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

http://www.gamerevolution.com/manifesto/ea-artist-soon-to-be-laid-off-burns-ea-management-1903

by Xero • 16 years ago

206 89 16 years ago

gamerevolution.com

Link to blog: http://ealouse.wordpress.com/

Xero• 16 years ago

http://ealouse.wordpress.com/

hitonagashi• 16 years ago

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

jim_dot• 16 years ago

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.

ryanc• 16 years ago

Wow, the comments are pretty entertaining, not much substance though.

ukdm2• 16 years ago

I worked on Warhammer Online for nearly two years before it left the offices of Climax Entertainment in Nottingham, England. When I arrived the game was already a couple of years in development, but the focus was on the technology not the game. We had no game, just a test area running on a local server.

There was a design department consisting of 10 people, 4 working on environment and level design, 6 working on quests, the magic system, and general game mechanics. There were 10 artists, 4 animators, and 13 programmers.

You'd think we would get somewhere with such a large team, but we didn't other than developing the underlying tech. The main reason the game design didn't progress was a second design team led by Paul Barnett was sitting in the office above us coming up with another vision for WHO without any interaction between the 2 departments other than meeting with the lead designer occasionally.

When the news came of Climax stopping development of the game it was not surprising to most people working on the title. You could see it coming for months before it happened. It looks as though that continued at Mythic although they did at least manage to ship.

I left a few months before the announcement was made and ended up having two exit interviews. The first was a standard set of questions given by the studio's human resources deaprtment. The second was with a representative of Games Workshop looking for answers as to why development was not progressing as they had hoped. They were in the dark about what was happening with their IP and wanted answers.

Torn• 16 years ago

Did you make it clear to Games Workshop why things weren't progressing properly?

ukdm2• 16 years ago

Yes, I just told the truth of what was happening and they seemed to take it on board. But at the same time I think they were quite powerless to do anything. So much money had been spent, I believe at that point they needed a sustained gamer base of around 300,000 if they released within a year to make the investment work. I have no idea what that grew to once the switch to Mythic had been made.

robryan4• 16 years ago

I would be annoyed to if I was games workshop, having spent decades painstakingly creating the IP to have a flop of an MMO created that was clearly pushed out before it was done.

pilkers3• 16 years ago

It's hardly unprecedented for games based on existing franchises to turn out less than stellar. They knew what they were getting in to.

Splines• 16 years ago

I love the W40K universe (it resonated with me as a teenager), I'm thankful at least that Relic has treated it so well.

ahoyhere• 16 years ago

A little outside perspective: This is exactly the way it goes with a huge percentage of IT-related projects, in many serious industries. The "Enterprise" is screwed.

singular• 16 years ago

I think the key factors are politics and managerial ignorance - there appears to be a general consensus that the most qualified person for the job is the a. biggest suck up and b. the least technically knowledgeable guy/gal available.

The problem with having politicals in senior positions is that they will, by their nature, happily abandon honesty + humility - the two most important qualities required by devs/management for any software project to even have a chance of something approaching sane completion.

Unfortunately politics and honesty/humility are not compatible.

Luckily there are companies out there that 'get it', but depressingly few.

rick_2047• 16 years ago

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.

pmjordan3• 16 years ago

I don't know about the enterprise area, but when this happens in the gamedev industry (and it happens a lot), it's extra depressing because 90%+ of the people working on it will have poured their life and soul into it and really care. We're not talking individuals in a sea of office drones.

Part of the problem is that "release early, release often" is hard to do when it comes to entertainment products. MMOs & social games are starting to change that, but nothing close to the sort of pivoting you can do with, say, a productivity web app.

fleitz• 16 years ago

The one thing about large enterprise projects is though, you can usually convince the mismanagers that it's good for their career, and the mismanagers end up disliking the competent programmers. If you're a vulture or a hyena a large IT project can become like a elephant corpse, easy pickings. Convince the mismanagers to move competent people to your team in exchange for your yes men. Then find a piece of infrastructure you need for your project and offer to build it for the larger project. This is basically an excuse to use their infrastructure, db servers, test servers, etc. Use this to get buy in to slip your own schedule so you have time to deal with the inevitable feature creep. Go to the design and planning meetings and suggest new and exciting technologies that they can figure out. When it doesn't work, take the hardware they req'd off their hands for the infrastructure you offered to build them. Make sure you integrate your project to the infrastructure first (you can always pitch it as reducing risk to the large project) so they can't make any changes to it with out breaking production code.

pilkers3• 16 years ago

See APB (All Points Bulletin) for an even bigger recent MMO game fiasco. In development for 5+ years, cost over $50 million to make, closed 2 months after launch.

