Outside of monetary topics (gambling, mtx) EA is actually a very decent company and employer. Basically the antithesis of CDPR.
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EA Criterion talks about how they avoid crunch
- Thread starter Nirolak
- Start date
It's hardly a hot take. There's no denying that the kind of pressure a studio like rockstar and naught dog faces with their newest games is completely different than the pressure a studio currently only (as far as we know) working on smaller parts of bigger projects that aren't their own. But my take on crunch is a little bit different than most here on Era. It's not pretty and sometimes it's excessive, but I've always been used to extra-work and work out-of-hours, in school, college and my work. And when it comes to making a piece of art (if you want to look at games as such, as I do), there is always something to polish, correct and improve.
This.
If it starts by ranking the amount of hours put in a project, you can definitely tell that productivity will take a hit. There's a healthier way of accomplishing results in this industry and i don't doubt that Criterion is applying it. People just need to start talking about it, to slowly dissipate this oppressive reality that a lot of individuals buys so easily.
And please, let's not reduce this thread into "but they don't make mah big AAA titles", that's very unfair and unreasonable, not to say cruel.
At least when I left three years ago, several studios at EA were making a concerted effort to align around "focus mode" instead of typical crunch in order to increase productivity for short stretches before milestones. The uptake of that varied between different teams and disciplines, though a lot had already adopted better work practices years ago; glad to see that effort has continued.
They released two in the last 4 years by supporting and working on the own mode and also are making their new IP. Even if supporting, they still could reach a crunch.
OP
OP
They have 99 employees on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/criterion-games/
Do you think they used to be 1000?
Sacrificing oneself for the sake of art is fine and all if you're the only one who sacrifice and you didn't drag a company of unwilling people along with you.
DICE makes AAA games regularly and they aren't normally crunching either. There was that thread about it happening during the Battlefront 2 controversy to quickly strip out the lootbox stuff, but that's an extreme case.
It's clearly possible to make big games and not crunch.
Wow I didn't know DICE didn't release any games!
I'm not surprised at all that this thread isn't taking off compared to the RDR one. People don't have anything to get mad about and they don't want to admit EA might not be as awful. Some of these responses are so weird.
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I know someone who work at EA montreal and he told me that crunch culture is really not a thing there, its more of an usa thing
I know what they are trying to say, but the way it's said is one sided which was the point I was making.
I didn't realize they'd staffed up and were working on their own thing again. That's great. I look forward to seeing it.
Good on EA for treating their employees well.
Good on EA for treating their employees well.
It's a hybrid. We use a lot of agile processes, but at the end of the day, our MVPs have to be pretty much the whole game, so it's hard to avoid more upfront, waterfall style planning.
Wow, this is so insightful, thanks for posting. I'm a wiser man now.