Welcome back to another edition of our informal business roundup, where we wedge all the fun MMO industry tidbits that pile up in our newsroom.
Remember EA Spouse, the EA developer’s wife whose initially anonymous article busted open the doors on EA’s culture of abusive crunch back in 2004? Rolling Stone’s Glixel blog (via Gamasutra) has a 14-year retrospective and a sum-up of the state of “crunch culture” since then. Intriguingly, EA Spouse herself – Erin Hoffman-John – declined to comment much on how she got the ball rolling, but other developers gave Glixel conflicting accounts. Some believe that EA has made an attempt to change and is no “worse than anyone else,” while one producer scoffed at the pushback against crunch, calling it a “disruption.” According to him, hustle is just the patch to greatness.
“If you think you’re going to do anything great in life, it doesn’t happen in 40 hours a week. It just doesn’t. You don’t get great at anything doing what everyone else does. You get great by spending more time doing it than everybody else does. EA Spouse was frustrating to a lot of us because for me it came from an area of if you want to be doing this, then let’s do it, but don’t complain about it.”
Bluehole’s PUBG Corp has apparently poached a Riot Games exec. MMO Culture reports that PUBG Corp snagged Riot’s Jung Hyun Kwon, who’d been the managing director of e-sports for League of Legends (and logged time at the Korean branches of EA, Vivendi, and Blizzard). He’ll be Chief Marketing Officer for PUBG Corp.
And finally, Funcom is doing a Q&A on its Q4 2017 financial report this afternoon at 2 p.m. EST (as this roundup goes live). We’ll be keeping an eye on it, as the MMO playerbase is interested to hear about the state of Secret World, the upcoming Conan Exiles launch, and the reveal of a new game slated for tomorrow. You can watch that below.