Over 250 people were laid off, including those working on a different game.

rthng• 16 years ago

There were some similarities in the situations from what EA Louse is saying to what I experienced. I'll be interested in seeing the Old Republic launch product because of that.

In respect to the RTW failure, senior dev Luke has a series of articles which explain it much more eloquently (and kindly) than I ever could.

http://lukehalliwell.wordpress.com/2010/09/15/where-realtime...

pilkers3• 16 years ago

RTW claimed to be of top pedigree, yet spent a long time and a lot of money to make a horrible game. Led by pretenders, I'd say.

heresyforme• 16 years ago

I'm actually a little shocked by these numbers. Even movies seem to have a better return on investment. They would do better offering the game freely with 3-6 months of play for the price of a movie to bring in as many as first time players as possible.

hackermom• 16 years ago

This might be a partial explanation of why EA's takeover of Mythic never resulted in a shaping-up of the jaw-droppingly bad programming DAoC still suffers from, 9 years after its launch.

msabalau• 16 years ago

Interesting article. I'm not certain I understand the complaint about the non-existent marketing campaign. According to the author, they sold a million boxes, but lost two thirds of the subscribers in the first month, and kept losing them thereafter. It sounds like they got the bums on the seats, people just hated the show.

I could understand faulting Evans for not pushing back and saying "We can't release this, it it's not ready" But it's hard to see how inducing more people to experience a lousy product would have helped, given that the business case presumably lives or dies on recurring revenue.

robryan4• 16 years ago

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.

nkassis3• 16 years ago

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 contend with impossible gamer's expectations considering they've been expecting WoW2.0 and nothing else will do.

MMOs are a killer market. That's probably why it cost Bioware 300 million to get their MMO out.

steveklabnik• 16 years ago

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.

nkassis3• 16 years ago

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.

billjings• 16 years ago

Video games. Long hours. But excellent drama.

KevBurnsJr• 16 years ago

"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.

crpatino• 16 years ago

The curse of the leader is that you cannot lead a group of people out of somewhere if they don't really want to leave. If you try, you end up becoming one of them.

I agree that corporate culture is dynamic and that you can make a difference, but you need to find if there is a group of people that is willing to change. Then you need to understand and put in concrete terms the vision that the group already have but does not quite understands. If there is not vision, the only option is to move on.

flogic• 16 years ago

This depends heavily on the situation. It from the letter it sounds like the most realistic outcome of making waves is getting fired. Incompetence can become well rooted and surprisingly competent at protecting itself. If I were in this situation, I would keep my head down and start pumping out resumes.

nickelplate• 16 years ago

This might work at a startup or a small company, but at a large company like EA, it is nearly impossible for a single individual to change the culture. EA has been a staple of bad management in the game industry for years, but it apparently did not impact their bottom line. Why would they change? I am all for not backing down, but you've got to pick your battles carefully.

Tyrant505• 16 years ago

What ultima is being created? I recently have been dreaming of ultima online being created for the browser.. Seems like it could be possible now, no?

xsmasher• 16 years ago

A civony/evony clone* with Ultima branding was released in the last year - maybe that? Don't get too excited, the game had no RPG gameplay that I could see; it looked like a city/kingdom sim.

* is Evony a clone of some other web game? I'm not familiar with the genre.

whimsy• 16 years ago

Evony is maybe a clone of Tribal Wars, which is maybe a clone of something else...

Evony also ripped a lot of art out of the first half of the Age of Empires series. I don't know how they haven't been sued.

br1• 16 years ago

"I'm sick of seeing EA outsource"

My country is poor and lots of developers work in outsourcing firms from the first world. The funny thing is that a friend of mine does class assignments for kids in American universities, perpetuating the cycle of outsourcing need.

maukdaddy• 16 years ago

This comment needs to be stickied, printed, whatever so that people can ALWAYS see it. This one bit of insight is key to what's happening with American technical talent and managers.

I see MBA students who would happily outsource their work and have no moral qualms about it. They will turn around and work for companies where they will outsource work because they are only thing about 1 thing - cost.

