And the saga continues. Electronic Arts seems to have pissed off one too many geeks, and now that this story has gone public details are beginning to emerge that don't look good for the world's leading video game maker. San Francisco's Schubert & Reed LLP will be representing an unknown number of employees in a class action lawsuit that contends Electronic Arts had wrongly classified a large number of artists and developers as exempt from overtime when, under state and federal law, they were not. In the meantime, Kotaku points out that EA is going after label Cherry Lane Music and jokes that they're "just looking for another set of employees to exploit."

Gamespot was forwarded an email, purportedly from EA management to their staff, promising that they would not retaliate against employees who joined the suit - although that seems like another one of those "well, you don't have to come in this weekend but we'd really appreciate it if you did" kind of management mindf**ks. Take recently terminated employee Joe Stratiff's complaints for instance:

Here's my story from front to back, I'll let you decide who's the insane one here. I just listed several of the incidents that led up to my dismisal that I assume were the reasons. Laughingly, I don't really know the exact why -- I never got one from HR and my boss just said the last item was the "last straw." However, I skipped many colorful and fleshing out stuff that shows you the culture of EA, e.g. the Executive Producer of the project hung a neon sign in the team area that said "Open 7 days" and constantly sent out emails to the whole team saying that he'd see them over the weekend. Or the meeting five months before the ship date where they were trying to tell everyone that weekends from then are were mandatory without actually saying it. There was never discussion on cutting stuff or adding resources to complete the game, it was always about working longer and harder.

As fellow geeks, SFist would like to point out that angry employees plus inconsiderate management equals crappy code. If any of these allegations are true (and it's looking rather likely, seeing as how more and more disgruntled techies are crawling out of the woodwork now that this is public) then SFist would like to suggest that EA hire more people. It's not like there's a shortage of out-of-work coders, artists and testers in the Bay Area. Frankly, we're not buying any EA games until this is all cleared up - oh, wait, we weren't buying EA games in the first place.