I worked for Maxis during the big closure in 2004, when the company was in Walnut Creek. A small group moved to Emeryville, many people (including the Sims teams) moved to Redwood Shores, and some some people didn't make the transition. Think of it like layoffs, following on the colossal failure that was The Sims Online (although, ironically, what's left of that team had already moved to EARS).
This is pretty much the same thing. Spore was a disappointment, SimCity was never a massive moneymaker, and whatever games they've been working on since got cancelled. The Emeryville shop has had a decade to produce a hit and it hasn't worked out. Some folks have already been laid off. Some folks will get moved to EARS. Some folks will be looking for a new job. The cycle continues.
It's unlikely that any of the individuals responsible for the specific versions of whatever old game you fondly remember playing are still around. At the end of the day, what you're lamenting is the loss of an office building and a logo.
Spore was a textbook example of bad management. They spent 80% of time, money and effort on creature designer - a feature that did not make up even 20% of game, closer to 5%. Game had complex and massive functionality for libraries, various downloadable creatures, even tunes for cities, outfits for citizens - all things that were not just unnecessary, but one might say even made game less attractive (because usually you end up not being such great designer and all cities look equally generically bad). Essential features, such as autosave, were lacking. It is hard to fathom how detached from reality the managers were.
I don't know anything about the game or how it failed, but what you describe reads like a classic caricature of an engineer's wet dream: lots of fancy tech that's fun to build but not very useful to the end user, while comparatively boring but useful features (autosave) gets passed over.
Sure, management also failed (any failure is by definition a failure of management since they're supposed to be responsible for the project) - but textbook? You hardly made the case for that.
Management letting engineers build whatever cool toys they want instead of features customers want and need sounds like it ought to be a textbook example of what not to do.
Maybe you can't herd cats, but you can at least train them to use the litter box and not scratch your television.
Maxis (and EA in general) doesn't really work like that. The producers and game designers are in charge; engineers may have some input but there are professionals running the show. And those professionals screw up a lot. It's a hard business.
Maxis in particular suffered from the problem of having a bright, famous designer who produced two major hits. This gave him license to make dozens of failures. Unfortunately, Maxis started "betting the farm" on his last couple creations, with budgets into the high tens of millions. You don't get to roll the dice many times at that price.
to expand on that, likely the person in charge of a feature which consumed so much resources was untouchable. Considered too good to fail or have, gasp, a bad idea
My biggest complaint about Spore was that it was four or five different games, and just when you started getting the hang of one the game said "Evolution time!" and jerked you into the next one. By the time I was enjoying anything about the game, it took it away and gave me something else new to learn. By the time I got to the phase of the game I was going to spend more time on (cities and civilizations) I just didn't care anymore.
Like Doom 3, Spore was a game killed by pre-release piracy for the sole reason that people had fair warning about how terrible of a game it was.
Spore was a disappointment by design. Will Wright prefered "The Sim's sales than Half Life's scores"[1]. They catered to the Sim's public. That's why you have a "design everything" feature. And mechanics so simple.
I remember sprinting through the game, realizing the phases had really simple and boring mechanics, and designing all stuff in less than a minute. When I finally reached the space phase it got a little meatier, but no enough to cater my interest for long. And It had severe interaction problems (I have an interstellar empire, but I have to navigate to each planet to collect its manufactured resources? Come on!)
It was a game with a premise for the hardcore strategy/sim fans that was made to be like the Sims. Biggest disapointment in gaming ever!
I think I probably spent less than 10 hours on the game.
It might be my worst disappointment in gaming.
While not just because of this issue, I now usually wait for games to be out for a couple months before I buy. That way I can see what the 'regular people' think about the game.
That being said, I was young and it is very possible that the pre-release reviews were bad and I just didn't notice.
Well, I wasn't exactly young at the time and I had the exact same experience as you did. A real disappointment after building up my expectations pretty high, but an opportunity to realize what's really important in life when moving through it.
Yep. And what people don't understand here is that EA isn't killing Maxis, they're shutting down the Emeryville studio. Half of Maxis was already at the Ears studio on the Sims and other work. Sim City will be maintained and probably be a slow but steady seller for the next 7 years. All the best developers from that studio will simply be moved to jobs in other studios.
Not to mention, a lot of these studios would have ended up bought by someone because, at the end of the day, they are investments geared and designed for an acquisition. Its not like EA came in there with machine guns and enslaved everyone. The point of these businesses is to make money first and make games second. There is no utopia where they aren't seeking buyers and a big paycheck. Its a rare shop that turns down "fuck you" money. Even indie-cred neckbeard hero Notch sold out to the "evil" MS empire.
Enjoy your games, but don't expect everything to last. I kinda like the way the system works in some ways. It means the talented and the risk-takers who do a good job get paid. It also means there's going to be new blood soon in the space the Sims and Sim City lived in. The same way the zombie and world-builder genre, which was just expensive and milquetoast AAA titles, is now the darling of smaller and indie shops with excellent results. I'd love a new company to take on the Sims market. The Sims product is good but the lack of a real co-op or multiplayer is inexcusable. The managerial and creative fuck ups at Maxis are legendary at this point. Its best to put this cow out to pasture. Shame the entire Maxis team didn't fold. This not the Maxis of old and whoever is left over now failed to contemporize long ago.
EA's strategy seems to be "Buy studio, make them shovel a couple incomplete games out of the door, close studio, repeat."
Okay, they're asshats. What I don't get is, how does this make them any money? They're basically strip-mining the games industry, is this really more profitable than actually making good games?
As a strategy, it's better than being profitable: it's predictable. The forecasts for the upcoming financial quarters are much more likely to be accurate when you only work with known IP.
The CEO is more beholden to analysts and stockholders than to customers. He has more to lose by failing expectations than he has to gain by exceeding expectations. Therefore, EA adopts a strategy that minimizes variance rather than maximizing profit.
