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EA Shuts Down ‘SimCity’ and ‘The Sims’ Developer Maxis

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Re: EA Shuts Down ‘SimCity’ and ‘The Sims’ Developer Maxis

#111

Post by tempestn »

rwallace wrote: post #102
lmkg wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a strategy, it's better than being profitable: it's predictable. The forecasts for the upcoming financial quarters are much more likely to be accurate when you only work with known IP. 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…

The way I figure it, when value is being knowingly and unnecessarily destroyed, someone somewhere in the chain is being irrational. Given that EA is a public company, the obvious candidate for that somewhere is Wall Street. Your analysis seems to confirm that. 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 rand…

Sounds like the people buying games from EA are the ones being irrational in that description.

Re: EA Shuts Down ‘SimCity’ and ‘The Sims’ Developer Maxis

#112

Post by stickfigure »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #58
UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #29

The title (and of the article) is inaccurate. The title talks about Maxis as a whole closing, but the article and third party sources list just one (admittedly BIG) location closure. The Maxis brand may very well continue and appears to be operating at other physical locations.

Maxis Emeryville is Maxis. The Will Wright Maxis, the Sims , SimCity and Spore Maxis. The real Maxis, if you will. 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 split up when they closed the Walnut Creek office in 2004, with SimCity and Spore (and Will Wright) going to Emeryville, everyone else going to Redwood Shores. Will Wright left in 2009. There is no "real Maxis", and if there was, some Maxis expat older than me would tell you it died back in the 90s or whatnot.

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.

Re: EA Shuts Down ‘SimCity’ and ‘The Sims’ Developer Maxis

#113

Post by TylerE »

chao- wrote: post #53
prewett wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the plus side, it looks like there is a vacancy in the simulation game market...

Coincidentally I was just looking back into the state of city simulation games the other day. On my list of "Games I have played beyond any reasonable number of hours" is Sim City 4 with the various mods available. I was, like most, disappointed with the 2013 offering. Cities XL never really piqued my interest, and I've also switched entirely to Linux for my desktop needs. Then the other day I heard about an upcoming…

I am cautious about C:SL. I mean, it's a day one buy but my hopes are not super high. Their last title, Cities in Motion 2 - was something of a hot mess, with a design that really didn't gel and was in most respects worse and less fun than CiM 1.

Plus, they build their games in Unity, which is....not the best for these sorts of games.

Re: EA Shuts Down ‘SimCity’ and ‘The Sims’ Developer Maxis

#114

Post by randomname2 »

spiritplumber wrote: post #6

Westwood, Origin, Bullfrog, Maxis.... 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?

Interesting how no one has mentioned stock buybacks yet. These job cuts are a cost cutting exercise, giving the company more funds to buy back stock with, making the stock price go up, meaning the executives get heftier bonuses.

The "fire people to buy back stock in order to make the stock price go up" strategy is extremely popular in this economic environment.

Re: EA Shuts Down ‘SimCity’ and ‘The Sims’ Developer Maxis

#115

Post by Padding »

dkbrk wrote: post #86
eropple wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling Mass Effect 2 and 3 "exceedingly mediocre" puts you in a camp that is, by pretty much any metric, very fair from the mainstream. And I wonder who these "many gamers" are who think BioWare is a laughingstock. Do elaborate, please.

I, for one, was extremely disappointed in Mass Effect 2 as compared to the original. As a result, I didn't buy the third. 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…

I feel exactly like you, and I'm glad I'm not alone.

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.

Re: EA Shuts Down ‘SimCity’ and ‘The Sims’ Developer Maxis

#116

Post by dblohm7 »

byjess wrote: post #20
qmalxp wrote: post #3

I was just thinking today about how cool a modern open world version of SimAnt would be. Oh well. Edit: Someone posted a link to this but then it got deleted: http://www.formicarium.org/

Wow, haven't thought about SimAnt in a long time. Loved that game, thanks. And SimTower too.

SimAnt is playable on that Computer History Museum archive. Just sayin'

Re: EA Shuts Down ‘SimCity’ and ‘The Sims’ Developer Maxis

#117

Post by stickfigure »

These laments are a bit overblown.

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.

Re: EA Shuts Down ‘SimCity’ and ‘The Sims’ Developer Maxis

#118

Post by vetler »

poopchute wrote: post #89
chao- wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coincidentally I was just looking back into the state of city simulation games the other day. On my list of "Games I have played beyond any reasonable number of hours" is Sim City 4 with the various mods available. I was, like most, disappointed with the 2013 offering. Cities XL never really piqued my interest, and I've also switched entirely to Linux for my desktop needs. Then the other day I heard about an upcoming…

I quite like sim building games. My most recent favourite is Banished http://www.shiningrocksoftware.com/game/ Not nearly as complex as sim city but still very enjoyable

Wow, this looks great. I think I've actually seen this earlier sometime, but dismissed it since it was only available on Windows. Now that I actually have a decent Windows laptop, I'll definitely try it out.

Re: EA Shuts Down ‘SimCity’ and ‘The Sims’ Developer Maxis

#119

Post by SixSigma »

spiritplumber wrote: post #6

Westwood, Origin, Bullfrog, Maxis.... 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?

Business says "we exist to make a profit".

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"

Re: EA Shuts Down ‘SimCity’ and ‘The Sims’ Developer Maxis

#120

Post by sorenbs »

flomo wrote: post #99
kenrikm wrote: post #15

This is just my opinion, though semi-backed by conversations I've had with people who work at 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'r…

> Forcing use of Origin, Sims being online only 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…

I played it on a slow 3g connection in Bangladesh, and it mostly worked. What really killed it for me was the feeling that the feedback you got from the game wasn't consistent with the internal state of the simulation leading you to take counterproductive actions.
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