EA Artist, Soon To Be Laid Off, Burns EA Management, Discusses Failed MMO | Hacker News Reader

EA Artist, Soon To Be Laid Off, Burns EA Management, Discusses Failed MMO

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Link to blog: http://ealouse.wordpress.com/

I worked on Warhammer Online for nearly two years before it left the offices of Climax Entertainment in Nottingham, England. When I arrived the game was already a couple of years in development, but the focus was on the technology not the game. We had no game, just a test area running on a local server.

There was a design department consisting of 10 people, 4 working on environment and level design, 6 working on quests, the magic system, and general game mechanics. There were 10 artists, 4 animators, and 13 programmers.

You'd think we would get somewhere with such a large team, but we didn't other than developing the underlying tech. The main reason the game design didn't progress was a second design team led by Paul Barnett was sitting in the office above us coming up with another vision for WHO without any interaction between the 2 departments other than meeting with the lead designer occasionally.

When the news came of Climax stopping development of the game it was not surprising to most people working on the title. You could see it coming for months before it happened. It looks as though that continued at Mythic although they did at least manage to ship.

I left a few months before the announcement was made and ended up having two exit interviews. The first was a standard set of questions given by the studio's human resources deaprtment. The second was with a representative of Games Workshop looking for answers as to why development was not progressing as they had hoped. They were in the dark about what was happening with their IP and wanted answers.

Did you make it clear to Games Workshop why things weren't progressing properly?

Yes, I just told the truth of what was happening and they seemed to take it on board. But at the same time I think they were quite powerless to do anything. So much money had been spent, I believe at that point they needed a sustained gamer base of around 300,000 if they released within a year to make the investment work. I have no idea what that grew to once the switch to Mythic had been made.

I would be annoyed to if I was games workshop, having spent decades painstakingly creating the IP to have a flop of an MMO created that was clearly pushed out before it was done.

It's hardly unprecedented for games based on existing franchises to turn out less than stellar. They knew what they were getting in to.

Absolutely. It's Games Workshop's IP, it's theirs to make sure that they only entrust it to people who will make good use of it and theirs to make sure those projects are well run.

Reminds me about a story about JK Rowling during the early negotiations with Warner Bros about the Harry Potter films. They all sat down and Warners came up with a list of things that they said they were going to chang. JK Rowling stood up, wished them good luck and went to leave. They asked where she was going and she simply replied that they obviously had very clear ideas they wished to follow and that was fine, just not with her characters or books.

Now you can argue that she was being precious, awkward or whatever (I was going to write unrealistic but as she got her way she was being perfectly realistic it would appear) but whatever else she was doing, she was managing her IP in a way many others could learn from.

Well she used an old car buying trick. Never take the first offer, walk out at least once.

That might be true though she never changed her position on things - hence the almost entirely British cast, films that remain largely true to the books (within the limits of crushing 700 pages into two and a bit hours) and so on.

Obviously it helps with negotiations when you're holding all the cards as she was - owned what looks like it will be the most valuable franchise in film history, undoubtedly had competitors queuing round the block, didn't need the money...

I love the W40K universe (it resonated with me as a teenager), I'm thankful at least that Relic has treated it so well.

A little outside perspective: This is exactly the way it goes with a huge percentage of IT-related projects, in many serious industries. The "Enterprise" is screwed.

I think the key factors are politics and managerial ignorance - there appears to be a general consensus that the most qualified person for the job is the a. biggest suck up and b. the least technically knowledgeable guy/gal available.

The problem with having politicals in senior positions is that they will, by their nature, happily abandon honesty + humility - the two most important qualities required by devs/management for any software project to even have a chance of something approaching sane completion.

Unfortunately politics and honesty/humility are not compatible.

Luckily there are companies out there that 'get it', but depressingly few.

>The problem with having politicals in senior positions

This is a problem having politicals in any position of power what so ever.

The old saw about how the only person who should be in power is the person who doesn't want to be in power, huh?

Well, to be honest I think in some future time people will find it so strange that there was a time when decisions about critical aspects of a country where in the hands of people who were only experts at making people like them.

