This happened to me. Really burned my britches; after spending a whole year working on Halo2 as a contract employee, my max end date arrived. I left with a few others that were maxed out only to find out a few months later that we were all "forgotten". What really sucked, is that they knew the problem before it was too late and still decided not to spend that extra 30 minutes to fix it. I worked on other games after that which were great experiences, but Halo2 really left a bad taste in my mouth and ultimately, I ended up leaving the game biz to further my career as a developer. So far it has been a great move for me.