Electronic Arts

Electronic Arts is a behemoth of a company, and there are a lot of opportunities within the company. If you get tired of working the long hours and high-stress deadlines on a game team, the central groups that support the game teams by building common tech and tools are there.

Knowledge sharing is a big part of the draw of the company. The mailing lists across the company are an excellent way to get in contact with and brainstorm with people from a plethora of other game teams. Chances are, someone else has encountered the issue you're wrangling, and you can get feedback about a handful of different approaches you could take to solve it on your team.

Most people maintain a decent work-life balance, but there's still pressure from management to work longer hours than should be necessary if things were planned for well in advance. Stupid things that have been ignored for months suddenly become "high priority," requiring late hours or coming in on a Saturday to get them completed.

The artists also aren't very technically inclined. While skilled in the art authoring tools, they overall seem to lack understanding of the consequences of the assets they put in-game. It can be very frustrating working with them, having to remind them over and over to check their work and fix problems generated when they forget to do so.

Let us focus on two-or-more year features. Let us have a group of people doing pre-production type discovery work throughout the entire cycle, as that's how innovation is made.

We get a month or two to try and be creative, and then it's nose-to-the-grindstone to crank out the next iteration of the game.

Invest a bit more money into our iterative titles, and we might sell more year-on-year.