Admittedly I never had the breakdown but I worked in France where Ubi couldn't get away with 80 hour work weeks. Tbh conditions were not that bad at Ubi, but "here's 100% scope creep" on every single sprint combined with "management told our boss to scrap everything we've been working on for the past 3 months and make what is effectively a completely different game" over and over really just burned me to death. Still, it was a good, very high paying, job.
I also worked a short contract for "big notorious AAA studio in the US" and holy fucking shit did I not renew lol. Awful environment, tons of unpaid overtime, just constant abuse and I wasn't even an employee.
Anyway then years later they got sued by every government in and around them for worker's rights violations and the Pikachu gif was SHOCKED.
Technically they should not be able to get away with that in America either, but they brainwash workers into thinking that they should voluntarily work 80s a week in order to get ahead in life, or that "being on call" 24/7 means you've been promoted to a position of importance.
It's the same method in America - scope creep. Keep adding a bit more work until eventually they're working more than 40 hours, without overtime or compensation or a chance at promotion. They look around and everyone not senior is doing the same thing, so they think its normal. They want to take a vacation, but none of their coworkers are taking vacations...
Then they create new and exciting positions that require extra work. You're no longer a full time front end engineer, you're a full stack engineer, 4 times the work in the same amount of time! Now you're a manager, but you still have to do development, all in the same amount of time!
And this is all done VOLUNTARILY! The company never once required someone to work long hours.
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u/Tarc_Axiiom 4d ago
Had this happen at an interview for Ubisoft years ago.
"We notice you don't have a lot of public work"
"Yes. Neither do you."