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

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

#51

Post by billswift »

Aetius wrote: post #46
patio11 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

The software entity is constantly subject to pressures for change. Of course, so are buildings, cars, computers. But manufactured things are infrequently changed after manufacture; they are superseded by later models, or essential changes are incorporated into copies of the same basic design. Callbacks of automobiles are ready quite infrequent; field changes of computers somewhat less so. Both are much less frequent…

Good essay but I don't think he adequately addressed the problem of transaction costs for changing software, either in process or later updating, of course that wasn't his primary point (it has been a while since I read it and I could be misremembering).

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

#52

Post by weaksauce »

rikthevik wrote: post #35
weavejester wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the requirements for the house change a lot more than you think. There's definitely a push/pull with the client in civil engineering as well. And for contractors, oh boy, do they deal with clients changing things on them constantly. I don't have much faith in most Enterprisey teams to ship good software even if they have a thorough concrete spec. We love to blame changing / incomplete specs, but I'd imagine t…

The largest problem is that the people telling you what they want are not good enough to through every possible path the user may want to go down. This leads to specs that are ambiguous at best, contradictory at worst. It takes a good developer to see the hidden things in the spec and raise the questions that need to be asked before the development goes too far down a bad path.

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

#53

Post by xsmasher »

Tyrant505 wrote: post #41

What ultima is being created? I recently have been dreaming of ultima online being created for the browser.. Seems like it could be possible now, no?

A civony/evony clone* with Ultima branding was released in the last year - maybe that? Don't get too excited, the game had no RPG gameplay that I could see; it looked like a city/kingdom sim.

* is Evony a clone of some other web game? I'm not familiar with the genre.

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

#54

Post by jonhendry »

robryan wrote: post #40
patio11 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

The analogy fails though because most houses are build in a standardized way, software would have to be pretty much wholly the result of picking and matching preexisting components.

Houses probably aren't the best comparison. Commercial real estate is probably better, being a larger investment and with more interests pulling in different directions.

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y17/jamesinclair/IMG_6378.j...

A huge hole in the middle of Boston's Downtown Crossing shopping district.

The historic Filene's department store building was torn out, to be replaced with a 38 story tower. Funding evaporated. The project stalled in November of 2008.

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

#55

Post by jacoblyles »

patio11 wrote: post #26
rick_2047 wrote: post #23

Earlier 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 you've just described government contracting.

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

#56

Post by whimsy »

xsmasher wrote: post #53
Tyrant505 wrote: post #41

What ultima is being created? I recently have been dreaming of ultima online being created for the browser.. Seems like it could be possible now, no?

A civony/evony clone* with Ultima branding was released in the last year - maybe that? Don't get too excited, the game had no RPG gameplay that I could see; it looked like a city/kingdom sim. * is Evony a clone of some other web game? I'm not familiar with the genre.

Evony is maybe a clone of Tribal Wars, which is maybe a clone of something else...

Evony also ripped a lot of art out of the first half of the Age of Empires series. I don't know how they haven't been sued.

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

#57

Post by decadentcactus »

whimsy wrote: post #56
xsmasher wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A civony/evony clone* with Ultima branding was released in the last year - maybe that? Don't get too excited, the game had no RPG gameplay that I could see; it looked like a city/kingdom sim. * is Evony a clone of some other web game? I'm not familiar with the genre.

Evony is maybe a clone of Tribal Wars, which is maybe a clone of something else... Evony also ripped a lot of art out of the first half of the Age of Empires series. I don't know how they haven't been sued.

Travian's been around a while.

And I believe the Ultima game is Lord of Ultima [.com]? Played it for a bit, was an ok timesink but eventually I grew out of it since I mostly used it as a Sim City type game.

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

#58

Post by silverbax88 »

pmjordan wrote: post #42
ahoyhere wrote: post #11

Earlier 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 don't know about the enterprise area, but when this happens in the gamedev industry (and it happens a lot), it's extra depressing because 90%+ of the people working on it will have poured their life and soul into it and really care . We're not talking individuals in a sea of office drones. Part of the problem is that "release early, release often" is hard to do when it comes to entertainment products. MMOs & social…

Yes, everyone who works on software for any company other than gaming doesn't "really care" at all. We don't care if your ATM transaction works flawlessly. We don't care if the health monitors keep you alive while you're in a hospital bed. We don't care if you accidentally show up on a police blotter because a database went corrupt somewhere.

Nope, but if we were working on games, we would care then.

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

#59

Post by maukdaddy »

br1 wrote: post #44

"I'm sick of seeing EA outsource" My country is poor and lots of developers work in outsourcing firms from the first world. The funny thing is that a friend of mine does class assignments for kids in American universities, perpetuating the cycle of outsourcing need.

This comment needs to be stickied, printed, whatever so that people can ALWAYS see it. This one bit of insight is key to what's happening with American technical talent and managers.

I see MBA students who would happily outsource their work and have no moral qualms about it. They will turn around and work for companies where they will outsource work because they are only thing about 1 thing - cost.

My wife's company is in the process of outsourcing their financial work. Utter failure. I can't even describe what a fucked up process it is with internal financial work being done in 2-3 developing countries. But why outsource it? So managers can cut costs enough to get their quarterly bonuses.

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

#60

Post by pmjordan »

silverbax88 wrote: post #58
pmjordan wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about the enterprise area, but when this happens in the gamedev industry (and it happens a lot), it's extra depressing because 90%+ of the people working on it will have poured their life and soul into it and really care . We're not talking individuals in a sea of office drones. Part of the problem is that "release early, release often" is hard to do when it comes to entertainment products. MMOs & social…

Yes, everyone who works on software for any company other than gaming doesn't "really care" at all. We don't care if your ATM transaction works flawlessly. We don't care if the health monitors keep you alive while you're in a hospital bed. We don't care if you accidentally show up on a police blotter because a database went corrupt somewhere. Nope, but if we were working on games, we would care then.

You're trying to attack something I never even said. OP was talking about the "enterprise", which is known for its low-hanging fruit of embarrassingly terrible software. You seem to be talking about specialist systems software for banks, medical engineering, etc. or even software in general.
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