151–160 of 204 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this a joke?
No. It's one of the core beliefs of Behavioral Science
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?
It's been a while since they put out anything special, but overall the company seems to have done well by EA.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about DICE? And BioWare? I wonder if DICE came to the negotiation table more prepared and/or with something up their sleeve. It could be that EA is hands off so long as a studio produces highly profitable titles. As soon as there's a dip, snip snip.
It's widely agreed that Battlefield has been on the decline since 3 (3 being the first game released under EA). Bioware has been putting out exceedingly mediocre games since their purchase, not to mention are the laughing stock of many gamers.
This is so wrong, it's not even funny. DICE was acquired by EA 10 years ago. All Battlefield games except the original one were created since then.
Also it's generally accepted that BF3 was the best Battlefield game so far, with BF4 probably going to overtake it in customer satisfaction with the current Premium program.
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 mov…
> Spore was a disappointment Spore was a textbook example of bad management. They spent 80% of time, money and effort on creature designer - a feature that did not make up even 20% of game, closer to 5%. Game had complex and massive functionality for libraries, various downloadable creatures, even tunes for cities, outfits for citizens - all things that were not just unnecessary, but one might say even made game less…
Sure, management also failed (any failure is by definition a failure of management since they're supposed to be responsible for the project) - but textbook? You hardly made the case for that.
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…
The Sims was only completed because EA was able to prop up the studio while it was underdevelopment. They were able to do that because A) they are good at selling software and B) they were a large public company.
Since then the studio has had a couple of huge flops (Spore and SimCity online) as well as a few enjoyable but disappointing from a sales perspective releases. In an industry built on the blockbuster model, I'd say its surprising they've lasted this long. They have because they have been spending other peoples money. So if there was an inefficiency here, it was that the studio got too much leeway, not that it was shutdown too soon.
There is no paradox, because you started with a completely flawed conjecture.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>But the stock market is supposed to be hyper efficient nowadays such that it's practically impossible to outperform it even for the experts That's not true at all. Maybe in commodities, or foreign exchange or indexing, where algos can trade solely based on prices and public information it is true. But definitely not in individual stock picking. Domain knowledge is king here.
Also as an aside, commodities and foreign exchange are places where it is explicitly allowed to have non-public information...
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…