EA Employee Chastises Company Over SimCity in Public Letter | Hacker News Reader

EA Employee Chastises Company Over SimCity in Public Letter

forbes.com

91 pointsuladzislau29 comments

Why do people continually upvote forbes.com articles? A full-page ad for a fluff piece that adds zero content to the original reddit post (which happened a few days ago)

EDIT: the original post was http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/19xb2m/a_letter_from... but that was deleted. Another author reproduced the original post in http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/19xb2m/a_letter_from...

The original HN post was http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5346752

If you're going to complain about it, why don't you at least link the original for those of us who haven't seen it?

Your criticism is fair. I edited my response to include the link

Thanks, I was having difficulty finding it for some reason.

I predict this employee will have a short and sweet talk with his manager on Monday, followed by a quick exit interview with HR. Optional escort out of the building by security.

"Don't say goodbye, he's just leaving early" -- Tom Waits

Which is all a shame, but nowhere near the true tragedy of SimCity. EA has /no problem/ turning out the lights on old games; they're often not even that old. If you want to play in 2018, you'll likely be doing that on a cracked version because EA will have a slightly newer version of SimCity they want to push, and if you're playing the old one they think you're taking their money. Rinse, repeat.

I'd love to see EA let people run their own servers at some point. Chances of this happening are essentially zero.

It's an anonymous letter. And does not look genuine to me either - to somebody who worked at EA it's hard to imagine there is anybody there who seriously believes in the external PR stuff. Could be a contractor though.

Nevertheless, a lot of people at EARS will be laid off. A portion of EA's bonus depends on the Metacritic score so a lot of management types right now are missing a significant part of money they already had plans to spend. The only remedy for this is a massive layoff that boosts stock prices and increases other portions of the bonus. For recent example see what happened to MOH and EALA last quarter.

Yeah, "this has to be a contractor" was my first impression.

Personally, since I work at a competitor, I hope that EA never gets it. But you should never, ever have "someone else continues to screw up" as part of your business strategy. :-)

Eg. look at what happened to AMD after Core 2 replaced NetBurst.

I think hiring CEOs based on years of experience doing the same job is fundamentally flawed, as it creates a paradox. As I said before, I wish that CEOs like Marissa Mayer and David Marcus was more common.

Why a contractor?

I'm a contractor for two reasons: (1) money and (2) because I don't buy into the corporate PR. People who work in these places have to buy into the corporate values system.

I look at corporate values with great skepticism; perhaps I'm just cynical but in big companies it always seems to end up (in performance reviews) as being a way for the company to come back and justify why your bonus, increase, etc. will fall short of expectations this year.

There are few high paid contractors in games, usually brought in to save a failing title. All these I know are engineers, not artists, high profile artists are usually commissioned (i.e. they sell their art without ever showing on site and probably don't even know what studio is buying their work).

Normally a contractor is a "employee -1" - same low pay but no benefits and even less job security. They don't get invited to meetings and are less privy of the internal politics. Most of them are working hard to become an FTE.

> People who work in these places have to buy into the corporate values system.

Nope, it doesn't really go beyond some lip service. For most guys who do the actual work it's not even that - not shouting that the emperor has no clothes is absolutely enough to get by.

Well, he doesn't have to really believe in that external PR stuff but he surely could pretend to believe in it in order to make a public statement. It's trick commonly used in politics.

That's so cute. As if anyone at the C level believes in a company's mission statement and values. They're just there so the coffee cups aren't plain white.

At EA, this is almost certainly true. At some companies it's better. Values in particular often form a concrete axis for things like performance reviews, and offer a more useful version of the elusive "culture fit" than the usual startup bullshit of "let's hire a bunch of 20-something single white guys who have nothing better to do than hang out in the office playing ping pong after work, followed by more work".

I have no doubt that mission statements are real at some companies, and that they influence results in a positive way.

After making my comment, I made a short search, and posted this: Sex, Lies and Mission Statements. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5352298

It's from 1997. Things may have improved, I don't follow HR research. But it's at least a description of how things can go wrong, and probably still do.

Summary: Most managers report that their company's mission statement is ineffective, and many report that it's counter productive. Employee involvement in creating the mission statement is correlated with positive influence on behavior, yet that involvement is rare. Free coffee cups for everyone!

Mission statements are usually too pithy and vague to be useful. I've seen places where more verbose expressions of values or tenets work better.

Edit: Thinking back, some mission statements worked well. "A computer on every desk and in every home, running Microsoft software" comes to mind.

> Edit: Thinking back, some mission statements worked well. "A computer on every desk and in every home, running Microsoft software" comes to mind.

AFAIK, in management parlance, that would be a "vision statement". Mission statements seem to be a little more nuts-and-bolts. But I only remember this because the Microsoft one was held up as a vision statement in my business classes. =)

Update: EA is giving a free gift for their troubles.

"Hey guys, thanks for buying our singleplayer game. Sorry that 100% of our multiplayer portion is unplayable. While we work on fixing these issues by removing game features so only some of you can play at a time, you can play the singleplayer portion we talked about earlier. It's where you sit there and watch a 30 minute timer go by and if you win, you get to play the multiplayer portion of the game. But since we made this issue and won't give you a refund for a broken game, we'll give you one free game that'd cost us barely anything. Thanks again for your understanding."

> we'll give you one free game that'd cost us barely anything

...because we really hope that you buy the DLC.

That's what makes that gesture really pernicious to me.

Pretty cutting criticism. It will be interesting to see how this pans out. Unlike noname I think some of the C level types may in fact wish those values were the values they embodied. Now, the reality of making that happen? A lot harder.

However, given the history of the company and the choices it has made. And the fact that they seem to make the same bad choices in the same situation, suggests that those values have never been internalized.

"It’s a bold move for this nameless employee to write something like this, but so bold he might not be nameless for long"

It doesn't really matter in the end. I'm sure this is how everyone who worked on Simcity probably feels right now.

I await the unfortunate but inevitable news that this employee was terminated. If EA bans customers for speaking out, there is no hope for employees...

I think the original post states that he's not actually an employee, but that he has a very reliable source who is an employee.

This is interesting, but the article was posted two days ago. Why is it just now making its way to the top of HN?

I was thinking it just happened, until I get to the update at the bottom stating EA now gifting a free game to SimCity customers, which also happened two days ago.

Therefore, I'm less hopeful about the impact this will have, as it seems to have gone mostly unnoticed until now.

Or am I missing something?

Why is it only now that people start complaining about always-online DRM?

Whether there is some trouble due to a server being down or not, for me there is no difference. DRM that requires you to be always online for a single player game is already broken without the server being down imho.

Why is it now? If you haven't read any online news lately, as in the past few years, people have had fits about this since it was introduced. Diablo 3 for example.

More people are complaining about it now since with SimCity they didn't expect it to occur. Additionally how bad EA at keeping the game online too.

I have a friend who works as a QA tester on this Sim City EA game. He's demoralized about his job. I can see other employees getting pissed off enough to post on Reddit.

Next headline: Former EA Employee looking for a job.

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