But your recruitment will be based in love, not on wages. The mentions come rapid fire, culminating in the grand pronouncement from one employee: Blizzard employees are “just a bunch of geeks,” just like you. This is a window into how the industry as a whole views employment. As one of us has written about before, this is an industry with a layoff rate twice the national rate[PDF] across all industries and a culture of crunch where 68% of respondents work more than 50 hours a week for months at a time in order to get a product out the door. It’s a bad tradeoff: In exchange for being quiet about wages, hours, benefits and the like, you’ll get to hang out with like-minded people you’ll love to be with. The Blizzard video is the distillation of this pitch in a very blunt form. (via Working For the Love of the Game: The Problem With Blizzard’s Recruitment Video :: Games :: Features :: Paste)
link to layoff rate evidence from paragraph above: http://www.gamasutra.com/salarysurvey2014.pdf