> "Takeover by EA is usually considered a death knell for game studios..."

Further to this point: Maxis, makers of Sim City, were notable for a long time as being the glaring exception when it came to EA's habit of buying and squeezing studios to death.

But the writing was on the wall when THE SIMS hit so big and was.. "exploited"[1] so heavily.

And when Will left... well, it's just flat-out inconceivable that anyone remained naive about what EA was going to get up to.

[1] http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/12/05

That's slightly revisionist history. EA bought Maxis when they weren't in great financial shape (it didn't help that basically every Friday was spent at the bar). It's true that the Sims was a huge success that EA didn't anticipate (they repeatedly tried to kill the project), but the jury is still out if Maxis would have survived long enough to release it without EA's funding and support.

I wasn't remotely talking about money; about why Maxis sold, whether they had to or anything along those lines. You're projecting an argument I never made.

I'm talking purely about the games and the people who make them.

EA buys studios and squeezes them. Why the studios subjected themselves to it is irrelevant to the fact that it happened. Repeatedly. Pretty much non-stop since Trip walked out the door. EA's long-standing treatment of their employees and the properties they owned, in the pursuit of a release schedule that burned out both in short order, is not revisionist history. It is EA's history.

  EA bought Maxis when they weren't in great financial shape

I'm not familiar with the specifics, but if Maxis was in such dire straits, why did Wright become the largest shareholder of EA as a result of the takeover? And his partner became CEO for a while.

> Wright become the largest shareholder of EA as a result of the takeover

Sources?

From Wikipedia[1]:

  > The company's IPO took place in 1995. In 1997, after
  > setbacks on a series of secondary titles, Braun and
  > Wright sold Maxis to Electronic Arts for US$120
  > million in stock. The deal made Braun the largest
  > shareholder in EA at the time.

Not Wright, but a result of the purchase.

Also from Wikipedia[2]:

  > Maxis went public in 1995 with revenue of US$38 million.
  > The stock reached $50 a share and then dropped as Maxis
  > posted a loss. EA bought Maxis in June 1997.

and

  > It was a difficult idea to sell to EA, because
  > already 40% of Maxis's employees had been laid
  > off.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Braun

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Wright_(game_designer)

I remember when The Sims was first announced, where Maxis was saying "And most of the game isn't even done yet. We've got loads of new stuff we'll release for free online!" which turned into dozens of boxed expansion packs.

Yuck.

Really? Wow, what a bunch of jerks. I am surprised that anyone even wants to buy a game from them after something like that.

Yet they do keep buying, year after year. They want the polish of AAA EA titles as compared to indie fare, and they're willing to bend over to get it.

Its the whole consumer versus content producer battle in a microcosm, and it doesn't make consumers look good. It's easy to get away with being a shitty company like EA when people line up to get "Madden" versus some non-branded sports game.

I would like to have seen SimMars (and SimCastle).

http://www.shacknews.com/article/60839/new-images-of-maxis-c...

I shed a tear for Westwood studios.

Westwood was failing and wasn't going to survive on it's own. It's a sad fact but EA bought them up in order to save the franchises and the jobs of many developers.

"A Tear?" I'm still in mourning.

That cartoon is about Bobby Kotick of Activision.

Yes and EA is openly following the same playbook and has been less-openly following it for years. One could argue Activision took it from EA.

This cartoon is an interesting take on EA acquisitions...

http://i.imgur.com/zFrTB.jpg

My own personal anecdote is that most of my Bay-Area game-industry contacts were at Maxis: around 8-9 of them. And precisely none of them are still with EA today. Some have left to freelance, some to do indie games, some to do regular tech jobs outside the game industry entirely (e.g. would rather work for Lockheed than EA).

Whoa, Lockheed. Talk about a complete shift in career(s)...though I suppose programming UAVs is in some perverse way reminiscent of game programming. :)

Former game-dev here: Simulation programming is one of the most viable exits for developers looking to get away from the game space.

Thankfully so... I once ran an Ohio-class SSBN aground in a channel in a loss-of-all-possible-NAVAIDS casualty. Luckily it was in a simulator (unluckily, our bosses were there to see it happen).

Your sextant wasn't working?

You can't navigate through "the doglegs" by shooting an azimuth to the sun, that would take too long, it would be safer to DR through on a stopwatch.

Either way though, hard to shoot an accurate azimuth when heavy fog miraculously rolls in out of nowhere and limits visibility to ~100 ft from the bridge. :)

I guess you did say a loss of all navaids though. The sextant was probably used for a bottle opener and broken or something.

> Either way though, hard to shoot an accurate azimuth when heavy fog miraculously rolls in out of nowhere and limits visibility to ~100 ft from the bridge. :)

Well that part is easy. Follow Robert Duvall's advice and call in for a huge napalm strike to lift the fog. It is the smell of victory, right? ;)

Some places in EA are amazing places to work at. Others have challenges. They aren't the only game company that has seen studios do sub-standard work after being acquired.

You're seriously blaming this on Maxis?

I think the respective records of EA and a pre-EA Maxis ought to provide ample evidence of the likely culprit here.

I was speaking more broadly.

This isn't the first time EA has seriously blown a launch due to infrastructure issues I realize. EA's main infrastructure server team runs things like a pre-dotbomb forture 5.

I'm slow to throw blame since EA's acquisitions chose to join EA. Technical Directors at Maxis are just as much to blame as well as product/project managers that fail to squeeze load testing into the busy schedule.

I do (sadly) agree that studios seem to lose their magic to us gamers once they join EA. Why?

> I do (sadly) agree that studios seem to lose their magic to us gamers once they join EA. Why?

I'll give you one guess.

>since EA's acquisitions chose to join EA.

Not quite correct. Maxis' shareholders decided to join EA; I doubt the average programmer, or even the average project manager or tech lead had any say in the process whatsoever.

true. however if (coders ran the world); we would

Are you forgetting Spore? It was Will's baby, and it sucked.

Sucked might be taking it a little far. Though it didn't work well as a game, the editors they created were really, really good. A very nice combination of user friendly and just powerful enough for creativity.

One of my biggest disappointments with the games industry is that those editors never really made their way into the industry at large. One of my greatest hopes after Spore launched was that some company would license those editors and actually build a good game around them. A Dungeon-Keeperesque game with fully editable creatures and dungeon design was a particular dream. Sadly, it never really caught on, and Spore looks to be a mostly dead end.

I thought it did well commercially, though.

"In its first three weeks on sale, the game sold 2 million copies, according to Electronic Arts."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spore_(2008_video_game)

Unfortunately, the citation link is dead on the article. I don't know if this answers your question about commercial success. Maybe someone knows more about this data point in context of the industry.