Live data from Hacker News

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

gamerevolution.com

31–40 of 94 posts

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

#31

As someone who literally has two Warhammer tattoos on his forearms, I was so let down by WHO. I was one of those launch purchases, and I wanted to game to be good so dearly... but it just wasn't. It's unfortunate when developers are forced to release something that they feel isn't ready.

I had the same reaction with Star Trek Online. I'm a long time trekk{er,ie} and I just couldn't stick with the game. I could deal with the bugs but the game was a skeleton, less content then an average game.

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

#32
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. It's Games Workshop's IP, it's theirs to make sure that they only entrust it to people who will make good use of it and theirs to make sure those projects are well run. Reminds me about a story about JK Rowling during the early negotiations with Warner Bros about the Harry Potter films. They all sat down and Warners came up with a list of things that they said they were going to chang. JK Rowling stood up…

Well she used an old car buying trick. Never take the first offer, walk out at least once.

That might be true though she never changed her position on things - hence the almost entirely British cast, films that remain largely true to the books (within the limits of crushing 700 pages into two and a bit hours) and so on.

Obviously it helps with negotiations when you're holding all the cards as she was - owned what looks like it will be the most valuable franchise in film history, undoubtedly had competitors queuing round the block, didn't need the money...

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

#33
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some interesting comments on that(as well as the inevitable trolls)..

Yeah really, I was kinda hoping to read through some relevant posts, but it's just been taken over by a bunch of tards concentrating on his SWTOR comments.

This one made my day: "Panic set in, and it suddenly had to be WOW 2.0"

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

#35
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.…

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 that most dysfunctional teams would manage to bone up a perfect spec anyway.

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

#36
post #27

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.

> you will have some files which can be deleted I sure hope nobody deletes files after stopping work on a project. What a waste. Storage is so incredibly cheap...

Agreed. Putting files on tape and sending them to Iron Mountain is the new Delete button.

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

#37
post #30
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given some of the hype they come out with about the game and the IP it was a given they were going to get a heap of people to give it a shot, same with Age of Conan, it sold a heap of copies initially. Once you lose the player base it's a real uphill battle to retain them, if Age of Conan released in it's current state it would be a different story for them, would have kept a lot more people initially.

It would have been almost impossible for them to release Age of Conan in it's current form. The current form was fashioned after massive amounts of customer feedback. Developing a MMO in the dark for 6 years isn't going to make it better than a released game that takes a couple years to mature. The issue is that you can't charge 60 bucks for a half finished game and 15 bucks a month after that. You also have to conte…

It's true, but you can't really sell a game on the premise it will be eventually good, so yeah they are a killer market, well at least since WOW redefined what you had to do to have a successful MMO.

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

#38
post #33
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah really, I was kinda hoping to read through some relevant posts, but it's just been taken over by a bunch of tards concentrating on his SWTOR comments.

This one made my day: "Panic set in, and it suddenly had to be WOW 2.0"

There should be a fundamental game industry mantra in there: "Don't try to beat Blizzard at their own game. You will lose."

Caveat: Unless you think you can sneak out a Diablo game before Diablo 3 comes out. (Nice one, Torchlight)

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

#39
"So we shut up and did what we were told, by people too afraid to tackle real problems. It is a culture of fear [...]"

In my experience, this is passing the buck. Culture is not something dictated by management. Culture is something that every person in an organization takes part in. Anyone can change it any time they like. It just takes a little brass. Shutting up and doing what you're told is not good enough. I've seen it happen in most of the failed startups I've worked for (3-4). When people relinquish responsibility for the well-being of the company and the culture, everyone is the worse for it. It often takes hard work to have your voice heard.

I'm going through this now with a company I just joined that has kludged their codebase into a massive steaming pile of untestable horse shit. There's tons of bugs and development moves crazy slow. The tech lead/architect hasn't really done any architecture beside accepting product's piecemeal direction and submitting to design by accretion. I don't plan to accept things as they are and just keep my head down. I plan to make a difference.

Most people are more afraid of what they might become than what they might fail to become. Never back down.

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

#40
post #26

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.…

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.
Post reply on HN