But yes, it's profitable enough. Games and studios generally have more name-recognition than publishers. EA can take existing name-recognition on a series and generate large revenue from the first bad game they turn out. They launch a large marketing campaign, and by pushing pre-orders they can get more people to spend money on a game before they have an opportunity to find out what the product is that they're actually buying. At this point it's practically a science, and the market is only starting to push back (the latest Assassin's Creed may be doing a number on pre-orders).
The way I figure it, when value is being knowingly and unnecessarily destroyed, someone somewhere in the chain is being irrational. Given that EA is a public company, the obvious candidate for that somewhere is Wall Street. Your analysis seems to confirm that.
But the stock market is supposed to be hyper efficient nowadays such that it's practically impossible to outperform it even for the experts, let alone for random punters on the Internet.
What's the resolution to this paradox? Not a rhetorical question; I'm actually curious.
The problem is the stock market is somewhat disconnected from reality.
I need to elaborate this further because now it just seems to be some anti-capitalist snark (which I do not want it to be).
The way stocks were supposed to work is that you buy a part of a company keep it and make money by getting a part of their profits every year (called dividend). Todays problem is that we want to make more money, faster (which is not "wrong" intrinsically as some people might think, but it does not work with the "traditional" stock model). The reason it does not work is that it may take some time for a company to be profitable and even then they may want to keep some of their profits to invest in research etc. which keeps dividends small (sometimes even 0). The new way one tries to make money is to buy a stock while hoping to be able to sell it to someone else for more money in the future (nothing wrong about that either). The real problem is that this price is based on supply and demand/perceived value which might differ significantly from the actual value (worth of the company's physical assets, paid dividends, ...) - it is easier to see these differences on more tangible things like luxury watches, art, etc., which are nowhere priced for their physical value (a frame and some paint - does not seem to be worth much ...) but they are there for stocks, too.
Now to the "hyper efficient"-part: yes, that's true, the market is hyper efficient, as in it is not that easy to get money out, because that would mean that someone else leaves it on the table, but everything still happens in the "perceived value" point of view, in which you would have to compete, too, to make money with stocks.
The dilemma in which CEOs find themselves is that not all actions that are good for the company itself are good for the perceived value/stock price, at least not when you are forced to do "short-term thinking" (the CEO keeping his job, the trader making money now).
I know that Wall Street is the boogey man for the HN crowd but how in the world can Wall Street be the villain in this story?
The Sims was only completed because EA was able to prop up the studio while it was underdevelopment. They were able to do that because A) they are good at selling software and B) they were a large public company.
Since then the studio has had a couple of huge flops (Spore and SimCity online) as well as a few enjoyable but disappointing from a sales perspective releases. In an industry built on the blockbuster model, I'd say its surprising they've lasted this long. They have because they have been spending other peoples money. So if there was an inefficiency here, it was that the studio got too much leeway, not that it was shutdown too soon.
There is no paradox, because you started with a completely flawed conjecture.
No, I read the whole thread. I'm just having trouble understanding how a studio having failed at a basic business reality of their market, and thus being shutdown, has Wall Street to blame.
Wall Street, even as the completely generalized abstraction, doesn't have anything to do with this, other than a big video game publisher used some money generated there, to back a studio that has been unsuccessful at their job. If it had been a US governmental bailout or kickstarter that the financing came from, would not have changed that.
The idea is that they were set up for failure by the relentless push to drive higher profit margins. This approach is incompatible with long-term growth, as there are only so many people who will fall victim to the idea of buying a worse game than last year's edition yet still buy more and more expansions. EA pushes for day one profits seemingly without concern as to profits over the lifetime of the product. As soon as the product is unprofitable, they shut it down.
Again, this comes from the idea that they need to make their profits look better and better because their stockholders demand it, which is sometimes at odds with what the players are looking for.
Do you think Maxis failed on its own, or is there the possibility that EA milked it dry and left it to die? If the latter, why would they do that? Not because it's good for the company long-term, but because it makes their bottom line look good just before annual profit reports are coming out. Think about it: SimCity was rushed out to meet a deadline of the end of EA's fiscal year, which happens on March 31st. SimCity was released March 7th, 2013. What's today's date?
Maxis has been owned by EA for 17 or 18 years no? As part of the ownership by the public company EA, the studio was able to release and have sequels for one of the best selling games of all time. Further, said game was distinctive in its business model in comparison to other games released at the time (it being very much about after day one profits). That is, at least on the surface, evidence that being owned by EA does not preclude long term stewardship of a game/studio.
As far as the stockholders go, I can assure you that A) stock holders have no ability to influence the release schedule of a video game or B) care how profits are generated, only that they are. There is at least a passing argument that the massively successful franchise of the studio would not have been possible without those stockholders, and the studio certainly did not turn down the money when they were acquired.
Whether EA mismanaged Maxis specifically or their management is in general too fixated on short term profits is not the issue. "Wall Street", whatever that is, does not demand that and would more happily not be involved in those decisions. So is it possible that EA is mismanaging their studios in a misguided attempt to cook their books? Maybe, but if so that has been true for Maxis for going on 2 decades, 1 of which was hugely successful.
You can blame "Wall Street" all you want, but it seems a simpler explanation that in a blockbuster driven market, Maxis failed to deliver blockbusters. This isn't surprising in the least given most software projects fail and even more so with games. I find it surprising that Maxis lasted as long as it did quite frankly. An independent studio would probably not have survived Spore, and I think Maxis did largely because they were backed by "Wall Street".