This is why creating an "advanced technology" or "R&D" unit in the business is very risky. You have to be sure you actually do get the elite, and not just the people who want to play with shiny toys and have the connections to get the plum assgnments.

That's very true, and sadly it's also true that most of the time, the people choosing the purported elite are the least qualified to do so.

Sometimes it feels this is so because we have a lot less number of ruins when it comes to IT related projects. Stop construction of a building you have a gigantic half constructed bloat of concrete and bricks. Nothing can be reused (except for the land). Stop construction of a program and you will have some files which can be deleted, all the machines are general purpose and all this can be reused.

I think it is partially because nobody has figured out how to reliably estimate project costs and timetables for software. If houses routinely came with estimates like "We think this house will cost between $200k and $2.6 million to build, and it could be done in between 6 months and 10 years, and at the end it may or may not have a bathroom", every general contractor in the country would be in the unemployment line.

"Oh, the wizards burned through another $300,000 last month. Well, who knows what those wizards do. Tell them to get the payroll system ready by next month, OK?"

I think the problem is more fundamental than that. The requirements for a house are pretty much static. The requirements for an application are often in constant flux.

I think the requirements for the house change a lot more than you think. There's definitely a push/pull with the client in civil engineering as well. And for contractors, oh boy, do they deal with clients changing things on them constantly.

I don't have much faith in most Enterprisey teams to ship good software even if they have a thorough concrete spec. We love to blame changing / incomplete specs, but I'd imagine that most dysfunctional teams would manage to bone up a perfect spec anyway.

The largest problem is that the people telling you what they want are not good enough to through every possible path the user may want to go down. This leads to specs that are ambiguous at best, contradictory at worst. It takes a good developer to see the hidden things in the spec and raise the questions that need to be asked before the development goes too far down a bad path.

Programmers have it worse: http://ifaq.wap.org/computers/architects.html

What makes up a house is generally understood. A application or game is often a custom job with all sorts of different features and functions. Any decent company should be measuring these things as best they can. It appears that is often isn't done. It's remarkable that EA hasn't been able to do this since they have a bevy of projects that they should be able to use as a rough yard stick.

The analogy fails though because most houses are build in a standardized way, software would have to be pretty much wholly the result of picking and matching preexisting components.

Houses probably aren't the best comparison. Commercial real estate is probably better, being a larger investment and with more interests pulling in different directions.

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y17/jamesinclair/IMG_6378.j...

A huge hole in the middle of Boston's Downtown Crossing shopping district.

The historic Filene's department store building was torn out, to be replaced with a 38 story tower. Funding evaporated. The project stalled in November of 2008.

  The software entity is constantly subject to pressures for  
  change. Of course, so are buildings, cars, computers. But 
  manufactured things are infrequently changed after 
  manufacture; they are superseded by later models, or 
  essential changes are incorporated into
  copies of the same basic design. Callbacks 
  of automobiles are ready quite infrequent; field changes of 
  computers somewhat less so. Both are much less frequent than 
  modifications to fielded software.

  In part, this is so because the software of a system 
  embodies its function, and the function is the part that 
  most feels the pressures of change. In part it is because 
  software can be changed more easily--it is pure thought- 
  stuff, infinitely malleable.

- Fred Brooks, No Silver Bullet

Good essay but I don't think he adequately addressed the problem of transaction costs for changing software, either in process or later updating, of course that wasn't his primary point (it has been a while since I read it and I could be misremembering).

I think you've just described government contracting.

Ahem:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Parliament_Building#Ti...

> you will have some files which can be deleted

I sure hope nobody deletes files after stopping work on a project. What a waste. Storage is so incredibly cheap...

Agreed. Putting files on tape and sending them to Iron Mountain is the new Delete button.

I agree. There is no field of human endeavor (except war) where you can spend so much and have so little to show for it, as the enterprise software business.

I don't know about the enterprise area, but when this happens in the gamedev industry (and it happens a lot), it's extra depressing because 90%+ of the people working on it will have poured their life and soul into it and really care. We're not talking individuals in a sea of office drones.

