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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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).