Can we stop pretending that "Wall Street" is a completely non-thinking entity (/concept/idea/etc). The reason people talk about "Wall Street" is because we're talking about public companies, who are beholden to stockholders. "Wall Street" is the generic concept of stockholders. And the one thing stockholders as a generic concept ("Wall Street") was is profit growth. Because shrinking profits leads to lower stock price. It doesn't matter that you were profitable, if you weren't more profitable than last year, the generic concept of stockholders ("Wall Street") will, in a generic fashion, lose faith in your company. And if your stockholders lose faith in your company, they vote out your board of directors and replace them with people who will bring growing profits. It's not always the case (Amazon is a major exception), but in general, it holds true.
If you still don't think Wall Street has even an indirect say in what games get published when and at what quality, then I don't see a point in continuing this discussion. But I'll leave on the point of SpaceX not wanting to go public until they make it to Mars, because Elon doesn't believe that stockholders will let him take the risk of sending humans to another planet. Or, taking a step back from Wall Street and just talking investors, the idea from this very community that any exit for a startup is good and is favorable for your investors even if it leaves your customers high and dry. Or how about when Steve Jobs was pushed out of Apple because he wasn't making enough money? Apple raced to the bottom and lost, hard, in the pursuit of maximizing profit.
I'm not trashing the idea of Wall Street or of investors. This is EA's fault. But saying that investors don't influence a company's products is insane. Of course they do, to the fullest extent that the company will let them. Again, if you don't believe EA is completely controlled by their investors, take a look at the timing of the end of their fiscal year, the rushed release of SimCity, and the announcement of Maxis being shut down. That's not coincidence.
> The way I figure it, when value is being knowingly and unnecessarily destroyed, someone somewhere in the chain is being irrational.
Well, the model I see people using to describe EA basically amounts to buying studios with good long-term revenue prospects (known brands that, if consistently executed at a slightly below-average level, should maintain decent sales because the fans know what they're getting every time), and deciding to extract all of that future revenue all at once, by hyping up the latest incarnation of the series to extreme degrees while not bothering to execute at all. More sales now, less work now, no sales later.
If you want to stand by describing this as irrational, I wouldn't say the obvious candidate is EA shareholders. I'd say the obvious candidate is the studios who can't manage their brand well enough that it's worth more than the EA strip-mining approach. If you think that the long-term revenue stream has more "inherent worth", the studios are the ones squandering it.
(postscript -- I'm pretty sure I accidentally downvoted you when selecting a quote from your comment. I wish I could undo that.)
>But the stock market is supposed to be hyper efficient nowadays such that it's practically impossible to outperform it even for the experts
That's not true at all. Maybe in commodities, or foreign exchange or indexing, where algos can trade solely based on prices and public information it is true. But definitely not in individual stock picking. Domain knowledge is king here.
I'm not an efficient market hypothesis proponent in the least, but nearly every study, simulation, etc does in fact show that it is nearly impossible to beat the market via stock picking.
Also as an aside, commodities and foreign exchange are places where it is explicitly allowed to have non-public information...
This is pretty much how a deadly virus works, right? Infect a particular game brand (cell) by buying (infecting) it, generate enough new copies of the virus (selling the game), then destroy it and release the virus onto the next cells. If the analogy is correct, the game market will either die, find a cure and eject EA or EA adapts and finds a way to coexist such as not to kill the host cells anymore.
Not really: in this case the games sold by an infected game studio aren't copies of the original entity that go on to infect other game studios. They're more of a waste product. EA consumes game studios for sustenance and excretes a steady stream of sub-par sequels as it slowly digests its prey.
Apparently I haven't been clear enough, so let me rephrase: What DNA is to a virus, money is to EA. Selling games is how they get their money, which is then used to infect more games and destroying them all in the process. Well that's at least how my analogy was supposed to work.
I understood you, but your analogy doesn't work. Viruses are replicators, they infect cells to spawn new generations. EA is a monolithic entity that consumes studios to sustain itself, all without creating a single copy of itself. Money is food, not DNA.
To be honest, the virus might actually be more apt, if you change the kind of virus.
Take HIV for example: it attacks the immune system of the host, but is fairly difficult to transmit and relies on insufficient protection for that.
A studio that accepts a buyout from EA is like a person mainlining heroin using a needle that's been passed around a hundred different HIV+ heroin addicts. It gets the bug.
Sometimes it takes years for symptoms of illness to show. Some studios last decades before they waste away - and they last longer if they have proper treatment (in the case of Maxis, this was having Will Wright stay on board). But in the end it's incurable and terminal once treatment ceases, and the studio becomes weaker and skeletal before finally passing.
>Except when a company dies, no people actually die.
except that isn't always true. [0]
Suicide Rates Rising for Older U.S. Adults - Rates for 40-64 year-olds may be increasing due to financial circumstances, according to American Journal of Preventive Medicine
Are we really talking about suicide in a discussion about a company unsurprisingly shutting down?
It is not because it is EA, which have a really bad reputation (which they partly deserve), than we should have a discussion of such a low quality.
My second-hand understanding of the arrangement is that from 1997 until roughly the mid 2000s, Maxis's autonomy was mostly protected by Will Wright's personal clout (plus possibly some terms around the acquisition, if there were any). He was high-profile, a charismatic media figure, and very against moving to EA's main campus in Redwood City—partly to retain Maxis's autonomy, and partly just because he lived in the East Bay and didn't want to commute to the Peninsula.
It helped that the first post-acquisition new title from Maxis was The Sims, a massive financial success, which allowed EA to feel comfortable taking a hands-off approach and allowing the studio to do weird things, so long as the weird things brought in piles of revenue.
From the mid-2000s, though, EA started merging bits of Maxis in, closing the Walnut Creek office and moving those staff to Redwood City, but still leaving a smaller Maxis remaining in Emeryville, which continued to be headed by Wright, with considerable autonomy. He used that autonomy to lead the Spore (2008) development, an ambitious concept that was not a financial success (though it arguably kicked off the current resurgence of procedural content generation in games). And then he left the company in 2009. At that point I think many people in the industry considered it inevitable that the remaining Maxis would be moved to the main EA campus sooner or later.
