Next-Gen recently sat down to quiz Matthew Jeffrey, EA's head of European studio recruitment, on burning employment issues such as quality of life and whether crunch is inevitable, workforce diversity and the trouble with gaming degrees.
As the best known third party publisher in the world EA tends to come under about as much scrutiny as its Madden games rack up sales. Notably the company has come in for criticism regarding its working conditions, something that came to a head during the EA Spouse affair.
Jeffrey says EA is currently going through a "learning" process with regards to addressing quality of life issues.
New report from Skillsearch found that 22% of those surveyed had been laid off within the past 12 months.
It's a step forward for Stop Killing Games.
The Callisto Protocol director thinks the solution involves the right people, the right timing, and perhaps a little bit of AI
I don't agree with that. I WISH I could agree with that. But buying habits and customer opinions prove otherwise
We've seen developers in the AAA space try new things and ideas. More often than not, the customers aren't willing to give things a chance, or not enough people buy into the project for it to grow.
Creativity works better in the indie space because the budgets, pressures, and expectations aren't the same.
it's a nice idea and it worked during the PS2/PS3-era when AAA didn't cost hundreds of millions of dollars. smaller budgets and shorter development time left room for more creativity and more risk. a game didn't need to sell 4 million+ copies to break even. things are different now.
This is the guy who bragged about crunching his staff and having them work through the night. Crunch culture has lost more talent and done more damage to the industry than any other factor. Screw him.
and EA is learning that with the yearly employee strikes and lawsuits claming crap quality of life, and bad pay for it.
If they make a good game then its fine if it takes a couple years, but EA runs a buisness that the key is throwing as much crap into the marketplace and see what makes money they spend so lil on making the game so they make profit regardless.