Support NeoGAF

[Overside]

Maxis was forced to make a crappy game? Okay.

Every studio who ends up having to use a publisher is forced to put things the publisher wants in their game. Especially when said publisher aquires the studio.

EA is extremely adamant about pushing a certain business model thinly disguised as some concept of game 'design' through until it it is accepted and normalizes. When its rejected, they simply cut the studio away, and say 'You guys werent ready for that, its too innovative for you'.

And then they try again.

Why dont you ask Lorne Lanning what its like dealing with EA, and the things EA does to get you to do what they want?

 

[border]

Every studio who ends up having to use a publisher is forced to put things the publisher wants in their game. Especially when said publisher aquires the studio.

This is entirely speculation though. Who says Maxis was forced into their Sims/Simcity decisions? The DRM on The Sims was really only one part of the game's problems -- are we going to blame EA for the small city sizes and traffic routing problems as well?

Most of the DLC nonsense with The Sims was only the natural extension of what they'd been doing for over a decade prior with 10-20+ expansion packs per game - not that that makes it right, but they've simply had the same perogative on that stuff for a decade now.

 

[Deleted member 126221]

Maxis was forced to make a crappy game? Okay.

Are you implying they had complete creative control over the project? Okay.

 

[Overside]

This is entirely speculation though. Who says Maxis was forced into their Sims/Simcity decisions? The DRM on The Sims was really only one part of the game's problems -- are we going to blame EA for the small city sizes and traffic routing problems as well?

Most of the DLC nonsense with The Sims was only the natural extension of what they'd been doing for over a decade prior with 10-20+ expansion packs per game - not that that makes it right, but they've simply had the same perogative on that stuff for a decade now.

Who do you think was in control, of when the game was released? The people developing it, who said, this isnt ready yet, we need more time to fix these problems!' Or the publisher who already had a strict and huge marketing plan laid out?

Protip: Unless you are working for recent Nintendo, its not the developer.

"This is an age-old software development issue: reasonable scope on a reasonable schedule," says Keith Fuller, an experienced developer and production consultant who spent over a decade working on Activision projects like Jedi Academy, Quake 4 and Call of Duty: Black Ops before going independent. "Our ongoing inability to properly address it is rooted in leadership issues."

"Developers rarely get to tell Marketing 'We can ship it now, we fixed all the bugs,'" notes Fuller. "Rather, the marketing department will tell you when you're launching regardless of fixing bugs. If you want that arrangement to change, figure out how to sell millions of units without telling anyone your game exists."

"The last game I worked on as a studio dev was Call of Duty: Black Ops, and Activision's legal team would go into cardiac arrest if I shared with you how few months before launch that game was almost entirely unplayable," says Fuller. "That's due to the pressure of annual franchise installments and the competitive landscape."

Other ex-AAA veterans agree. "Teams are pressured to hit scope, schedule and cost goals up front that are unreasonable," says consultant and former High Moon CTO Clinton Keith, "Beyond a point, not even crunching helps."

"As a result of all this, the team releases an inferior game, which doesn't sell well and damages the brand," adds Keith, offering the chart embedded above as illustration. "The stakeholders/shareholders respond by applying more pressure to management, who then apply more pressure to development."

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/231661/When_big_games_launch_badly_Breaking_the_vicious_cycle.php

 

[Steroyd]

Point being that if Battlefield 3 had failed, the perspective would be "Stupid EA they killed DICE chasing that COD money" and not "Oh well I guess people just didn't want 64 player matches with jets and helicopters".

Medal of Honor was crappy and suffered the consequences, but it wasn't an inherently bad business idea to make a modern-day military shooter.

The issue here is why they failed and the pattern they followed before closure.

boom.

what exactly did you expect?

there are a lot more going for ea than aaa studios, in this day and age. sustainability, market conditions, alternate streams, etc. i mean the work itself is project-to-project and there are a lot of factors that affect how and why pubs decide to close studios and retain others. but who cares about being a public company trying to be more marketable when you're evil and bad. no one cares about terms of agreements, just clickbait headlines trying to serve an ongoing narrative. big bad wolf is evil, period.

You're right there could be more going on before the closure of such studio's buuuuut, the issue here is that there's an EA-ification to the studio's in question before the closure, when you look at what Criterion created in Burnout Paradise with tons of free DLC to extend the life of the game, compared to what they released in NFS Most Wanted which had microtransactions physically present in the game, is almost a like for like comparison of the criticism from Dead Space 1 to Dead Space 3, Dragon Age Origins had the exact same criticism with that NPC that started up a sub quest which lead you into the online store to buy said quest so you can accept it, I call it the Fifa syndrome, they saw a model where they made bank and ran with it in their other games.

 

[border]

Who do you think was in control, of when the game was released? The people developing it, who said, this isnt ready yet, we need more time to fix these problems!' Or the publisher who already had a strict and huge marketing plan laid out?

I think Maxis was, for the most part, in control of the amount of post-release paid content in the Sims. The business model for that series has always centered around expansions....it just seems all the more flagrant though when there's a DLC store built into the game.

The outcry about the size/scope of SimCity towns was a massive player/community backlash, not pressure from the publisher. I legitimately believe Maxis when they say that they couldn't get large cities to run well, due to the amount of horsepower required for all the simulation going on under the hood. That seems like very much a developer miscalculation rather than EA forcing them to do some evil thing.

The issue here is why they failed and the pattern they followed before closure.

Except that the "pattern" here is the same with many studio closures whether or not EA is involved at all. Developer makes giant, expensive high-profile failure and goes under. Oftentimes this is the result of pushing too hard in an overcrowded market (military shooter) or overspending on a genre that does not have the audience to sustain AAA blockbuster sales anymore (Sim series or subscription-based MMO).