This account of Anthem’s development, based on interviews with 19 people who either worked on the game or adjacent to it (all of whom were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about Anthem’s development), is a story of indecision and mismanagement. It’s a story of technical failings, as EA’s Frostbite engine continued to make life miserable for many of BioWare’s developers, and understaffed departments struggled to serve their team’s needs. It’s a story of two studios, one in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and another in Austin, Texas, that grew resentful toward one another thanks to a tense, lopsided relationship. It’s a story of a video game that was in development for nearly seven years but didn’t enter production until the final 18 months, thanks to big narrative reboots, major design overhauls, and a leadership team said to be unable to provide a consistent vision and unwilling to listen to feedback.
Perhaps most alarming, it’s a story about a studio in crisis. Dozens of developers, many of them decade-long veterans, have left BioWare over the past two years. Some who have worked at BioWare’s longest-running office in Edmonton talk about depression and anxiety. Many say they or their co-workers had to take “stress leave”—a doctor-mandated period of weeks or even months worth of vacation for their mental health. One former BioWare developer told me they would frequently find a private room in the office, shut the door, and just cry. “People were so angry and sad all the time,” they said. Said another: “Depression and anxiety are an epidemic within Bioware.”
This makes two incredibly high-profile BioWare flops as a result of severe mismanagement and gross negligence by executives, harming the lives of countless hardworking developers in the process. Once, BioWare was one of the greatest game development studios, but now, it’s barely a shadow of its former self, a running internet meme, and a studio whose upcoming games are not met with anticipation and excitement, but with rolling eyes and distrust.
I’m deeply worried about the studio’s future.
Thom Holwerda,
I’ve never worked in the game industry, although I hear it’s brutal. Actually I feel most places I’ve worked have been mostly high stress, high turnover, unpaid overtime, gloomy environment, unrealistic expectations with too few resources, etc. While I had higher expectations going into CS, this seems entirely “normal” to me in my field now that I’ve been working for so long. However I’m not sure how much my experience matches other’s? I’d like to ask everyone: who can relate to this or can not relate to this? What part of the world are you in? What is your industry?
I generally feel exactly the opposite. Where I work, you are very much expected NOT to work more than (about) 40 hours a week, and in 3 years I have only had one instance of overtime, which was exchanged for vacation days.
FlyingJester,
Thanks for your view. I take it you did not want to share your location or industry, which I was curious about, but that’s ok. I think it depends on specific job functions, a lot of us in IT have to put in O/T in part because we’re expected to deploy changes off hours/weekends and if anything fails they can call us in around the clock. This sort of responsibility often comes with the job, but the problem in the US anyways is that we’re excluded from federal overtime laws and unlike other professionals we have no trade unions to establish fair working conditions, so it’s really up to the specific employers.
It’s no surprise that company cultures can be pretty varied. I was hoping to have more responses to learn about what kinds of companies are more & less likely to be stressful to work for, but it doesn’t look like I’m going to get any data from this crowd, haha.
I feel fine sharing that I work for a large mapping company, as a senior software engineer. I really don’t have a lot bad to say about my company (other than that we don’t contribute to open source as much as I would like).
I think you see more reasonable hours and compensation for overtime (and less overtime in general) at companies that are 1: not startups and 2: not doing games
How can such thing even be possible?…
Anyways, I asked a buddy (working in VoIP) who relocated for ~3 months from Poland (working from home) to US office in Knoxville Tennessee, and he said: “in US employer-employee contract is very strong; people work overtime, but it’s not required; generally the pressure is much smaller, at work 9 hours, in which 1 hour for lunch; the pace of work is lower than in PL, the atmosphere better; people cooperate more, corpo-culture is completelly different”