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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

#181

Post by kasey_junk »

freehunter wrote: post #174
kasey_junk wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I read the whole thread. I'm just having trouble understanding how a studio having failed at a basic business reality of their market, and thus being shutdown, has Wall Street to blame. Wall Street, even as the completely generalized abstraction, doesn't have anything to do with this, other than a big video game publisher used some money generated there, to back a studio that has been unsuccessful at their job. I…

The idea is that they were set up for failure by the relentless push to drive higher profit margins. This approach is incompatible with long-term growth, as there are only so many people who will fall victim to the idea of buying a worse game than last year's edition yet still buy more and more expansions. EA pushes for day one profits seemingly without concern as to profits over the lifetime of the product. As soon…

Maxis has been owned by EA for 17 or 18 years no? As part of the ownership by the public company EA, the studio was able to release and have sequels for one of the best selling games of all time. Further, said game was distinctive in its business model in comparison to other games released at the time (it being very much about after day one profits). That is, at least on the surface, evidence that being owned by EA does not preclude long term stewardship of a game/studio.

As far as the stockholders go, I can assure you that A) stock holders have no ability to influence the release schedule of a video game or B) care how profits are generated, only that they are. There is at least a passing argument that the massively successful franchise of the studio would not have been possible without those stockholders, and the studio certainly did not turn down the money when they were acquired.

Whether EA mismanaged Maxis specifically or their management is in general too fixated on short term profits is not the issue. "Wall Street", whatever that is, does not demand that and would more happily not be involved in those decisions. So is it possible that EA is mismanaging their studios in a misguided attempt to cook their books? Maybe, but if so that has been true for Maxis for going on 2 decades, 1 of which was hugely successful.

You can blame "Wall Street" all you want, but it seems a simpler explanation that in a blockbuster driven market, Maxis failed to deliver blockbusters. This isn't surprising in the least given most software projects fail and even more so with games. I find it surprising that Maxis lasted as long as it did quite frankly. An independent studio would probably not have survived Spore, and I think Maxis did largely because they were backed by "Wall Street".

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

#182

Post by mordocai »

Vaskivo wrote: post #178
cLeEOGPw wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Spore was a disappointment by design. Will Wright prefered "The Sim's sales than Half Life's scores"[1]. They catered to the Sim's public. That's why you have a "design everything" feature. And mechanics so simple. I remember sprinting through the game, realizing the phases had really simple and boring mechanics, and designing all stuff in less than a minute. When I finally reached the space phase it got a little mea…

I bought the collector's edition.

I think I probably spent less than 10 hours on the game.

It might be my worst disappointment in gaming.

While not just because of this issue, I now usually wait for games to be out for a couple months before I buy. That way I can see what the 'regular people' think about the game.

That being said, I was young and it is very possible that the pre-release reviews were bad and I just didn't notice.

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

#183

Post by mmastrac »

saganus wrote: post #66
mmastrac wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't it a black on dark maroon list of city populations? It's been a while, but that's what I remember.

Precisely. A purple-ish brown and very glossy background.

Gotcha. I didn't recall it being extra glossy, but that makes sense now!

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

#184

Post by ryanhuff »

troymc wrote: post #39
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?

EA has at least one other strategy, with EA Sports: every year they come out with a new and improved Football, Basketball, Hockey, Golf, etc. and people get it. Madden NFL has been going since 1988. To be fair, EA Sports did discontinue some of their less popular games, such as Rugby and Cricket.

They also discontinued Baseball, which pretty much made the Xbox platform crap for a baseball fan (my son).

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

#185

Post by saganus »

mmastrac wrote: post #183
saganus wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely. A purple-ish brown and very glossy background.

Gotcha. I didn't recall it being extra glossy, but that makes sense now!

Ironically, one day later there's a post in HN that links to old copy protection schemes.

And there's a pic of the manual of course:

http://www.vintagecomputing.com/wp-content/images/copyprotec...

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

#186

Post by pavel_lishin »

mseebach wrote: post #155
cLeEOGPw wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I don't know anything about the game or how it failed, but what you describe reads like a classic caricature of an engineer's wet dream: lots of fancy tech that's fun to build but not very useful to the end user, while comparatively boring but useful features (autosave) gets passed over. Sure, management also failed (any failure is by definition a failure of management since they're supposed to be responsible for the…

Management letting engineers build whatever cool toys they want instead of features customers want and need sounds like it ought to be a textbook example of what not to do.

Maybe you can't herd cats, but you can at least train them to use the litter box and not scratch your television.