Your second hand understanding is pretty accurate.
In the case of Maxis, it's not accurate or fair for the person to say that EA's strategy is to "Buy studio, make them shovel a couple incomplete games out of the door, close studio, repeat."
That ignores the fact that EA buying Maxis enabled Maxis to successfully finish and ship The Sims, which became the best selling PC game of all time. And that The Sims division was a major part of EA (one of three main studios), which made a huge amount of money over a long period of time.
You're correct to say that Maxis and The Sims franchise enjoyed autonomy and protection thanks to Will Wright, while he was at the company. But after he left, he didn't have much to do with it, and it was on its own.
Many of the people working The Sims and SimCity franchises were the original people from Maxis or the early days of The Sims at EA, and they did a wonderful job of carrying on without Will. The infamous problems of latest SimCity release were actually Origin's fault, which the Maxis people unsuccessfully fought against, and had to take the rap for.
Lucy Bradshaw managed The Sims and SimCity since EA acquired Maxis, but EA threw her under the bus by insisting that she make public statements that simply and obviously weren't true, in an attempt to justify Origin's idiotic and non-negotiable mistakes that they pushed on Maxis.
Ocean Quigley was the lead artist for SimCity and The Sims at Maxis since before EA acquired us. Ocean invented the beautiful yet practical hybrid z-buffered 2.5D / real time 3D "holodeck" technology that enabled The Sims 1 to run well on non-accelerated low-end PCs in 2000, which enabled it its widespread success and appeal to casual gamers and young kids (who inherit their older sibling's low end PCs).
Ocean's technical and artistic contributions were as important as Will's game design contributions, and he stuck around for much longer. He led the ground-up redesign of SimCity (2013), which I think was both true to the original game, and took it into a totally new territory, away from the terrible tiles, and re-oriented around free-form roads.
Ocean and other Maxis employees were rightfully frustrated by Origin's interference in SimCity (specifically their insistence on online play, and their initial public pretension that offline play was impossible). After the release, Ocean left to pursue his own projects. After working on Will's ideas for so many years, he has a lot of his own original ideas that he wanted to work on. He explained how it was time to step out of Will's shadow in this article [1], which I empathize with.
Maxis hired me in January 1997 to work on The Sims (before it was given that name), then EA bought Maxis in July 1997, then we shipped The Sims 1 in February 2000, and I left soon after the release.
Then I did some contracting for EA to develop user created content tools like The Sims Transmogrifier, and I worked for Will's own company, the Stupid Fun Club, while he was still working for EA on The Sims expansion packs and Spore.
At the time, SFC was just Will's side project for, well, doing stupid fun stuff. We did things that were outside of EA's scope like robotics and reality TV shows, including Empathy [2] and Servitude [3] (which were never aired), and researched and developed some of his entertainment, toy and game ideas.
After Will finished Spore, he left EA in 2009, and EA invested in SFC. Then I joined SFC full time, where we worked on various projects including producing a viewer-scripted TV show, Bar Karma, with Current TV. [4]
SFC was shut down after problems spinning off a company called HiveMind, that ended in lawsuits due to the melt-down and failure of a self-described "Serial Hackerpreneur" (cough, cough), who neglected to pay the rent, let alone secure the investments he was contractually obliged to, after which he baselessly accused Will of "atrocity" and "genocide", then failed to deliver on his blustering threat that he tweeted: "Looking for PR professionals to build awareness for "THE INCONVENIENT TRUTH ABOUT WILL", an exposé documentary, releasing on YouTube 6/2012."
>It was announced in early June 2012 that the entire project was on hold due to ongoing legal disputes between company executives. Said Wright, "Hivemind is still a company. But it has no money. No nothing. It's just sitting there because of the litigation. It is frozen. It's so complex and there's quite a bit of disappointment... We have to find out where this is going in the near term." On October 26, Wright and HiveMind co-founder Jawad Ansari stated they had settled their disagreements regarding the company. Wright said, "We are pleased to have reached a friendly and respectful resolution. Jawad’s entrepreneurial energy, passion for the expansion of the online game industry and tenacious execution brought the necessary elements together to build Hive Mind to where the operating team can take the Company forward."
>Game pioneer Will Wright’s personal gaming startup falls apart in litigation (exclusive) [6]
>“It didn’t work out at all,” Wright said. “Hive Mind is still a company. But it has no money. No nothing. It’s just sitting there because of the litigation. It is frozen. It’s so complex and there’s quite a bit of disappointment.”
>Ansari withdrew his lawsuit in Alameda, Calif., and in Delaware, the court appointed Wright, Randy Breen and Ansari as the board of Hive Mind. The litigation is still ongoing.
>To give you an idea of just how ugly this is getting, the guy who started all this, Jawad Ansari, recently tweeted that he’s looking for PR professionals to help him plug a YouTube “documentary” called “The Inconvenient Truth about Will”. Yeah, Jawad, if you have to start with the smear tactics, we’re just going to go ahead and assume you don’t have much of a case and are a bit of an ass.
>SimCity creator Will Wright settles lawsuit over Hive Mind studio control [8]
>Ansari released his own statement, adding: "During my 18 years in the business I have never met anyone who has the creativity and vision of Will Wright. Over the period of several months working with Will Wright, Will's mentorship helped me develop a deep understanding of players' psychology and thus the ability to see the world in dimensions that I did not know even existed. For this I would always be thankful to Will!"
Yeeeeeah, and he's sooooo sorry he took the money. [9]
EA has at least one other strategy, with EA Sports: every year they come out with a new and improved Football, Basketball, Hockey, Golf, etc. and people get it. Madden NFL has been going since 1988.
