EA Shuts Down ‘SimCity’ and ‘The Sims’ Developer Maxis
gamerant.com
gamerant.com
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.
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.
Maybe you can't herd cats, but you can at least train them to use the litter box and not scratch your television.
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
http://www.spore.com/comm/prototypes
I would say that every part of Spore was fun, or at least could be, but they never were able to get them to mesh together in a cohesive whole.
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!
[1] http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2008/09/08/wil-wright-pr...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
When you think of the brand "Maxis", what do you think? Either the Sims or Sim City.
But the brand EA is a far more recognisable (and valuable).
Like it or not, EA buys a company, milks it for what its worth, then kill it off.
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).
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
[0] : http://www.elsevier.com/about/press-releases/research-and-jo...
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.
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.
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.
Also as an aside, commodities and foreign exchange are places where it is explicitly allowed to have non-public information...
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.
Two replies up, you'll find your answer there, as you probably jumped over it.
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.
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?
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".
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.
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.)
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).
To be fair, EA Sports did discontinue some of their less popular games, such as Rugby and Cricket.
Also, they have FIFA Ultimate Team which has a whole meta game of players and cards (which i love).
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?
but can you even??
He was disappointed, a sentiment that was shared by many others.
Plus, they build their games in Unity, which is....not the best for these sorts of games.
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.
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.
[1] http://venturebeat.com/2013/07/19/ocean-quigley-steps-out-of...
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.
[2] http://donhopkins.com/home/RobotMovies/Empathy.mpg
[3] http://donhopkins.com/home/RobotMovies/Servitude.mpg
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]
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_Karma
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."
>HiveMind [5]
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiveMind
>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]
[6] http://venturebeat.com/2012/06/03/game-pioneer-will-wrights-...
>“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.
>Will Wright's Social Game Is In Legal Limbo [7]
[7] http://uproxx.com/gammasquad/2012/06/will-wrights-social-gam...
>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]
[8] http://www.polygon.com/2012/11/2/3589520/simcity-creator-wil...
>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]
I'm making less than 60k over here :(
(But honestly I'd rather do something I enjoy and make less than something I don't even if it pays more)
Apr 09, 2013: EA wins Consumerist's Worst Company in America poll for second year in a row
http://www.polygon.com/2013/4/9/4205402/ea-wins-consumerists...
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.
The "fire people to buy back stock in order to make the stock price go up" strategy is extremely popular in this economic environment.
People don't tend to be profit maximisers in their actual work.
I don't know many workers who think "which one of these choices is most profitable for the company"
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 ?
I'm paraphrasing heavily, not to hurt your feelings. Less voodoo science, more thinking.
To paraphrase: Your opinion is meaningless to me.
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.
It's been a while since they put out anything special, but overall the company seems to have done well by EA.
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.
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)
5) Repeat 1-4 yearly.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MlatxLP-xs
Even with their "improvements" to the ending, it was still just choosing what color explosion you got.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Exceptions to the rule:
- Mirror's Edge
- Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (w/ Criterion)
- Medal of Honor (multiplayer only)
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.
ME combat mechanics brought the whole franchise down, SW:TOR was pointless (and not bioware). And Dragon Age II and Inquisition were plain boring.
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.)
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.
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.
signed still bitter about Ultima 8 & 9
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:
https://casualaggro.wordpress.com/2014/03/03/ultima-vii-is-o...
>signed still bitter about Ultima 8 & 9
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.
If you're an affected developer, shoot me an email & I'll be happy to put you in our pipeline.
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.
Loosing the manual was not an option.
Farewell Maxis.
Definitely iconic. Fond memories!
And the Sierra adventure games had this form of copyright protection way before SimCity.
And there's a pic of the manual of course:
http://www.vintagecomputing.com/wp-content/images/copyprotec...
[1] http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/897/Indianapolis+500+-+The...
Edit: Someone posted a link to this but then it got deleted: http://www.formicarium.org/
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/exo...
The Maxis brand may very well continue and appears to be operating at other physical locations.
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 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.
ie. Any studio they take over and force to change gameplay to pay-to-win
YOU'LL REGRET THIS
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...)
Still, really sad to see Maxis axed.
I suspect that is part of what led to their demise. I'm in the same boat. I'd much rather run classic SimCity than any of the new stuff.
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.
The internet has made this seem blown way out of proportion.
What I don't get it is why are people still buying EA games...