Longklaw.com

Electronic Arts, the world’s largest third-party video game publisher, is in a little trouble. Yesterday, this Livejournal blog entry by the spouse of an EA worker started a buzz on the internet. She was unhappy with EA’s unfair treatment of its workers. During crunch time, they are expected to work at least 12 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week. They get no overtime pay or additional days off for doing this.

I’ve known that in the software development industry, it’s expected that you work long hours during crunch time. I had heard that the video game industry was exceptionally harsh, but this is worse than I expected. I read some of the responses to the blog entry yesterday, and it seems like not all of EA is like that. And of course, not all video game companies are like that.

Now it appears that EA could be facing a class action lawsuit because of the unpaid overtime pay. I wonder how this will turn out.

Over the summer I went through part of the interview process with EA. I submitted my resume so that I could be considered for a position with their sports division in Orlando. They sent me a written test to fill out. I guess I did well on the test because they wanted a phone interview a couple of weeks later. The phone interview didn’t go so well, so I’m still here in Starkvegas. It would interesting to see how things are inside EA right now.