Part of the problem is that "release early, release often" is hard to do when it comes to entertainment products. MMOs & social games are starting to change that, but nothing close to the sort of pivoting you can do with, say, a productivity web app.

Yes, everyone who works on software for any company other than gaming doesn't "really care" at all. We don't care if your ATM transaction works flawlessly. We don't care if the health monitors keep you alive while you're in a hospital bed. We don't care if you accidentally show up on a police blotter because a database went corrupt somewhere.

Nope, but if we were working on games, we would care then.

You're trying to attack something I never even said. OP was talking about the "enterprise", which is known for its low-hanging fruit of embarrassingly terrible software. You seem to be talking about specialist systems software for banks, medical engineering, etc. or even software in general.

Well, that's because bank and medical software usually falls under the "enterprise" umbrella. So, while you may be right that a lot of enterprise software is terrible, there are projects in said enterprises that work great and for which people developing them care a lot. You generalized, so he/she struck back with a general statement.

Wait, I'm generalising?

silverbax88 interpreted my

"I don't know about the enterprise area"

to mean

"Yes, everyone who works on software for any company other than gaming doesn't "really care" at all"

And I'm the one jumping to conclusions?

All I know is I've yet to meet someone in gamedev who doesn't care about the product they're working on. Probably because the pay is much lower for the same level of skill as elsewhere, so you won't find anyone doing it for the money. Have I met software developers in other areas who don't give a crap? Lots. Have I met ones who care? Also lots. None of this contradicts anything I've said.

Your sarcasm is wrong, because you are claiming the converse of what pmjordan claimed. Its a common logical fallacy.

The one thing about large enterprise projects is though, you can usually convince the mismanagers that it's good for their career, and the mismanagers end up disliking the competent programmers. If you're a vulture or a hyena a large IT project can become like a elephant corpse, easy pickings. Convince the mismanagers to move competent people to your team in exchange for your yes men. Then find a piece of infrastructure you need for your project and offer to build it for the larger project. This is basically an excuse to use their infrastructure, db servers, test servers, etc. Use this to get buy in to slip your own schedule so you have time to deal with the inevitable feature creep. Go to the design and planning meetings and suggest new and exciting technologies that they can figure out. When it doesn't work, take the hardware they req'd off their hands for the infrastructure you offered to build them. Make sure you integrate your project to the infrastructure first (you can always pitch it as reducing risk to the large project) so they can't make any changes to it with out breaking production code.

But why would I want to do all these things for the benefit of a toxic organization? That system feeds off people who try to do the right thing, then it chews them up and spits them out. In fact it relies on there being people who will do the right thing even tho' it means extra stress and no extra reward. Organizations like that deserve to collapse under their own weight.

Same reason millionaires want more money: it's about the game.

Not quite.

I read it as a strategy for firewalling off a section of the organisation from the useless people, which enables you do enjoy your work.

... For the benefit of the management tier above that allowed the toxic situation to develop in the first place. You can bet that you won't see any of the profits yourself, and they're laughing all the way to the bank, they took their eyes off the ball and still scored.

It's not as simple as that.

Firstly, money isn't everything for most people. Enterprise work can be interesting and rewarding, because you deal with problems that are quite different to the consumer space. If you can escape the toxic situations somehow, that is enough for many people

Secondly, enterprise work can be rewarding financially. Contract rates of $70-$150/hour mean that you make pretty decent money very reliably. Those rates let you hire pretty talented people, and if you can firewall them off from the wider issues in the company you can do pretty good work.

"I'm sick of seeing EA outsource"

My country is poor and lots of developers work in outsourcing firms from the first world. The funny thing is that a friend of mine does class assignments for kids in American universities, perpetuating the cycle of outsourcing need.

This comment needs to be stickied, printed, whatever so that people can ALWAYS see it. This one bit of insight is key to what's happening with American technical talent and managers.

I see MBA students who would happily outsource their work and have no moral qualms about it. They will turn around and work for companies where they will outsource work because they are only thing about 1 thing - cost.