To be fair, EA Sports did discontinue some of their less popular games, such as Rugby and Cricket.
i can't speak for Madden because i'm not a fan/player. But for FIFA (a franchise that i've been playing since Road To World Cup 98), 2014 is easily the best one. They improved a shitton of stuff.
Also, they have FIFA Ultimate Team which has a whole meta game of players and cards (which i love).
The SimCity reboot and The Sims 4 were a bad joke. So it's not surprising. It was definitely EA's fault to guide SimCity and Sims 4 in the wrong direction. Less content, fake simulation, even more DLCs, always-on-DRM, smaller game worlds, more casual gameplay. EA was also named the worst company to work for in the U.S.
EA did a fairly poor job with SimCity, I agree. A very, very poor job. EA was named the worst company to work for in the US, but that was years and years ago. They've really done a better job at keeping their developers happy (I worked there two years ago as a dev). I mean sure, Alpha and Beta can still be brutal, but what game studio isn't like this? Overall, I enjoyed working at EA and would work there again if they didn't offer me such a shitty salary. A shitty, shitty salary. Pretty much the only thing I can complain about. Oh, and no free food.
there's a difference between "worst company" and "worst company to work for". worst company is voted upon by everyone. Everyone on the internet, which is the most vocal group, hates EA which is totally understandable.
Worst company to work for is voted by employees. Most people who work at EA enjoy their time there. They might not agree with some company decisions, but overall, it's a great place to work.
Please realize there is a difference and that list is also fairly biased. I mean, its fucked up how a video game company is worse than banks who take billions of money from people through fees, interests, and all other random shit.
yeah :( they offered me starting pay of 60k, which granted is not the worst. It's alot more than other jobs, but I just had a better offer somewhere else that I couldn't say no to (though not in games). I had other priorities that had to come first than my love for games :(
Bioware have successfully pivoted from rich story-driven RPG territory into modern military shooter (butwithlasers!) territory, which seems like it will be predictably profitable for at least another decade.
Interesting how no one has mentioned stock buybacks yet. These job cuts are a cost cutting exercise, giving the company more funds to buy back stock with, making the stock price go up, meaning the executives get heftier bonuses.
The "fire people to buy back stock in order to make the stock price go up" strategy is extremely popular in this economic environment.
Coincidentally I was just looking back into the state of city simulation games the other day. On my list of "Games I have played beyond any reasonable number of hours" is Sim City 4 with the various mods available. I was, like most, disappointed with the 2013 offering. Cities XL never really piqued my interest, and I've also switched entirely to Linux for my desktop needs.
Then the other day I heard about an upcoming title called "Cities: Skylines", which seems like it has promise from a gameplay standpoint. Even better, it's cross-platform to both Linux and Mac.
Edit: It's interesting that the recommended hardware for Linux is a lower bar than on Windows (see bottom of https://www.paradoxplaza.com/cities-skylines). Can anyone with a game dev or graphics background speculate on that?
I quite like sim building games. My most recent favourite is Banished http://www.shiningrocksoftware.com/game/ Not nearly as complex as sim city but still very enjoyable
Wow, this looks great. I think I've actually seen this earlier sometime, but dismissed it since it was only available on Windows. Now that I actually have a decent Windows laptop, I'll definitely try it out.
I love games from Paradoxplaza some of the best strategy games such as Hearts of Iron 3 and of course my all time favorite Europa Universalis 4 which sucked away hours and days of my life are made by them
I am cautious about C:SL. I mean, it's a day one buy but my hopes are not super high. Their last title, Cities in Motion 2 - was something of a hot mess, with a design that really didn't gel and was in most respects worse and less fun than CiM 1.
Plus, they build their games in Unity, which is....not the best for these sorts of games.
> is this really more profitable than actually making good games?
I know I'm going to sound like a terrible elitist snob, but the target audience for today's mainstream video games are not exactly the top layer of humanity. It's pretty much a tale of milking the stupid, i'm afraid.
Historically, studios either put out zero games or one game. I think it's the fairly extreme outliers that do it over and over and most of them deal in sequels. If you look inside the game industry, I think I would be hard pressed to do a second game if I made games. It doesn't look like an easy feat to keep the team magic working. Likewise, there seems to be no shortage of up and comers that want to make a new game. The studio might not be as valuable as we want to think.
Which would you bet more money on: Maxis coming up with a new hit game concept or the masses going ape over sim city 2015 on ps4? And by "ape" I mean willing to buy it for over $30. I have a hard time with both options, just like ea.
Pretty good strategy from a financial perspective if you consider game purchasing to be a zero-sum game. If your average consumer is willing to spend $XX on games, and $YY is going to solid competitor ZZ, then acquiring and shutting down ZZ, removing them from the game industry, frees up that $YY to be spent on EA games.
What I don't understand about that strategy is what prevents the acquired employees from re-forming as a new company? Are there non-competes in place? Is it difficult to get financing to form a AAA game company? I'm presuming that, regardless of what happens, it takes a while.
>What I don't understand about that strategy is what prevents the acquired employees from re-forming as a new company?
Nothing prevents this, there had been many studios by former employees of a shut down studio (e.g. Ensemble -> Robot, Pandemic -> Killzone, Incognito -> Lightbox, Big Huge Games -> Impossible etc. etc). However, usually the reason a studio had been shut down was its poor performance and not some evil marketing plan so the respawned studios inherit the problems of the original studio complicated with the talent drain that happens during such a transition.
It is very difficult to get financing for a AAA game company since the industry is so hit-driven. Moreover, it'd be rather difficult to find investors just after the studio you worked for just shut down due to poor performance.
I hope that is EA's strategy, as it will end them.
The overhead of entering the games industry is cheaper than ever, and as a result we are seeing more and more independent game developers successfully penetrating the market.
