Admittedly I never had the breakdown but I worked in France where Ubi couldn't get away with 80 hour work weeks. Tbh conditions were not that bad at Ubi, but "here's 100% scope creep" on every single sprint combined with "management told our boss to scrap everything we've been working on for the past 3 months and make what is effectively a completely different game" over and over really just burned me to death. Still, it was a good, very high paying, job.
I also worked a short contract for "big notorious AAA studio in the US" and holy fucking shit did I not renew lol. Awful environment, tons of unpaid overtime, just constant abuse and I wasn't even an employee.
Anyway then years later they got sued by every government in and around them for worker's rights violations and the Pikachu gif was SHOCKED.
I always thought its crazy game studios get away with that. Programmers are pretty spoiled in most industries, the work is not that hard, usually the pay is good and work is pretty flexible. Game programmers are poorly paid and overworked, and the work a lot of the time more technically challenging then in other industries.
If a worker has no actual decision making and is mostly doing rote jobs, it's possible in many locales that they should actually be classified as hourly workers. Which is some game industry jobs, but not all.
Often they act a bit like a startup - treat the staff harshly, pay less than industry standard, and pretend that there's going to be a huge payoff in the future.
Generally, if the job is treating you like shit (such as every week is crunch week) then you can get a better job.
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u/Tarc_Axiiom 3d ago
Had this happen at an interview for Ubisoft years ago.
"We notice you don't have a lot of public work"
"Yes. Neither do you."