Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How EA Lost Its Soul

polygon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 57 posts

Re: How EA Lost Its Soul

#21

Post by booruguru »

tvawnz wrote: post #15

Why does no one just put all the words in a row like a book or a newspaper or something anymore? Does anyone actually enjoy this "experience" where you have to wade through a maze of obnoxious pictures and logic puzzles and shit? Is the general assumption that, now that we've made it to the internet we can forget our big boy book-reading skills and go back to pop-up picture books? Why is there all this ADHD frame-shi…

I'd like to read this article on my Kindle. Is there any way I can consolidate those pages?

Re: How EA Lost Its Soul

#22

Post by tvawnz »

RGamma wrote: post #19
tvawnz wrote: post #15

Why does no one just put all the words in a row like a book or a newspaper or something anymore? Does anyone actually enjoy this "experience" where you have to wade through a maze of obnoxious pictures and logic puzzles and shit? Is the general assumption that, now that we've made it to the internet we can forget our big boy book-reading skills and go back to pop-up picture books? Why is there all this ADHD frame-shi…

Try it with uMatrix and a policy like mine: https://i.imgur.com/TMzeWu2.png (and yes, these links actually do something) The web becomes a lot calmer without scripts (and you start to notice how little regard many sites have for proper web markup).

Thanks for the tip.

Re: How EA Lost Its Soul

#23

Post by twiceaday »

TillE wrote: post #11
varelse wrote: post #4

I consulted for a couple weeks at EA about 10 years ago. On one of those days, I got 2 VPs and a director into a half-hour talk in a break area about how much they loved the game Starflight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight Starflight's a great game. And we were all having a great time reminiscing over it when I made the mistake of saying "Why not do an update? You all seem to love this game." Their response…

It's really funny how many "dead" genres have been revived thanks mainly to Steam and Kickstarter. Or how Minecraft would have certainly been laughed out of the room by any major publisher. Most of these games will not make obscene profits. But it should be really clear by now that it makes sense to invest in and sell a variety of games, not just mass-appeal action games.

Just because some genres were revived doesn't mean you can predict which genres to dump money into. Also, what some consider revived others consider still dead.

Re: How EA Lost Its Soul

#24

Post by chipotle_coyote »

tacos wrote: post #14

I'm not sure how an article about Trip Hawkins could possibly take this tone. Trip's approach to business is legendarily eccentric/arsty/wacky -- for better and for worse. A business mastermind he was not. A man with a clear vision for "Electronic Arts the Game Company" in 1982? No way. For starters, it was not yet called Electronic Arts. And secondarily, it did not author much (if any) game software for years. For s…

I know they incorporated under a different name (Amazin' Software), but they changed it in 1983 -- only a year later. I'm not sure they ever released anything before the name change. They came out of the gate in 1983 with Archon, M.U.L.E., Pinball Construction Set and One on One, all of which were not only games but arguably historically significant.

I agree that Hawkins wasn't a great businessman, but I think you're a bit off on both how quickly EA became EA and how invested they were in entertainment software from the start.

Re: How EA Lost Its Soul

#25

Post by tacos »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #24
tacos wrote: post #14

I'm not sure how an article about Trip Hawkins could possibly take this tone. Trip's approach to business is legendarily eccentric/arsty/wacky -- for better and for worse. A business mastermind he was not. A man with a clear vision for "Electronic Arts the Game Company" in 1982? No way. For starters, it was not yet called Electronic Arts. And secondarily, it did not author much (if any) game software for years. For s…

I know they incorporated under a different name (Amazin' Software), but they changed it in 1983 -- only a year later. I'm not sure they ever released anything before the name change. They came out of the gate in 1983 with Archon, M.U.L.E., Pinball Construction Set and One on One, all of which were not only games but arguably historically significant. I agree that Hawkins wasn't a great businessman, but I think you're…

Those were published (not written in house) and not even exclusively published -- often USA only. EA shifted its razor focus to games much later, in the process alienating many of their core engineers who were all about the "making tools for Electronic Artists" mission. Pretending this was some grande vision from day one misses the most interesting part of the story, and arguably the exact moment EA "lost their soul." (Hate that phrase, but I'll play it since the author used it.)

