No, what I mean is that salary guarantees you get @ least 40 hours of pay (assuming salaried full-time). If you show up for work and they send you home, as a salaried employee you still get paid. Or if you finish the alloted work for the week early, you still get paid for 40.
After all of that is when non-exempt comes into play with OT pay according to federal & state regulations and any contract guarantees that go above those regulations.
Salary non-exempt guarantees you’re paid at least the 40 hours a week + overtime.
I’d push back and say that this is a terms of contract change and get your peers to do the same.
Edit: I wouldn’t be surprised if they do this and start reducing hours for various reasons. And from there it’s reduction in benefits duce to not hitting certain hours. It’s a pattern that’s been seen in various industries before.
Game dev is extremely hard to break into. I’ve been in and out of the industry for some time now.
If you’re dead set on working in the industry I’d strongly advise going the platform integrations route.
Gain experince working with API services and creating some C++/C# integration wrappers for UE and Unity (GoDot potentially too).
Pick up some contract work doing API development outside the games industry to strengthen your knowledge and experince developing solutions.
Find a game team that needs a platform(s) integration engineering role or a central publishing engineering role.
Develop a host of solutions professionally for a year or two.
Make the jump into the role you actually want.
This also gives you a ton of job flexibility in an industry that values knowledge breadth and has waves of job stability. Automation & tooling engineering, API development, services engineering, etc.