My wife's company is in the process of outsourcing their financial work. Utter failure. I can't even describe what a fucked up process it is with internal financial work being done in 2-3 developing countries. But why outsource it? So managers can cut costs enough to get their quarterly bonuses.

mseebach• 16 years ago

> My wife's company is in the process of outsourcing their financial work. Utter failure. I can't even describe what a fucked up process it is with internal financial work being done in 2-3 developing countries. But why outsource it? So managers can cut costs enough to get their quarterly bonuses.

Replace "outsource" with "computerize" and you have a common complaint from 15 years ago, made by people ignorant to the possibilities of computers.

Outsourcing is not a silver bullet, and it's not easy. Does that mean that outsourcing is always a bad idea, and only ever decided by stupid managers? Of course not. Just like the fact that many software projects are failures doesn't make software a bad idea.

mattm3• 16 years ago

I have no inside knowledge of EA but from reading this and the EA Spouse letter in the past, I'm amazed EA can actually deliver any software.

teamonkey2• 16 years ago

It's almost as if two whistleblowing-style blogs were not entirely representative of the company as a whole.

mattm3• 16 years ago

I have also heard other accounts as well but yeah, it's probably bad to draw conclusions based on a couple people's accounts.

However, despite their size, large companies do generally seem to be quite uniform in their culture.

potatolicious• 16 years ago

I grew up in Vancouver, Canada - home of EA's largest office, and knew many people who worked for them.

They deliver code because the number of glory-seekers is basically infinite. They can afford to burn people out and abuse them to no end because there are a hojillion more lined up outside the door, just begging for someone to get burned out and leave so they can get in. I also knew some testers, and heard about the horrific hours that they voluntarily put themselves through on the vague promises by management that exemplary performance in testing could be a path to development. This rarely actually happened, but it happened enough that the testers would basically pummel themselves with work for that off chance.

At this point I'm unconvinced that the majority of CS grads will realize what a shithole the games industry is in terms of sane employment. It seems to take some first-hand experience (I've also known people who interned with EA and then ran away screaming) for people to realize that making games is a completely different beast than playing them.

mattm3• 16 years ago

Yeah, I remember talking to a friend who wanted to get into game development. I told him that the gaming industry has a bad reputation for making people work long hours for relatively low pay and a lot of stress.

His reply - "I don't care. I'll do whatever it takes."

I'm not into gaming so I don't really understand the drive. It seems to be very similar to the entertainment industry, except that employed game developers will never achieve the fame or riches of a well known actor or producer.

I'm all for being passionate about what you do as long as you know your value and don't let other people take advantage of it.

gamble• 16 years ago

The games industry is exactly like the TV or movie industry. Entry level jobs really, really suck. But if you can stick around long enough to become established (read: ship a successful title) then you can write your own check. Experienced game developers never lack for good offers. Heck, most of the people I've seen fired for incompetence were able to find new jobs within a few weeks if they'd shipped before.

yesimahuman• 16 years ago

Good software even (I count the Skate franchise among my absolute favorites).

whyenot• 16 years ago

It's interesting to read about the internal workings of EA, but the reason WAR failed was because it was an awful game.

Poorly built, buggy, and not fun, unless waiting for an hour next to the mail box to get your mail is your definition of fun. The in-game bug report tool, which we were urged as beta testers to use to write bug reports along with steps to reproduce was limited to <256 characters! When I reported that as a bug, I was told it wasn't a bug.

But, I think it is wrong to put all the blame for the outcome on EA's execution. I think an additional problem is that Warhammer really wasn't that great an IP. Warhammer is a very dark place and an ugly place. I don't think that is what most people want in a fantasy world. That doesn't mean there wasn't a niche for Warhammer, but it's a smaller niche, and if you also alienate people with poor execution, maybe too small a niche for an MMO to be successful.

GrandMasterBirt• 16 years ago

Lets see.

1 job I had, the company could not realize that monitors are important for developers.

The next job all managers from every department pointed fingers at other managers until the entire company went bankrupt. They had the best product on the market and the only reason why it would not sell insanely would have to be due to the sales team. They instead did not dogfood and paid a heavy price, when they tried to dogfood they realized too late that everyone is incompetent.

And now I have a very high-up manager shooting himself in the foot with a shotgun.

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

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