St. John wrote that developers should quit complaining about fair wages and long hours since making games "is not a job, it's an art."

"Many modern game developers have embraced a culture of victimology and a bad attitude toward their chosen vocations. They complain that the long hours and personal sacrifices great games require are a consequence of poor management."They want to pretend that they can turn an inherently entrepreneurial endeavour like game development into a 9-to-5 job. Somehow, these people have managed to adopt a wage-slave attitude toward one of the most remarkable and privileged careers in the world," St. John said.

He claimed making games is a rewarding venture in itself and isn't a "hardship" since employees are just "pushing a mouse."
However his comments are coming at a time when the International Game Developers Association is trying to tackle the game industry's ubiquitous practice of "crunch" or mandatory unpaid overtime and long hours.

According to the 2015 Developer Satisfaction Survey by the IGDA, about 62 per cent of developers said their jobs involve crunch time, nearly half of which report working more than 60 hours per week and 17 per cent working more than 70 hours. About 37 per cent of developers also reported that they did not receive any additional compensation for crunch time last year.

So as a result St. John's arguments have had a spot of negative feedback from hacked off developers and industry professionals.

Vlambeer co-founder Rami Ismail pointed out that "passion and taking care of yourself aren't mutually exclusive". "Great art isn't made by burning out making it. Great art is made through passion and experience and you won't have either if you burn out."

There was the usual Twitter outcry but St. John writing in his bog , did not seem to be particularly repentant. He claimed that the only people who were hacked off were “lazy millennial hipster game developers who think that long hours weren't priced into their paychecks when EA hired them."

He added that the stressful work conditions are "how we roll in the industry" he mocked "kids" who "enter the workforce with spoon-fed educations, prestigious degrees, an inflated sense of their own value and a disastrous work ethic". He added that employers should "churn and burn to find an 'optimal' team," and not "waste time managing the weak".

Curiously though this is the same St. John who claimed that he "started to burn out" at his job in Microsoft in 1997. In an interview he said he would “pass out at his keyboard and straggle into morning meetings with key marks on his face. Worked sucked everything out of him; his marriage disintegrated. In 1997, he succeeded in getting himself fired he walked out of Microsoft feeling 100 lbs. lighter'."

We guess that it is different when you are manager and you have to flog the workers rather than being the flogged worker. We think he should cut back on his reading of Ayn Rand.