<i>Within a few months, we were putting in brisk 10 hour days as we started our new project. Six months in a launch date was handed down from above and we shifted to 11 hour days six days a week. ... Six weeks before shipping the studio was flown out to San Francisco to launch our game - 12 hour days seven days a week, free of the distraction of friends, wives and girlfriends. I watched alcoholism and substance abuse skyrocket, relationships crumble (including my own), people slept on office couches, two developers got divorced, one nervous breakdown.</i><p>This is evil.<p>I don't mean that like Google-don't-be-evil evil, which is a business practice one finds either unsavory or advantageous to competitors which one dislikes. I don't mean cartoonishly evil, like a villain killing someone to clue in anyone still wondering which character to root for after seeing the black cape and hearing the cackle. I don't mean hyperbolically evil, like the word carelessly thrown around when one's political opponents suggest +/- 3% changes in governmental policies.<p>I mean <i>evil</i>: characterized by sin, injurious to the proper ordering of society, an offense against the dignity of man, in contravention to the natural law as discoverable by reason. You could get a Catholic dogmatist, an atheist Marxist professor, and a hard-core libertarian together in a room, and they'd all call that evil. Their explanations would proceed from different and frequently incompatible axioms but they'd focus on the same parts of the act and come to strikingly reconcilable conclusions.
Wow. If those reviews are true, Zynga is going to fold like a cheap suit. Can't imagine anyone is working 11 hour days for peanuts when the stock is heading to $0. Weird, too, because I thought virtual cows was a pretty good business model. I guess consumers have caught on.