EA survive off of Madden and FIFA licenses. They don't have to spend that much money on improving the game year after year, but millions of people purchase them almost religiously.
Agree with @interesting_att - it's all about EA Sports. As much as I despise EA, even I get sucked into FIFA. Their sports franchise will support one hundred studio fuck-ups - annual minor updates are as good as owning a money printing press.
Maxis had a nearly 18 year run after the EA purchase. A lot of independent studios die over that sort of timeframe. They released every entry in the fairly successful Sims series, as well as two well regarded entries for SimCity.
It's been a while since they put out anything special, but overall the company seems to have done well by EA.
I doubt the EA name will continue to be valuable. I've already learned not to buy any EA games as it'll be garbage. I have no doubt that the average consumer will start to see that soon.
It was a blessing in disguise when EA started Origin and stopped selling their shovelware on Steam. Now I don't need to worry about accidentally purchasing one of their games!
I don't think the EA brand is worth much. It took a big hit to its reputation with the always-on DRM strategy, and it's widely regarded as a crappy place to work.
Sales, Marketing and Accounting departments are filled with people whose only job is to think how to make more money for the company. Is that covered in the core beliefs of Behavioral Science?
You're missing the point. They don't think about how to maximise profit. They think about how to hit their sales target, how to run successful marketing and how to perform their accounting function.
Assuming they even do that. Their daily thoughts are more likely to be : How can I make sure my superiors notice I perform my role. How can I make sure I don't fuck this up. What do I need to do to get a promotion. I don't feel fulfilled, I think I'll go find a job elsewhere, I wonder where I should start looking. etc. etc.
When you posted these comments were you thinking : how does posting on HN maximise my profit ?
Let's not forget about human resources: filled with people whose only job is to think how to make more money for the company by spending less on employees.
This is just my opinion, though semi-backed by conversations I've had with people who work at EA.
EA Gameplan in a nutshell.
1) Force studio to make changes to a game that benefit the EA but have no tangible (or very little) benefit to the customers (Forcing use of Origin, Sims being online only, etc..)
2) Act surprised when the proverbial shit hits the fan with angry customers.
3) Let said customers know that "you're sorry" and they "have been heard" "loud and clear".
4) Close studio that you forced to make the game breaking changes (or at a minimum lay off most of the staff)
So much smoke has been blown about these things, it has almost been overlooked that SimCity apparently just wasn't a very fun game. Tiny cities, bugs, overly-complicated simulator that was never really taken advantage of, etc.
Had they just delivered something like SC3 with snazzy graphics, I think the silent majority (such as myself) would have purchased and played the hell out of it without a second thought to the Origin/online issues.
I played it on a slow 3g connection in Bangladesh, and it mostly worked. What really killed it for me was the feeling that the feedback you got from the game wasn't consistent with the internal state of the simulation leading you to take counterproductive actions.
It certainly wasn't ideal and a legitimate issue for a lot of people. But at the same time there was a group of huge loudmouths who went on the warpath because piracy/paranoia/EA hatred/whatever.
The whole SC incident bothers me because there was so much screaming about the online stuff. Yet it took two weeks before you started seeing gameplay reviews which finally started admitting "Hey, this just isn't very fun..."
EA brought this on themselves, so they deserve it. But I think a good game would have survived the furor. SimCity4 was a very long-tail title. (And it was pretty broken out-of-the-box, and only really playable with mods.)
Sim city, the very definition of a single player game, forced in to some sort of Frankenstein online game for no real purpose.
Gamers had had enough and sim city made a convenient rallying point. It's a bad trend that a lot of games are going through they try and force you to enjoy some sort of multiplayer or social mode with no benefit to the single player experience. And no way to turn it off.
I wonder if DICE came to the negotiation table more prepared and/or with something up their sleeve. It could be that EA is hands off so long as a studio produces highly profitable titles. As soon as there's a dip, snip snip.
It's widely agreed that Battlefield has been on the decline since 3 (3 being the first game released under EA). Bioware has been putting out exceedingly mediocre games since their purchase, not to mention are the laughing stock of many gamers.
Calling Mass Effect 2 and 3 "exceedingly mediocre" puts you in a camp that is, by pretty much any metric, very fair from the mainstream. And I wonder who these "many gamers" are who think BioWare is a laughingstock. Do elaborate, please.
I, for one, was extremely disappointed in Mass Effect 2 as compared to the original. As a result, I didn't buy the third.
Mass Effect, was, in my opinion, truly inimitable. While the sequels may have kept the setting and had very high production values, at their core they were little more than a sequence of cover-based setpieces and cutscenes.
Dragon Age 2 was even more of regression from Dragon Age: Origins. Origins may not have had quite the same depth as truly old-school CRPGs such as Baldur's Gate or Planescape: Torment, but it took many ideas from that heritage and translated it into something indubitably modern.
I wouldn't call BioWare a laughingstock, but they certainly haven't fared well creatively under EA.
Mass effect 2 was perhaps the best game in the series, but it was a very different game than mass effect 1. While the core mechanics were the same, it was extremely episodic and the plot was flimsy. I recall ME3 reeled it back a bit, doing away with some of the annoying exploration stuff, but suffered from third installment syndrome.
I'm sorry, but last I recall ME3 was a 20-30hour long game that is way more than just a 10-minute ending sequence. Maybe criticism of it should take that into consideration?
I don't expect to convince you otherwise (honestly, I don't expect that of anybody on the Internet, though I still try sometimes), but did you watch the linked video?
The critic (and a whole bunch of other people) did enjoy the game, and the series. Overall, I don't regret the time spent playing it. If people didn't enjoy the ME series, no one would have cared about the ending.