My wife's company is in the process of outsourcing their financial work. Utter failure. I can't even describe what a fucked up process it is with internal financial work being done in 2-3 developing countries. But why outsource it? So managers can cut costs enough to get their quarterly bonuses.

> My wife's company is in the process of outsourcing their financial work. Utter failure. I can't even describe what a fucked up process it is with internal financial work being done in 2-3 developing countries. But why outsource it? So managers can cut costs enough to get their quarterly bonuses.

Replace "outsource" with "computerize" and you have a common complaint from 15 years ago, made by people ignorant to the possibilities of computers.

Outsourcing is not a silver bullet, and it's not easy. Does that mean that outsourcing is always a bad idea, and only ever decided by stupid managers? Of course not. Just like the fact that many software projects are failures doesn't make software a bad idea.

"So we shut up and did what we were told, by people too afraid to tackle real problems. It is a culture of fear [...]"

In my experience, this is passing the buck. Culture is not something dictated by management. Culture is something that every person in an organization takes part in. Anyone can change it any time they like. It just takes a little brass. Shutting up and doing what you're told is not good enough. I've seen it happen in most of the failed startups I've worked for (3-4). When people relinquish responsibility for the well-being of the company and the culture, everyone is the worse for it. It often takes hard work to have your voice heard.

I'm going through this now with a company I just joined that has kludged their codebase into a massive steaming pile of untestable horse shit. There's tons of bugs and development moves crazy slow. The tech lead/architect hasn't really done any architecture beside accepting product's piecemeal direction and submitting to design by accretion. I don't plan to accept things as they are and just keep my head down. I plan to make a difference.

Most people are more afraid of what they might become than what they might fail to become. Never back down.

The curse of the leader is that you cannot lead a group of people out of somewhere if they don't really want to leave. If you try, you end up becoming one of them.

I agree that corporate culture is dynamic and that you can make a difference, but you need to find if there is a group of people that is willing to change. Then you need to understand and put in concrete terms the vision that the group already have but does not quite understands. If there is not vision, the only option is to move on.

This depends heavily on the situation. It from the letter it sounds like the most realistic outcome of making waves is getting fired. Incompetence can become well rooted and surprisingly competent at protecting itself. If I were in this situation, I would keep my head down and start pumping out resumes.

This might work at a startup or a small company, but at a large company like EA, it is nearly impossible for a single individual to change the culture. EA has been a staple of bad management in the game industry for years, but it apparently did not impact their bottom line. Why would they change? I am all for not backing down, but you've got to pick your battles carefully.

Interesting article. I'm not certain I understand the complaint about the non-existent marketing campaign. According to the author, they sold a million boxes, but lost two thirds of the subscribers in the first month, and kept losing them thereafter. It sounds like they got the bums on the seats, people just hated the show.

I could understand faulting Evans for not pushing back and saying "We can't release this, it it's not ready" But it's hard to see how inducing more people to experience a lousy product would have helped, given that the business case presumably lives or dies on recurring revenue.

Given some of the hype they come out with about the game and the IP it was a given they were going to get a heap of people to give it a shot, same with Age of Conan, it sold a heap of copies initially.

Once you lose the player base it's a real uphill battle to retain them, if Age of Conan released in it's current state it would be a different story for them, would have kept a lot more people initially.

It would have been almost impossible for them to release Age of Conan in it's current form. The current form was fashioned after massive amounts of customer feedback. Developing a MMO in the dark for 6 years isn't going to make it better than a released game that takes a couple years to mature. The issue is that you can't charge 60 bucks for a half finished game and 15 bucks a month after that. You also have to contend with impossible gamer's expectations considering they've been expecting WoW2.0 and nothing else will do.

MMOs are a killer market. That's probably why it cost Bioware 300 million to get their MMO out.

It's true, but you can't really sell a game on the premise it will be eventually good, so yeah they are a killer market, well at least since WOW redefined what you had to do to have a successful MMO.

You can, it's just really hard.

