The North American Game Industry - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 94

of foul play on the part of a big publisher—another common story.
Electronic Arts of ered a job, the salary was right and the benefi ts were
good, so my SO took it. I remember that they asked him in one of the
interviews: “how do you feel about working long hours?” It's just a
part of the game industry—few studios can avoid a crunch as deadlines
loom, so we thought nothing of it. When asked for specifi cs about what
“working long hours” meant, the interviewers coughed and glossed on
to the next question; now we know why.
Within weeks production had accelerated into a “mild” crunch:
eight hours six days a week. Not bad. Months remained until any real
crunch would start, and the team was told that this “pre-crunch” was
to prevent a big crunch toward the end; at this point any other need for
a crunch seemed unlikely, as the project was dead on schedule. I don't
know how many of the developers bought EA's explanation for the
extended hours; we were new and naive so we did. The producers even
set a deadline; they gave a specifi c date for the end of the crunch, which
was still months away from the title's shipping date, so it seemed safe.
That date came and went. And went, and went. When the next news
came it was not about a reprieve; it was another acceleration: twelve
hours six days a week, 9am to 10pm.
Weeks passed. Again the producers had given a termination date on
this crunch that again they failed. Throughout this period the project
remained on schedule. The long hours started to take its toll on the
team; people grew irritable and some started to get ill. People dropped
out in droves for a couple of days at a time, but then the team seemed to
reach equilibrium again and they plowed ahead. The managers stopped
even talking about a day when the hours would go back to normal.
Now, it seems, is the “real” crunch, the one that the producers of this
title so wisely prepared their team for by running them into the ground
ahead of time. The current mandatory hours are 9am to 10pm—seven
days a week—with the occasional Saturday evening of for good behav-
ior (at 6:30pm). This averages out to an eighty-fi ve-hour work week.
Complaints that these once more extended hours combined with the
team's existing fatigue would result in a greater number of mistakes
made and an even greater amount of wasted energy were ignored.
EA's attitude toward this—which is actually a part of company pol-
icy, it now appears—has been (in an anonymous quotation that I've
heard repeated by multiple managers), “If they don't like it, they can
work someplace else.” Put up or shut up and leave: this is the core of
EA's Human Resources policy. The concept of ethics or compassion or
even intelligence with regard to getting the most out of one's workforce
never enters the equation: if they don't want to sacrifi ce their lives and
their health and their talent so that a multibillion dollar corporation
can continue its Godzilla-stomp through the game industry, they can
work someplace else. (ea_spouse 2004)