The short of it is that while the second installment is always a challenge, being forced to face the reality of being a sequel instead of a stand-alone story, the successful sequel usually ends up passing the buck by focusing on buildup and universe expansion. Often the sequel jumps genres or settings.
The third installment is then charged with culmination, building up tension even more before tying it all up in a satisfying manner, without the option of switching it up yet again. If it's in 3D, that means they couldn't figure it out and opted for a second sequel instead.
The fourth installment is, of course, practically impossible, and tends to be a prequel or a spinoff.
I feel exactly like you, and I'm glad I'm not alone.
For some reason though we're the exception here. Most people seem to have enjoyed ME2 more than ME1 because nobody seems to care about having an actual coherent storyline as opposed to a bunch of one-off missions, fancy graphics and a character with a recognizable face from TV.
Personally speaking, I preferred ME2 greatly because it was a modern game in the good senses of the word: competent mechanics, enjoyable combat, and a good-enough story that was presented well enough as to be able to effectively stir emotional reactions that I appreciated. ME3 continued this trend--its general rep as "ME2 but more and better" is a compliment to ME2, which I feel like is a game that could have come out today and nobody would have felt it was out of place. In terms of mechanics and structure, it was ahead of its time, and it's still very fun for me to play today.
On the other hand, the original Mass Effect is unplayable to me; that the narrative is a little (not a lot, IMO, despite retroactive claims to the contrary) tighter gets lost when the game is too frustrating to play, with unsatisfying core gameplay when you get out of menu hell to even play it. I liked many of the ideas in it--the Mako was a great idea with a ton of potential--but execution, and arguably the technology stack they used, was severely lacking. As such, ME1 is a product of that weird transitional era in games where few people seemed to really have a handle on what they were doing--a game like the original Half-Life has aged better than the ME1, and it came out many years before.
Now, isn't it funny that that bears no resemblance to hurf blurf fancy graphics recognizable face hurf blurf? But that's a real nice cross you've nailed yourself to, don't let me stop you from indulging in your self-righteous enlightenment.
That's rather hyperbolic. Battlefield 4 has done reasonably well - about 70% of the sales of Battlefield 3 since its release (1.5 years vs. 4 years).
As for Bioware, the success of the Dragon Age franchise both in terms of reviews and sales is indisputable. SWTOR is also profitable at a recurring revenue stream even though it's not huge.
I have no love for EA but there is a reason they make money - they do just enough to crank em out.
> It's widely agreed that Battlefield has been on the decline since 3 (3 being the first game released under EA).
This is so wrong, it's not even funny. DICE was acquired by EA 10 years ago. All Battlefield games except the original one were created since then.
Also it's generally accepted that BF3 was the best Battlefield game so far, with BF4 probably going to overtake it in customer satisfaction with the current Premium program.
Lets not forgot that EA took the BioWare name slapped it on a completely different studio and released mediocre games with it. DICE is in fact the exception, though they are like the golden goose, then consistently produce quality titles, I expect that if that were to change EA would attempt to terminate them as well.
DICE has barely been able to release a non-Battlefield game since EA bought them, despite a much more varied output before acquisition. I imagine that isn't too great for employees at the time who didn't want to make pew pew simulators for all eternity.
Exceptions to the rule:
- Mirror's Edge
- Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (w/ Criterion)
- Medal of Honor (multiplayer only)
And that's it. That they weren't allowed to make a straight up sequel to Mirror's Edge, and only now are coming out with a "reboot" says a lot to me about EA's control over their output: crank out Battlefield games or lose funding.
Bioware has had some major issues under EA as well. DICE works because they create games that work really well with EA's strategy: hollywood-esque action games for the masses
Interestingly, one of the DICE founders (Patrick Söderlund) now runs both EA Games and EA Sports - meaning most of the game franchises except for the mobile and casual stuff.
This is where my curiosity lies. I wonder if the DICE founders were very sharp, knew what they were getting into, and had the leverage to set the kind of terms that would maximize their chances of success.
For example, I think they decided to keep the studio in Stockholm. That might have went a long way to keep the EA influence down and letting them focus on building blockbuster titles.
Perhaps EA is a sink or swim kind of organization (on that level)? In a harsh kind of way. In reality most franchises do eventually sink.
That might be what they do, but I doubt it is fully intentional, since this is a remarkably stupid "game plan" which makes little financial sense. In the case of SimCity they have murdered what was once a popular and highly-profitable franchise.
Rather it is likely a combination of fantastically stupid middle managers driven by conflicting and dysfunctional incentives coming down from upper management and the board.
(BTW I just described 90% of apparently-stupid corporate behavior.)
except that it's working very well for them. Have you taken a look at the stock price recently? Apparently customers opinions aren't bothering them too much
It doesn't matter. They aren't selling deodorant -- their customers in 10 years aren't going to be the same group of people as their customers today. See also: Hasbro, Disney.
As far as I'm concerned, the time to mourn is upon the acquisition by EA. On that day, the studio is already dead to me. By the inevitable day the name has finally had all "value" squeezed out of it by the corporate behemoth that is now EA, I have long since done my mourning.
>As far as I'm concerned, the time to mourn is upon the acquisition by EA.
Warning: Possible Spoilers Ahead
Origin did mourn the EA acquisition; Ultima 7 Black Gate is littered with forebodings over EA. The serial killers Elizabeth and Abraham carry the initials of the company and leave a trail of butchery throughout Britannia. The shapes of the EA logo--a triangle, cube, and sphere--are re-purposed as "generators" which undermine magic everywhere. Even the horror lurking beyond the eponymous black gate--the Guardian--is possessed of a personality based on EA's hostile business practices. The EA buyout loomed over the whole production of Ultima 7, ultimately producing one of the series most conscienceless, unreasonable, single-minded villains. More info can be found here:
One can only dream what would have followed Serpent's Isle had Origin retained control of their creative processes. All the magic in Garriott's dreamworld stood for nothing against the dead-hearted accountants of EA.
