EA: The Human Story (2004)
ea-spouse.livejournal.com
ea-spouse.livejournal.com
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.
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.
So since Riccitiello left?
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)
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.
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 fiancé, 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]”
> 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.
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.
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.
Source: worked for a major game developer at one of their SE Asia studios for a while.
Hearing how they treated LemonSky absolutely soured me on playing it in the end however
I know that there are shops where overtime has lingered around. I know from speaking with ex-employees that Microsoft's Coalition did severe, brutal overtime in developing Gears of War 4 and 5. My impression overall though is that the amount of overtime in general in the video game industry has dramatically decreased since this article was written (at EA as well).
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.amazon.com/Best-Software-Writing-Selected-Introd...
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.
My [husband] works for Electronic Arts, I'm ... a disgruntled spouse. (2004) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1454102 - June 2010 (105 comments)
Suffice to say I didn't take that offer. Studio tour was fun though.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Quit your job
Seriously..
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.
These types of things have happened across how many industries at this point, historically? Practically all of them.
[0] https://www.quora.com/How-much-support-does-the-U-S-governme...
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.
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?
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?
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
> "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.
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.
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
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.
And that's why I still haven't bought "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2" two years later.
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.
Only a fool would think that it was because the Spanish we’re dirty or adversely affected.
I am certainly not the first to inform you that "Git" is a slur in Britain, but we all commonly use a software for which it is named.
---
If I were to argue in defense of "Spanish Flu" in particular, it's because of two major factors:
1) Education is good enough that people do not associate it with spanish people, in fact "flu" is not a dirty disease either, other exonyms from the period were "the Russian Pest" (IE: pestis) which are of course inferring some level of uncleanliness.
2) Everyone knows the Spanish Flu killed millions, but they do not consider it the same as influenza. If you say "killed more than influenza" it does not invoke the desired idea in the reader.
Thus, controlling the speech limits our ability to effectively reason about such a pandemic. Influenza as it is known today is not the same as the Spanish Flu, there is some distinction that needs to be made.
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.
These are probably related attributes. It's hard to take care of your employees when your company is operating game paycheck to game paycheck.
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.
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."
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.
And yet,
> My guess is that you don't see 'light' racist, misogynistic, or homophobic behavior as problematic
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.
"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.
All that to say that the moral thing to do might change with time.