EA Faced With Another Employee Lawsuit

GamesIndustry.biz has the news that EA has been slapped with another employee-filed lawsuit. He's part of the engineering staff, and feels unfairly targeted by the "creative staff" laws in CA. From the article: "...in the midst of a storm of unwanted publicity about EA's employment practices, and provoked a response from the firm's vice president of human resources, Rusty Reuff, who admitted that 'as much as I don't like what's been said about our company and our industry, I recognize that at the heart of the matter is a core truth.'"

Comments

Re:The Saddest Part

[EnronHaliburton2004]

I don't quite follow.

EA has plenty of subsidiaries who continue to develop games.

Maxis was aquired by EA in 1997. When Maxis develops a game, it means that EA is developing a game.

Re:The Saddest Part

[Alban]

SSX
Def Jam
Need for Speed
The sims
Medal of Honor (for better or for worse)
Command and Conquer
LotR RPG
LotR RTS
LotR hack'n'slash (two towers + rotk)
Goldeneye
Harry Potter
Nascaar racing

to name just a few, are all sports games and are all developped internally at EA.

As for 5 sports games a year, your count is quite inexact (btw the 'street' games are totally different from their 'serious' counterpart, both from gameplay and art perspectives - you should try them and stop talking out of your ass):

- Madden
- FIFA
- NBA
- MVP
- Fight Night
- Tiger Woods Golf
- NHL
- FIFA Street
- NBA Street (if you haven't tried vol'3 you are missing something)
- NFL Street

Re:Employers Need to Be Smart

[Phisbut]

In the real world, you miss the holiday season and you are screwed.

Year after year, the holiday season seems to comer earlier. Companies always want to get their product out before their competitor, so now, 'holiday season' begins in september.

Quoting Gabe from Penny Arcade :

What in the hell is wrong with the videogame industry? If they spread these games out over the course of a year I'd probably buy every one of them. As it stands now, I'll end up having to rent 90% of these.

In the movie industry you have a few big summer blockbusters, but decent movies come out year round. Imagine if every single movie worth watching came out in July. Imagine if you had to spend five hundred dollars in one month just to see the movies you were interested in. People wouldn't stand for that. Why is it that the videogame industry is able to get away with this bullshit?

I'm not even talking about October and November here. 99% of all the games worth playing in a given year come out in the space of three months. THAT IS F***ING RIDICULOUS!

Re:Solution

[homer_ca]

I'll say they're surviving. They've been profitable for at least the last three years. They made a $577M net profit last fiscal year.

Re:Part of the problem

[Psychochild]

There's a further problem in the games industry in that you can't really schedule for "fun". We're still trying to understand this mysterious beast from a logical point of view. Or, to put it another way, there's no test harness for "fun factor". You can plan out the game with a high degree of detail, implement everything on schedule and under budget, but if the game isn't fun it doesn't matter. Yet, the money people hate to think that all that work went for nothing, so they usually want a game to ship by the deadline no matter what state it's in. That's why you sometimes see games that are absolutely unplayable and obviously not finished; the developers weren't able to get the game to a "fun" state before the money dried up.

This gets worse when you have business people willing to exploit the eagerness of people developing games. I eagerly worked 60-80 hours at 3DO working on one project I enjoyed (the project I bought from 3DO after they closed it down, Meridian 59), but I hated working even 50 hour weeks on another game that only had a 6 month development cycle. Usually the managers just say, "Hey, you're making games. Suck it up and have fun!" if you complain about the hours. It doesn't help that many people have a completely misguided idea of what it's like to make games (even without the bullshit you have to tolerate at large companies); they don't realize that making games is different than playing games.

Enough of a rant for now. Some thoughts from someone who has seen the inside of the beast.

Have fun,