In November 2004 a LiveJournal user who called herself “ea_spouse” posted a long essay titled “EA: The Human Story”. She described the hours her partner was working at Electronic Arts: “The current mandatory hours are 9am to 10pm – seven days a week – with the occasional Saturday evening off for good behavior (at 6:30pm). This averages out to an eighty-five hour work week.” Within three weeks the post had drawn more than 3,000 comments, and within a month Edge was telling its readers that “crunch time has long been accepted as a necessary evil of the games industry, but many are being forced to question that status quo”. The post did not act alone. EA’s own artists were already suing it for unpaid overtime, and the lawsuits, not the essay, are what eventually cost the company money. But the essay gave the argument a voice, and the name “EA Spouse” became shorthand for crunch, the industry’s habit of long compulsory overtime before a deadline.
Fast facts
- Posted: November 2004, on LiveJournal, as “EA: The Human Story”
- Author: anonymous at first; named in April 2006 as Erin Hoffman
- The claim: mandatory 9am-to-10pm days, seven days a week, averaging 85 hours, with no overtime pay or time off in lieu
- The lawsuits: EA settled with its artists for $15.6 million (October 2005) and its programmers for $14.9 million (April 2006)
- What changed at EA: entry-level staff reclassified as hourly workers who could claim overtime; deadlines moved from Mondays to Fridays
What the post said
Everything below is the author’s account, in her words. She explained why she was not signing it: “I am retaining some anonymity here because I have no illusions about what the consequences would be for my family if I were explicit.” She did not name the game or the studio.
The project, she wrote, had slid into crunch by stages. Within weeks of starting it was in “a ‘mild’ crunch: eight hours six days a week”. Then came the “real” crunch, the 85-hour weeks. For that, she said, “EA salaried employees receive a) no overtime; b) no compensation time!” EA had once given staff a few weeks off at the end of a project, and had recently said it no longer wished to.
She turned EA’s slogan against it: “EA’s bright and shiny new corporate trademark is ‘Challenge Everything.’” Her challenge to “any EA executive that happens to read this” was “how about safe and sane labor practices for the people on whose backs you walk for your millions?” The answer to a team stretched this far, she argued, was to hire more people, and EA could afford them: “In its first weekend, Madden 2005 grossed $65 million.”
How far it travelled
The post spread through link sites and message boards. Salon, reporting on 2 December 2004, counted 3,318 comments on the original page and hundreds more on Slashdot. Edge found “a swell of support from developers, including current and ex-EA staff”, and noted that other studios had begun inviting EA staff “to come and work with them in a less intensive environment”.
Others came forward. A programmer who had just left EA, Joe Straitiff, posted his own account under his real name; Salon reported that among his complaints his manager had hung a sign in the office reading “Open 7 days”. EA’s public answer, Salon said, was “little more than a statement that it offers workers competitive salaries and benefits”.
The lawsuits
The essay arrived in the middle of a court case. In July 2004 Jamie Kirschenbaum, an EA artist, had filed a class action in California for about 200 colleagues, arguing that EA had wrongly treated animators, modellers, texture artists and others as exempt from overtime. Electronic Gaming Monthly put the two side by side in February 2005: “Around the same time the lawsuit was filed against Electronic Arts, the anonymous ‘EA Spouse’ wrote a blog entry about the challenging work schedules at the company.”
EA settled with the artists in October 2005 for $15.6 million. It reclassified about 440 employees as hourly workers and, Edge reported, moved the major deadlines on its projects from Mondays to Fridays “to encourage a standard five-day working week”. A second class action, brought for its programmers, followed. In April 2006 EA settled that one for $14.9 million, covering programmers employed between 14 February 2001 and 14 February 2006. Entry-level programmers became hourly workers who could claim overtime, and in return gave up stock options and bonuses for a one-off grant of restricted shares.
The same week, the San Jose Mercury News named the author of “EA: The Human Story” as Erin Hoffman. Her fiancé, Leander Hasty, an EA programmer who had worked on The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth, was one of the named plaintiffs in the programmers’ case. By then the two were working at another developer, 1st Playable Productions, in Troy, New York, and running Gamewatch, a website about working conditions in the industry.
The argument it started
The coverage tried to explain why crunch happened at all. Electronic Gaming Monthly‘s February 2005 feature, by Jennifer Tsao, quoted a 2003 Gamasutra survey: a programmer with two to five years’ experience earned an average of $70,000 a year, “the same amount programmers in other industries can earn straight out of college”. Gordon Walton of Sony Online Entertainment told the magazine that employers “get away with it” because “every time I have an open position I get 40 to 100 resumes”. Not every cause was exploitation. Tim Schafer, whose Double Fine was then crunching to finish Psychonauts, described the pull of a project he cared about: “Yes, I want to go home. I don’t want to work this hard. But am I willing to hurt my baby for it? That’s a tough choice.”
