Mandatory overtime? The games industry is slavery, unionize NOW for fuck’s sake.
And it’s for a demo… Not even a real release.
Financial milestones or conferences or industry markets are always putting deadlines on things. This just screams bad scheduling and punishing the workforce to make good on an impossible timeline.
Yep, the schedule is always a perpetual crisis. Justifies crunch, adding tech debt, shooting down dev wishlist items, cutting content, all sorts of things.
The last game I worked on got panned pretty hard, and amongst the hundreds of complaints I didn’t see one that hadn’t been raised internally months or years before release. Some of them I personally had shelved P4 change lists that were 6 months old. But hey, no time for that, we gotta get this E3 trailer out! Oh now that’s done? Well changelist is old now, can’t risk submitting that we got a presentation for the brass soon!
Anyway I think I’m retired, or something.
Lord. An industry I have zero desire to be in based on the stories.
What I was thinking… imagine when it will come to do the actual game.
Your post is so good it has negative 1 downvotes.
They should unionize.
paid overtime?
“I’m sorry, the working time directive does not allow me to work more than a 40 hour week”
In the UK I’ve been told its “standard procedure” to opt out of the Working Time Regulations “just in case”.
I’ve had to back out of a job because of it was a requirement to sign even though the job was for 40h/week.
I can condone zionism, but I draw the line at crunch
/s
The /s tone indicator is doing a lot of heavy lifting in my comment
Do they paid for overtime hours, including double pay for work after certain hours?
Not if they’re salaried (payed a set amount per year) which most devs are. At least that’s how it is in the US if you don’t have a union contract.
For completeness sake, and because workers should know their rights, I just want to add that many salaried employees do actually qualify for overtime. It’s possible that these devs don’t, but be sure to look into it and know your rights if you are a salaried employee and being forced to do overtime. Wage theft is the most common form of theft, so make sure to protect yourself.
OK, thanks for the explanation. They definitely need to unionize then.
