According to a Reuters article a programmer is suing the games branch of Vivendi Universal for unpaid overtime.
It will be interesting to see how this turns out and weather or not it kicks off a whole bunch of similar lawsuits (there are a lot of disgruntled, burnt out programmers who have left the games industry).
There are, however, a few things that people should notice about this case.
1. VU is a publisher of games. A publisher is very different from a 3rd party independent development house (like the one I work for). Publishers foot the bill for the production of the game and they get most of the profits from the game (they also eat the losses for the many, many failed games).
2. According to the article Neil Aitken says that he was told to falsify his timesheet so that VU would be in compliance with California labor law.
3. There's a big difference between working 70-90 hours a week in order to establish a career or because you believe in a project, and working that much at the whim of another.
The subject of overtime in the games industry (and for programmers in general) is very touchy. It seems like a lot of people I meet feel like something needs to change, but nobody's willing to make the changes.
I love writing code. But I've been working overtime for a long, long time and it would be kind of nice to have a life again.
Posted by matt at July 1, 2004 02:43 PM