This is basically what Minecraft is doing - the game is entertaining now, but it's also got INSANE potential. So it's absolutely worth plopping $13 down on. Notch made $3 million or whatever (enough to fund game development) on the alpha sales. Of course, he may have trouble making money post-release if he can't charge the people who bought Alpha for the full version and if most of his potential audience buy Alpha or Beta.

Torchlight had the right idea, I think - create a fun initial product, and use the income from that to fund your more expensive V 2.0 that has a subscription model.

Maybe they should stop developing them in the dark for so long?

What would it be like if they had a completely open beta from the point that there was a playable client and gave long term testers access to end-game prestige content on official Day-1, or a free year of game time, or something else?

See APB (All Points Bulletin) for an even bigger recent MMO game fiasco. In development for 5+ years, cost over $50 million to make, closed 2 months after launch.

Over 250 people were laid off, including those working on a different game.

There were some similarities in the situations from what EA Louse is saying to what I experienced. I'll be interested in seeing the Old Republic launch product because of that.

In respect to the RTW failure, senior dev Luke has a series of articles which explain it much more eloquently (and kindly) than I ever could.

http://lukehalliwell.wordpress.com/2010/09/15/where-realtime...

RTW claimed to be of top pedigree, yet spent a long time and a lot of money to make a horrible game. Led by pretenders, I'd say.

Led by some of the same people featured in this documentary.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1012096952890708986...

I'm actually a little shocked by these numbers. Even movies seem to have a better return on investment. They would do better offering the game freely with 3-6 months of play for the price of a movie to bring in as many as first time players as possible.

http://ealouse.wordpress.com/

There's some interesting comments on that(as well as the inevitable trolls)..

Yeah really, I was kinda hoping to read through some relevant posts, but it's just been taken over by a bunch of tards concentrating on his SWTOR comments.

This one made my day: "Panic set in, and it suddenly had to be WOW 2.0"

There should be a fundamental game industry mantra in there: "Don't try to beat Blizzard at their own game. You will lose."

Caveat: Unless you think you can sneak out a Diablo game before Diablo 3 comes out. (Nice one, Torchlight)

Jeff Strain formulated it like this: "the team that is best poised to deliver a successful game that is an evolution of WoW is... well, the WoW team".

http://www.guildwars.com/events/tradeshows/gc2007/gcspeech.p...

It will be interesting to see how much of his own advice he managed to follow.

That was probably the main thing that killed the game. Personally I loved the RvR aspect of WHO (the few times you actually had enough players from both sides on the same server and in the same zone to actually make a decent fight out of it). Easily the most fun I've had with any MMO game. Had they focused on that and really made that the core of their game, it could have been something great.

Wow, the comments are pretty entertaining, not much substance though.

As someone who literally has two Warhammer tattoos on his forearms, I was so let down by WHO. I was one of those launch purchases, and I wanted to game to be good so dearly... but it just wasn't.

It's unfortunate when developers are forced to release something that they feel isn't ready.

I had the same reaction with Star Trek Online. I'm a long time trekk{er,ie} and I just couldn't stick with the game. I could deal with the bugs but the game was a skeleton, less content then an average game.

It's interesting to read about the internal workings of EA, but the reason WAR failed was because it was an awful game.

Poorly built, buggy, and not fun, unless waiting for an hour next to the mail box to get your mail is your definition of fun. The in-game bug report tool, which we were urged as beta testers to use to write bug reports along with steps to reproduce was limited to <256 characters! When I reported that as a bug, I was told it wasn't a bug.

But, I think it is wrong to put all the blame for the outcome on EA's execution. I think an additional problem is that Warhammer really wasn't that great an IP. Warhammer is a very dark place and an ugly place. I don't think that is what most people want in a fantasy world. That doesn't mean there wasn't a niche for Warhammer, but it's a smaller niche, and if you also alienate people with poor execution, maybe too small a niche for an MMO to be successful.

Video games. Long hours. But excellent drama.

I have no inside knowledge of EA but from reading this and the EA Spouse letter in the past, I'm amazed EA can actually deliver any software.

It's almost as if two whistleblowing-style blogs were not entirely representative of the company as a whole.

