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EA Artist, Soon To Be Laid Off, Burns EA Management, Discusses Failed MMO
21–30 of 94 posts
Re: EA Artist, Soon To Be Laid Off, Burns EA Management, Discusses Failed MMO
#22See 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.
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.
Re: EA Artist, Soon To Be Laid Off, Burns EA Management, Discusses Failed MMO
#23I 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 ques…
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.
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.
Re: EA Artist, Soon To Be Laid Off, Burns EA Management, Discusses Failed MMO
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/managem…
>The problem with having politicals in senior positions
This is a problem having politicals in any position of power what so ever.
Re: EA Artist, Soon To Be Laid Off, Burns EA Management, Discusses Failed MMO
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: EA Artist, Soon To Be Laid Off, Burns EA Management, Discusses Failed MMO
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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?"
Re: EA Artist, Soon To Be Laid Off, Burns EA Management, Discusses Failed MMO
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
> 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...
Re: EA Artist, Soon To Be Laid Off, Burns EA Management, Discusses Failed MMO
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Well she used an old car buying trick. Never take the first offer, walk out at least once.
Re: EA Artist, Soon To Be Laid Off, Burns EA Management, Discusses Failed MMO
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
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.
Re: EA Artist, Soon To Be Laid Off, Burns EA Management, Discusses Failed MMO
#30Interesting 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 i…
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.