Some studios used the moment to say they had already changed. David Amor of Relentless Software, the developer of Buzz!, told Edge in 2005 that the long hours behind the argument were “really avoidable. We didn’t react to the EA Spouse thing because we’d already done something about it.”
Afterwards
EA said it had learned from it. Keith Ramsdale, EA’s vice-president for the UK and Ireland, told Retro Gamer in 2008 that the affair “affected us profoundly”, and that EA “settled the class action lawsuits with California engineers and artists and changed how we scheduled certain groups of employees, making them eligible for overtime”. He added that EA “gets a lot of the blame for what we know are really industry-wide problems”. In 2010 Edge wrote that the controversy had “turned the company into a symbol of the game industry’s gruelling crunch culture”.
Others wrote in the same form. In January 2010 a letter signed by the “Determined Devoted Wives of Rockstar San Diego employees” made similar complaints about the studio making Red Dead Redemption (see Rockstar). An Edge columnist wrote in 2011 that it was “sad that we must rely on whistle-blowers like EA Spouse to air the industry’s dirty laundry”. Looking back in 2018, the designer Alex Hutchinson, who had worked at EA in those years, told Wireframe: “If you recall, those were really dark days, where it was more of a sausage factory.”
Sources
- Erin Hoffman (as ea_spouse), “EA: The Human Story”, LiveJournal, November 2004 (web, primary): the hours, the 85-hour average, no overtime or compensation time, the end-of-project time off, “Challenge Everything”, the Madden 2005 figure, and the reason for anonymity. https://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html
- Retro Gamer issue 48, 2008, pp. 39–42, history of Electronic Arts (reprinted in Retro Gamer Collection volume 3, 2009, pp. 149–152): quotations from the post, including the hours and the anonymity passage; Joe Straitiff’s account; Keith Ramsdale, EA’s vice-president for the UK and Ireland, on the effect on EA and the settlements.
- Edge issue 144, Christmas 2004, news, “EA spouse speaks out”: crunch as a “necessary evil”, the 85-hour week, support from developers and other studios’ offers.
- Katharine Mieszkowski, “Santa’s sweatshop”, Salon, 2 December 2004 (web, secondary): the 3,318 comments, Joe Straitiff and the “Open 7 days” sign, EA’s statement, and the Kirschenbaum case. https://www.salon.com/2004/12/02/no_fun_and_games/
- Electronic Gaming Monthly issue 188, February 2005, p. 59, Jennifer Tsao, “The reality of game development”: the class action and the post, the Gamasutra salary survey, Gordon Walton, Tim Schafer.
- “Electronic Arts Pays Up”, Shacknews, 6 October 2005 (web, secondary): the artists’ suit filed in July by Jamie Kirschenbaum for about 200 employees, and the $15.6 million settlement. https://www.shacknews.com/article/38973/electronic-arts-pays-up
- Edge issue 163, June 2006, news: the programmers’ settlement covering 14 February 2001 to 14 February 2006, reclassification as hourly workers, the artists’ $15.6 million the previous October, and deadlines moved from Mondays to Fridays.
- David Jenkins, “Programmers Win EA Overtime Settlement, EA_Spouse Revealed”, Gamasutra, 26 April 2006 (web, secondary): the $14.9 million settlement and its terms, the 440 reclassified employees, the San Jose Mercury News identification of Erin Hoffman, Leander Hasty, 1st Playable Productions and Gamewatch. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/pc/programmers-win-ea-overtime-settlement-ea_spouse-revealed
- “EA Settles Overtime Lawsuit”, Slashdot, 26 April 2006 (web, secondary): the $14.9 million settlement with the programmers, and a named plaintiff as the blogger’s partner. https://yro.slashdot.org/story/06/04/26/1733244/ea-settles-overtime-lawsuit
- Edge issue 153, September 2005, studio feature on Relentless Software: David Amor on the EA Spouse affair.
- Edge issue 219, October 2010, p. 64, feature on EA: “a symbol of the game industry’s gruelling crunch culture”. Edge issue 231, September 2011, p. 147, column: “whistle-blowers like EA Spouse”.
- Wireframe issue 1, November 2018, p. 11: Alex Hutchinson on “EA’s Spouse years”.