I’m not sure how this works in other countries, but if staff in Australia work over weekends they often have to be paid at an increased rate, even if it’s within their weekly hours. Eg, if someone works a Saturday they get 1.5x the amount of normal pay, and up to 2x on a Sunday. Is this different in the US?
The reason you’ll see me working odd hours over the weekend is that I have this extra time built into my contract, and I get some other benefits for working outside of normal office hours. Also, when something goes wrong there is not usually one staff member who can fix it. It will often require a mix of people, depending on what the issue is. If it was a matter of one person working over a weekend and having them swap, it would be something we could discuss with our team. However, this is not the case, and one person often isn’t enough to implement a fix.
In the past we have come in over weekends to sort out issues, even when it isn’t in our contracts. This is typically for extremely game breaking bugs, and not server related issues. We wouldn’t do this if we didn’t care, and many games companies don’t come in on weekends. I understand that it’s frustrating when things go wrong and we aren’t here, but please remember that we aren’t a big dev studio like Blizzard or Riot with the budget to hire people exclusively on weekends.
In a majority of jobs once you’ve done your contracted hours, you’re free! To expect us to be available 24/7 is, in my opinion, unreasonable. Many of us already work outside our contracted hours because we care about the game. We are also human beings who deserve down time, leisure time, and have the right to pursue our own lives outside of this game that we work for and love so much.