

EA Artist, Soon To Be Laid Off, Burns EA Management, Discusses Failed MMO - Xero
http://www.gamerevolution.com/manifesto/ea-artist-soon-to-be-laid-off-burns-ea-management-1903
Link to blog: http://ealouse.wordpress.com/
======
ukdm
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.

~~~
ahoyhere
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.

~~~
rick_2047
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.

~~~
patio11
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.

"Oh, the wizards burned through another $300,000 last month. Well, who knows
what those wizards do. Tell them to get the payroll system ready by next
month, OK?"

~~~
weavejester
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.

~~~
rikthevik
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.

~~~
weaksauce
The largest problem is that the people telling you what they want are not good
enough to through every possible path the user may want to go down. This leads
to specs that are ambiguous at best, contradictory at worst. It takes a good
developer to see the hidden things in the spec and raise the questions that
need to be asked before the development goes too far down a bad path.

------
br1
"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
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
> 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.

------
KevBurnsJr
"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.

~~~
nickelplate
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.

------
msabalau
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.

~~~
robryan
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.

~~~
nkassis
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.

~~~
robryan
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.

~~~
ZachPruckowski
You can, it's just really hard.

This is basically what Minecraft is doing - the game is entertaining now, but
it's also got INSANE potential. So it's absolutely worth plopping $13 down on.
Notch made $3 million or whatever (enough to fund game development) on the
alpha sales. Of course, he may have trouble making money post-release if he
can't charge the people who bought Alpha for the full version and if most of
his potential audience buy Alpha or Beta.

Torchlight had the right idea, I think - create a fun initial product, and use
the income from that to fund your more expensive V 2.0 that has a subscription
model.

------
pilkers
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
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...](http://lukehalliwell.wordpress.com/2010/09/15/where-realtime-
worlds-went-wrong/)

~~~
pilkers
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.

~~~
teamonkey
Led by some of the same people featured in this documentary.

[http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1012096952890708986...](http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1012096952890708986#)

------
Xero
<http://ealouse.wordpress.com/>

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

~~~
jim_dot
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.

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

~~~
rikthevik
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)

~~~
abrahamsen
Jeff Strain formulated it like this: "the team that is best poised to deliver
a successful game that is an evolution of WoW is... well, the WoW team".

[http://www.guildwars.com/events/tradeshows/gc2007/gcspeech.p...](http://www.guildwars.com/events/tradeshows/gc2007/gcspeech.php)

It will be interesting to see how much of his own advice he managed to follow.

------
steveklabnik
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.

~~~
nkassis
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.

------
whyenot
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.

------
billjings
Video games. Long hours. But excellent drama.

------
mattm
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.

~~~
potatolicious
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.

~~~
gamble
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.

~~~
_delirium
There's still a lot of burnout, though, because it's very hard to get into a
position with significant creative control, even once you get established. You
can get a _job_ , but not the job the aspiring designers _want_. Among well-
regarded developers I can think of off the top of my head, Borut Pfeiffer,
Chris Hecker, Damian Isla, and Chaim Gingold have all left the AAA-title part
of the industry in the past year or two, either to try their hand at indie
development, or start a consulting firm.

------
Tyrant505
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
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
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.

~~~
decadentcactus
Travian's been around a while.

And I believe the Ultima game is Lord of Ultima [.com]? Played it for a bit,
was an ok timesink but eventually I grew out of it since I mostly used it as a
Sim City type game.

------
GrandMasterBirt
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.

------
hackermom
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.