I have also heard other accounts as well but yeah, it's probably bad to draw conclusions based on a couple people's accounts.

However, despite their size, large companies do generally seem to be quite uniform in their culture.

I grew up in Vancouver, Canada - home of EA's largest office, and knew many people who worked for them.

They deliver code because the number of glory-seekers is basically infinite. They can afford to burn people out and abuse them to no end because there are a hojillion more lined up outside the door, just begging for someone to get burned out and leave so they can get in. I also knew some testers, and heard about the horrific hours that they voluntarily put themselves through on the vague promises by management that exemplary performance in testing could be a path to development. This rarely actually happened, but it happened enough that the testers would basically pummel themselves with work for that off chance.

At this point I'm unconvinced that the majority of CS grads will realize what a shithole the games industry is in terms of sane employment. It seems to take some first-hand experience (I've also known people who interned with EA and then ran away screaming) for people to realize that making games is a completely different beast than playing them.

Yeah, I remember talking to a friend who wanted to get into game development. I told him that the gaming industry has a bad reputation for making people work long hours for relatively low pay and a lot of stress.

His reply - "I don't care. I'll do whatever it takes."

I'm not into gaming so I don't really understand the drive. It seems to be very similar to the entertainment industry, except that employed game developers will never achieve the fame or riches of a well known actor or producer.

I'm all for being passionate about what you do as long as you know your value and don't let other people take advantage of it.

> It seems to be very similar to the entertainment industry, except that employed game developers will never achieve the fame or riches of a well known actor or producer.

Not quite as famous and rich, but I think the top-level game designers are famous and rich enough, especially famous among the audience the would-be developers themselves are part of, to provide the motivation. Many people really want to be the next Will Wright, Peter Molyneux, John Carmack, Sid Meier, etc., even if that isn't quite the same level of fame as being the next Arnold Schwarzenegger. The bigger problem is that the odds of becoming the next any of those are really low (and nobody new has managed to claw up into that list in >10 years).

The games industry is exactly like the TV or movie industry. Entry level jobs really, really suck. But if you can stick around long enough to become established (read: ship a successful title) then you can write your own check. Experienced game developers never lack for good offers. Heck, most of the people I've seen fired for incompetence were able to find new jobs within a few weeks if they'd shipped before.

There's still a lot of burnout, though, because it's very hard to get into a position with significant creative control, even once you get established. You can get a job, but not the job the aspiring designers want. Among well-regarded developers I can think of off the top of my head, Borut Pfeiffer, Chris Hecker, Damian Isla, and Chaim Gingold have all left the AAA-title part of the industry in the past year or two, either to try their hand at indie development, or start a consulting firm.

Good software even (I count the Skate franchise among my absolute favorites).

What ultima is being created? I recently have been dreaming of ultima online being created for the browser.. Seems like it could be possible now, no?

A civony/evony clone* with Ultima branding was released in the last year - maybe that? Don't get too excited, the game had no RPG gameplay that I could see; it looked like a city/kingdom sim.

* is Evony a clone of some other web game? I'm not familiar with the genre.

Evony is maybe a clone of Tribal Wars, which is maybe a clone of something else...

Evony also ripped a lot of art out of the first half of the Age of Empires series. I don't know how they haven't been sued.

Travian's been around a while.

And I believe the Ultima game is Lord of Ultima [.com]? Played it for a bit, was an ok timesink but eventually I grew out of it since I mostly used it as a Sim City type game.

Lets see.

1 job I had, the company could not realize that monitors are important for developers.

The next job all managers from every department pointed fingers at other managers until the entire company went bankrupt. They had the best product on the market and the only reason why it would not sell insanely would have to be due to the sales team. They instead did not dogfood and paid a heavy price, when they tried to dogfood they realized too late that everyone is incompetent.

And now I have a very high-up manager shooting himself in the foot with a shotgun.

This might be a partial explanation of why EA's takeover of Mythic never resulted in a shaping-up of the jaw-droppingly bad programming DAoC still suffers from, 9 years after its launch.

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