput another way, video games are addictive and people in the industry are not immune to addiction life paths
- peytoncasper 4y agoI 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.
- Jeaye 4y ago(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.
- karpierz 4y agoI 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 4y agoI 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.
- NonNefarious 4y ago
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- pvg 4y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32110743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32110743
- NonNefarious 4y ago
- pvg 4y agoAnd please don't write these comments like the guidelines ask. And they remain offtopic, and that is also mentioned in these guidelines. And you can find them here and you should read them if you haven't had a chance! https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- NonNefarious 4y ago
- maximilianburke 4y agoGood 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 4y agoThis 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 4y agoYeah, 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.
- hoot 4y agoThe article mentions that Larry Probst was ceo at the time fwiw.
- sascha_sl 4y agoWhen 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.
- daveslash 4y agoThis 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-Introduced/dp/1590595009 https://www.amazon.com/Best-Software-Writing-Selected-Introd...
- barrysteve 4y agoThat 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.
- AshamedCaptain 4y ago> 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.
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- shp0ngle 4y agoplease put (2004) in the title
- justinhj 4y agoI 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.
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- ido 4y agoDisclaimer: I now run my own studio but I worked as an employee not that long ago and have been working in games for almost 13 years now. It really depends on the role. Programmers and producers are the best paid disciplines. And while there’s a lot of junior people competing for entry level jobs it’s hard to find senior talent. As a specialist programmer with 10+ years of experience you’ll have very good job security and will be better compensated than most anyone aside from maybe upper management (you’d still get better pay at Google, Facebook or Microsoft though).
- AlbertCory 4y agoI 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 https://www.albertcory.io/the-big-bucks
- ido 4y agoThe game industry changed a lot since 1984 (almost 40 years ago!) and EA went through multiple changes in leadership in the meanwhile. There’s probably not a single person you know from that time still working there. All the big studios/publishers (including those with very deep pockets from parent companies like Microsoft Studios) bought a lot of dev studios for vertical integration. Almost all of EA’s studios were companies they bought rather than founded themselves.
- kmeisthax 4y agoThis 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 4y ago[deleted]
- shadowgovt 4y agoThis post is from 2004.
- nu11ptr 4y agoThis should have a "(2004)" suffix on the title. I thought this was current and only accidently noticed the date later.
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- silentsea90 4y agoGreat call out. I was confused why Madden 2005 was being referenced but it makes more sense (note: madden 2005 launched in 2004)
- silentsea90 4y agoWhy 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.
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- Tiktaalik 4y agoIt's not standardized or if it arguably is, only in the last couple of years since Unreal and Unity took over, and even then, many will say that Unreal is only really saving you heaps of time if you're making a FPS/3rd person game and if you're doing anything else you're swimming against the current. Then of course every few years the platforms change and that throws a wrench in the works. Things take so long because so often everything is built from scratch and got to the point where it just barely works for ship, and then ship happens, everyone moves on (teams break up!), and the bespoke tech hyper narrowly optimized for the specific game is unusable for anything else.
- 1ark 4y agoNot sure what your profession is, SE? Anyway, just creating the thousands of assets that go into a production takes a long time. Characters should be modeled, textured, rigged and animated; same as in a Pixar animation. It usually turns out to some ratio of artists per engineer. Games run on a single machine and in realtime, so you might need simplified versions of those before mentioned assets. Resources are limited, so there are engineers working on only rendering for example, ie. the end of the pipeline before an asset hits the screen. It is complicated and you have to catch up with whatever Nvidia puts out there for you to work with etc. But we have not talked about how things should even work in a specific game yet. It could maybe be seen as glue, and you need a lot of it. All the thousands of rules that needs to be programmed and fit together. A physics engine only deals with physics. Even an AI engine is discrete. It needs to fit with the game in mind. And what is the game in mind, is it fun? That whole process of creativity to figure that out also takes a lot of work and time. The game designer's job. Then the tweaking of values, how much damage should the attack of enemy B take? It is an enormous art and engineering puzzle that is solved together from usually a pretty blank canvas.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dijit 4y ago> 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.
- sangnoir 4y agoTo 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 4y agoYeah. 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.
- sangnoir 4y agoNationality-based idioms and names (and stereotypes in general) are on a subjective spectrum of offensiveness, IMO. "Irish exit" and "French disease" can be benign to one individual, but offensive to another.
- zac23or 4y agoThe 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.
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- droptablemain 4y agoUnder 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.
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- TheWoodsy 4y agoAnyone curious to find out their browser wants to talk to russia via 91.192.149.121 UDP port 3478?
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- pizzathyme 4y agoFunny 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.”
- dang 4y agoRelated: My [husband] works for Electronic Arts, I'm ... a disgruntled spouse. (2004) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1454102 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1454102 - June 2010 (105 comments)
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoThis 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.
- wly_cdgr 4y agoDoubt much has changed in the industry as a whole, although maybe the identity of the worst offenders has shifted around as the shame spotlight has moved around over the years.
- Tiktaalik 4y agoI chat with people at EA Canada from time to time and the impression I get is that it's a very good place to work (the people always try to lure you there!) with none of the sort of brutal overtime issues expressed. It's commendable that EA would have steered the ship around from 2004 and ended these awful practices.
- Mockapapella 4y agoI used to work with a very experienced SE (something like 20+ years) who worked at EA a little after this article was written. Man I thought it was just a reddit bandwagon to hate on EA but hearing a first hand account of how his managers treated him and the rest of his team was jaw dropping. Manager walking back and forth with a bullhorn shouting about bugs that needed to be fixed at midnight on a Saturday, firing a (according to him) great dev weeks before his wife was going to have their child, the constant backstabbing politics, driving someone to suicide (though he felt very uncomfortable expanding on that). Though reading this I can't help but wonder if there is a better model for releasing games to avoid crunch -- something like what minecraft did. Give access to an unfinished game, then do a rolling release and slowly make it better and better.
- ido 4y agoThere are better ways to develop than crunch, but Minecraft is an outlier (literally the best selling game of all times https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_gam...) that shouldn’t be used as a replicable example.