Guys, EA is plenty easy to hate, and if you want to hate them, more power to you, but the idea that they snatched up maxis, killed it, and looted its corpse is just not compatible with the timeline.
Will Wright got rich and bored and left. The fundamental landscape of computer games changed. The staff turned over in huge quantity, obviously, because 18 years. And the big new idea for the studio was interesting technology that never quite gelled as a game.
SimCity had one of the earliest form of DRM I remember. The almost-impossible to Xerox manual (highly reflective paper so photocopies would come black) was used to answer a question the game asked you, about the population of a specific city on a certain page of the manual.
This is not DRM, it's copy protection. DRM is about stopping you from using a product you paid money for - as Wikipedia puts it "[controling] the use of digital content and devices after sale." No matter how many years in the future you travel, no matter what happens to Maxis, the original Sim City will still work (assuming you still have the manual, and hardware capable of playing it.)
I remember hand-copying the numbers from a black on dark dark grey crinkled photocopy acquired from a friend of a friend in my spare time during classes in high school. Boy was I glad to finish that... Then I discovered that the PC version didn't look anywhere near as good as the B&W Mac version :(
I remember this style of copy-protection in another game released the same year (1989). Indianapolis 500: The game would ask a question that would be answerable from the manual.[1]
The title (and of the article) is inaccurate. The title talks about Maxis as a whole closing, but the article and third party sources list just one (admittedly BIG) location closure.
The Maxis brand may very well continue and appears to be operating at other physical locations.
Maxis Emeryville is Maxis. The Will Wright Maxis, the Sims, SimCity and Spore Maxis. The real Maxis, if you will.
There are some other things EA does under the Maxis brand, but that's just rebranded EA Play stuff. The Maxis people cared about is dead. (Though The Sims isn't, that was spun off into its own studio before Spore was made.)
Maxis split up when they closed the Walnut Creek office in 2004, with SimCity and Spore (and Will Wright) going to Emeryville, everyone else going to Redwood Shores. Will Wright left in 2009. There is no "real Maxis", and if there was, some Maxis expat older than me would tell you it died back in the 90s or whatnot.
Maxis had a few big hits and a lot of colossal failures. Including some that never made it to the public. I guess the balance sheet just finally shifted too far in the wrong direction. This isn't necessarily EA's fault; studios that fail go out of business one way or another.
There seems to be a lot of misinformation going around.
They're chopping off the people of Maxis but the name will remain (ahem!). Same for the IP, it will live on and be farmed to (an)other studio(s).
(I don't side with EA. Sad day for SimCity lovers. Maxis is a mammoth of history and should not be chopped up. My thoughts for the devs that lost jobs...)
People are what make game companies great, not names or logos. There's something to say for maintaining the direct line of employee descendants to the original Sim City.
Absolutely true. I've purchased a few sequels over the years only to find somebody made the game in a different place with different people and turned my beloved franchise to crap.
Wasn't this a strategy one empire used to control the territories it annexed? Take over, split the population, and move them to other cities. Forced them to integrated, and made revolt impossible.
Kind of sad when I think back of some really awesome Maxis games like SimLife and SimAnt. But Maxis hasn't really been in a position to make the kinds of games they used to have they? Seems really odd to shut it down during GDC though, could make for some awkward badges over at the convention center.
Bummer. I'm not necessarily a fan of their titles today, but I grew up with them and they have a very special place in gaming history. Maxis, you will be missed.
It's not even released yet but it's better? When will this early access bubble burst? There's cities xl as well (with the benefit of having actually been released), how would you rate it?
People always make EA out as some comic book villains but they're not doing this to spite gamers or against the wishes of the previous company owners. The creators go into these deals willingly and sometimes it's either that or bankruptcy. What I'm saying is EA are less like lions hunting studios in their prime and more like hyena's going for the weak and wounded, or ones who just want out. My analogies are worse than EA.
I seem to be sensing a recuring theme here with EA buying well-loved studios and then slowly killing them off before eventually shutting them down for good.
SimCity probably changed my life. I grew up with SimCity on DOS and then Super Nintendo, and then SimCity 2000. Then The Sims came out when I was a teenager and blew my mind all over again.
As an adult, I consider myself to be very strategic and analytical. I believe I can attribute some of my refinement in this sense to games like SimCity and Civilization. It's sad to see such a storied label gutted.
C&C - Red Alert 2 is the best RTS game I have played so far.
The thing about EA is, its probably right. If a game does not perform well, its better to cut losses as the game industry is very unforgiving. But somehow all these studios closing down, does feel like the original theme or charisma of the game that they are associated with is lost.
I was talking to a friend who works at EA and said most of them were just being moved to EA Redwood Shores. The Maxis studio was a satellite studio out of Emeryville and teams were being migrated to Redwood Shores. "Nothing has changed, Sims 4 and such are still being made" -EA Employee
The internet has made this seem blown way out of proportion.
I worked for Maxis during the big closure in 2004, when the company was in Walnut Creek. A small group moved to Emeryville, many people (including the Sims teams) moved to Redwood Shores, and some some people didn't make the transition. Think of it like layoffs, following on the colossal failure that was The Sims Online (although, ironically, what's left of that team had already moved to EARS).
This is pretty much the same thing. Spore was a disappointment, SimCity was never a massive moneymaker, and whatever games they've been working on since got cancelled. The Emeryville shop has had a decade to produce a hit and it hasn't worked out. Some folks have already been laid off. Some folks will get moved to EARS. Some folks will be looking for a new job. The cycle continues.
It's unlikely that any of the individuals responsible for the specific versions of whatever old game you fondly remember playing are still around. At the end of the day, what you're lamenting is the loss of an office building and a logo.