Re: How EA Lost Its Soul

#26

Post by DonHopkins »

jefe78 wrote: post #13

Working there a while ago was quite interesting. The corporate structure is incredibly heavy on management and lacks communication. You could have more managers than you knew and it wasn't unusual to be told to work on something else by someone you'd never met, which put you at odds with your known managers...

VPs who program can be very disruptive!

When I was working on The Sims 1, Luc Barthelet [1] was the VP who was closely shepherding the project, and he just loves to code his ideas up in Mathematica. (He later became executive director at Wolfram|Alpha.)

He would come over to my desk and show me some cool character animation trick he'd coded up in Mathematica, and suggest I implement it.

He had it reading in the Sims character animation files that I was exporting from 3D Studio Max, blending them together, drawing stick figures, and exporting web pages with animated gifs.

It's quite impressive what he can do with Mathematica, and of course I felt compelled to take some of his suggestions to heart and work on implementing them in the game.

But of course that pissed my direct manager off to no end, who insisted that Luc stop putting things on my plate without going through him first.

Luc's quite an animated character himself!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc_Barthelet

Re: How EA Lost Its Soul

#27

Post by richardboegli »

shostack wrote: post #20

I don't know how much I can blame EA as a driving force in the industry, vs. the industry as a whole and the nature of corporations and publicly traded companies. Games got into a slump for a while because the average AAA title was stuck at a $50 price tag, yet years of inflation and increased production costs were hitting revenue and margin hard. While prices gradually started creeping up, DLC/IAP/microtransactions…

A quote I came up with when reading about Satoru Iwata (President and CEO of Nintendo from 2002 to 2015) life which is relevant to this article: For gaming to succeed as an industry it is necessary to have business men and women who are gamers at heart. Richard Boegli

Re: How EA Lost Its Soul

#28

Post by rtpg »

tvawnz wrote: post #15

Why does no one just put all the words in a row like a book or a newspaper or something anymore? Does anyone actually enjoy this "experience" where you have to wade through a maze of obnoxious pictures and logic puzzles and shit? Is the general assumption that, now that we've made it to the internet we can forget our big boy book-reading skills and go back to pop-up picture books? Why is there all this ADHD frame-shi…

There are a lot of broken articles in the universe, but is this one of them?

This article seems to just have chapter separation and a cover image on each chapter, as well as some video inserts.

Apart from the video, this is pretty much exactly how it would be formatted in a magazine. Do you think magazines are for chumps too, because they use too many pictures?

Re: How EA Lost Its Soul

#29

Post by mdm_ »

tvawnz wrote: post #15

Why does no one just put all the words in a row like a book or a newspaper or something anymore? Does anyone actually enjoy this "experience" where you have to wade through a maze of obnoxious pictures and logic puzzles and shit? Is the general assumption that, now that we've made it to the internet we can forget our big boy book-reading skills and go back to pop-up picture books? Why is there all this ADHD frame-shi…

I'm on my phone and honestly at first thought the "cover" page was just broken on mobile. When I realized what it actually was, I backed out of it and will likely never go back. I do most of my browsing/reading on a mobile device, and pages like this are just brutal.

Re: How EA Lost Its Soul

#30

Post by rtpg »

TillE wrote: post #11
varelse wrote: post #4

I consulted for a couple weeks at EA about 10 years ago. On one of those days, I got 2 VPs and a director into a half-hour talk in a break area about how much they loved the game Starflight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight Starflight's a great game. And we were all having a great time reminiscing over it when I made the mistake of saying "Why not do an update? You all seem to love this game." Their response…

It's really funny how many "dead" genres have been revived thanks mainly to Steam and Kickstarter. Or how Minecraft would have certainly been laughed out of the room by any major publisher. Most of these games will not make obscene profits. But it should be really clear by now that it makes sense to invest in and sell a variety of games, not just mass-appeal action games.

I think this is a scale thing as well.

Bigger structures like EA have a lot of overhead, making small projects not as worth it (even if its just opportunity cost)

Steam and Kickstarter (combined with everyone having good computers now and of course the internet) have made small games super viable now, luckily

Post reply on HN