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

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

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

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.

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.

Unfortunately this is the ultimate reason many projects fail. It seems shitty management seems to be the running theme everywhere. People with "paper manager" certifications, or managed an entirely different group of people/type of project brought on to manage another completely different type of project because they have "management" experience.

We have a similar situation in my company, where a call center manager was promoted to a technical support manager. On the surface they might appear to be the same but they are different in their entirety on both the type of people you need working beneath you and the way calls are handled.

Because the new call center manager fired their best technicians (to save money for personal bonuses), they're now relying on IT engineering to solve their technical problems. It's gotten so bad that the "level 3" technical support person is actually going to be a position under IT and closer to the engineering group rather than someone beneath the technical support manager.

Why? Because that manager has no idea what they're looking for or how to handle that team.

Same theme amongst many other groups as well.

Rest assure EA Louse, it's unfortunately no different in most other places. Too bad it's "unprofessional" to comment on them.