Why you should boycott EA, and tell them you're doing it

[unixronin]

ea_spouse tells the story of the EA Sweatshop and EA's apparent employment and HR policy -- "Lie to prospective developers, get'em in, use'em up, burn'em out, then discard'em and get a new batch."  EA is working their developers eighty to ninety hours a week for a year at a time, with no overtime and no comp time whatsoever, and their product schedules are clearly planned on that basis from the start.  EA has apparently decided it's more cost-effective to regard entire development teams as single-use, throwaway fungibles.

Quoth micheinnz:

As others have said, if you choose to boycott EA because of how they treat their workers (and if I were a gamer I'd be seriously considering it), please drop them a line every time they release a title you'd otherwise have bought, explaining why you're not going to.  Silent boycotts make no difference at all.

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

The long hours expected of "startup" software development teams is nothing particularly new or interesting.

Oh yeah, sure. But EA can hardly be considered a startup.

I guess once one or two major players start doing it, everyone else who wants to stay in the game pretty much has to follow suit or throw in the towel. But necessity does not make virtue.

Personally, even without this, I think that having a few giant companies like EA and Vivendi gobble up everything else in sight is bad, long-term, for the entire videogame industry.

As for HPS ........ hmmm. When we have money again, I must remember to check out their War over Vietnam. I'm missing having a decent combat flight-sim, but I don't really want to buy Microsoft if I have a choice. Several of the others look interesting, too, particularly the naval campaigns.

Now, where can I bookmark this where I'll remember what it is....

[iphy.livejournal.com]

No, EA is not a startup, the "development groups" mostly are.