Yeah, I heard about this post from some other people, believe it or not. To tell you the truth, I'm not at all suprised that this is the state of things for low-ranking EA employees.
Take Disney as an example. Someone sees "The Little Mermaid" as a kid and has a life-long dream to become an animator for Walt Disney studios. One day, they attain that dream, but they find out that what they've gotten themselves into is basically slave labor. As a low ranking animator at Disney, your entire reason for existence is to fill in what the head animator doesn't have time to finish. Creativity? None whatsoever. The hours are unfathomable, & there's very little chance of ever getting your own project because there's only room for a few "big dogs".
I'm sure being a programmer or a graphic designer at EA is not much different. EA is, believe it or not, of comparable size to Disney. A good 1/2 of the US-originating video game franchises are under the EA umbrella (even if they're not developed in-house by them).
The suffering of the underlings is an unfortunate side effect of a company becoming a megacorporation. A 20-something kid could still find an outlet for his or her creativity at some startup game development house, but we're in an age now where you need a major motion picture type budget in order to put out a game which will sell reasonably well.
Take Disney as an example. Someone sees "The Little Mermaid" as a kid and has a life-long dream to become an animator for Walt Disney studios. One day, they attain that dream, but they find out that what they've gotten themselves into is basically slave labor. As a low ranking animator at Disney, your entire reason for existence is to fill in what the head animator doesn't have time to finish. Creativity? None whatsoever. The hours are unfathomable, & there's very little chance of ever getting your own project because there's only room for a few "big dogs".
I'm sure being a programmer or a graphic designer at EA is not much different. EA is, believe it or not, of comparable size to Disney. A good 1/2 of the US-originating video game franchises are under the EA umbrella (even if they're not developed in-house by them).
The suffering of the underlings is an unfortunate side effect of a company becoming a megacorporation. A 20-something kid could still find an outlet for his or her creativity at some startup game development house, but we're in an age now where you need a major motion picture type budget in order to put out a game which will sell reasonably well.
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