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

#187

Post by wavefunction »

mordocai wrote: post #182
Vaskivo wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spore was a disappointment by design. Will Wright prefered "The Sim's sales than Half Life's scores"[1]. They catered to the Sim's public. That's why you have a "design everything" feature. And mechanics so simple. I remember sprinting through the game, realizing the phases had really simple and boring mechanics, and designing all stuff in less than a minute. When I finally reached the space phase it got a little mea…

I bought the collector's edition. I think I probably spent less than 10 hours on the game. It might be my worst disappointment in gaming. While not just because of this issue, I now usually wait for games to be out for a couple months before I buy. That way I can see what the 'regular people' think about the game. That being said, I was young and it is very possible that the pre-release reviews were bad and I just di…

Well, I wasn't exactly young at the time and I had the exact same experience as you did. A real disappointment after building up my expectations pretty high, but an opportunity to realize what's really important in life when moving through it.

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

#188

Post by SixSigma »

blumkvist wrote: post #169
SixSigma wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the point. They don't think about how to maximise profit. They think about how to hit their sales target, how to run successful marketing and how to perform their accounting function. Assuming they even do that. Their daily thoughts are more likely to be : How can I make sure my superiors notice I perform my role. How can I make sure I don't fuck this up. What do I need to do to get a promotion. I don'…

The fastest way to show that you don't understand what you're talking about is through analogy. I'm paraphrasing heavily, not to hurt your feelings. Less voodoo science, more thinking.

I'm not hurt in the slightest.

To paraphrase: Your opinion is meaningless to me.

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

#189

Post by freehunter »

kasey_junk wrote: post #181
freehunter wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea is that they were set up for failure by the relentless push to drive higher profit margins. This approach is incompatible with long-term growth, as there are only so many people who will fall victim to the idea of buying a worse game than last year's edition yet still buy more and more expansions. EA pushes for day one profits seemingly without concern as to profits over the lifetime of the product. As soon…

Maxis has been owned by EA for 17 or 18 years no? As part of the ownership by the public company EA, the studio was able to release and have sequels for one of the best selling games of all time. Further, said game was distinctive in its business model in comparison to other games released at the time (it being very much about after day one profits). That is, at least on the surface, evidence that being owned by EA d…

Can we stop pretending that "Wall Street" is a completely non-thinking entity (/concept/idea/etc). The reason people talk about "Wall Street" is because we're talking about public companies, who are beholden to stockholders. "Wall Street" is the generic concept of stockholders. And the one thing stockholders as a generic concept ("Wall Street") was is profit growth. Because shrinking profits leads to lower stock price. It doesn't matter that you were profitable, if you weren't more profitable than last year, the generic concept of stockholders ("Wall Street") will, in a generic fashion, lose faith in your company. And if your stockholders lose faith in your company, they vote out your board of directors and replace them with people who will bring growing profits. It's not always the case (Amazon is a major exception), but in general, it holds true.

If you still don't think Wall Street has even an indirect say in what games get published when and at what quality, then I don't see a point in continuing this discussion. But I'll leave on the point of SpaceX not wanting to go public until they make it to Mars, because Elon doesn't believe that stockholders will let him take the risk of sending humans to another planet. Or, taking a step back from Wall Street and just talking investors, the idea from this very community that any exit for a startup is good and is favorable for your investors even if it leaves your customers high and dry. Or how about when Steve Jobs was pushed out of Apple because he wasn't making enough money? Apple raced to the bottom and lost, hard, in the pursuit of maximizing profit.

I'm not trashing the idea of Wall Street or of investors. This is EA's fault. But saying that investors don't influence a company's products is insane. Of course they do, to the fullest extent that the company will let them. Again, if you don't believe EA is completely controlled by their investors, take a look at the timing of the end of their fiscal year, the rushed release of SimCity, and the announcement of Maxis being shut down. That's not coincidence.

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

#190

Post by ansible »

izacus wrote: post #150
ansible wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, like others, was disappointed in the ending for Mass Effect 3. This guy took the time to explain it very well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MlatxLP-xs Even with their "improvements" to the ending, it was still just choosing what color explosion you got.

I'm sorry, but last I recall ME3 was a 20-30hour long game that is way more than just a 10-minute ending sequence. Maybe criticism of it should take that into consideration?

I don't expect to convince you otherwise (honestly, I don't expect that of anybody on the Internet, though I still try sometimes), but did you watch the linked video?

The critic (and a whole bunch of other people) did enjoy the game, and the series. Overall, I don't regret the time spent playing it. If people didn't enjoy the ME series, no one would have cared about the ending.

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