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Like I said getting bought out by EA is never a good thing, EVER
GreenChaos
Member Posts: 2,268
EA cutting 11% of its work force, BioWare's Dragon Age will be one of the games delayed.
Any comment I want to make about this will get me banned from this site, because profanity is not allowed.
Think about all the crap titles they could pull people from, but BioWare the best dev team they have is taking a hit? EA has no brains and they never will.
Dragon Age will probably be their biggest game of the year, what a bunch of fools.
Perhaps they were banking on WAR making more money?
Comments
www.edge-online.com/features/riccitiello%E2%80%99s-nine-steps-recovery
EA's 9 steps to recovery. Seems one of the steps is returning to doing sequels...awesome.
See you in the dream..
The Fires from heaven, now as cold as ice. A rapid ascension tolls a heavy price.
EA killed Bullfrog (Syndicate), Origin (Ultima series), Westwood Studios (would have been as good as Blizzard) and almost killed Maxis. They also killed all NFL football games with that stupid contract.
Is it realy EAs fault? I mean a lot of others had similar money problems too in the past few months.
No, but new IPs are going to get hit, like BioWare and Mythic games, while they go back to proven sequels. So basically sims and sports.
BioWare is going to get reamed.
I'm guessing any huge MMO investments will get put on hold.
You have to be a fool to work in this industry to begin with. It's only recently (in the last 2 years) become popular to read about Development layoffs...
Prior to that, it just happened regularly. Games would come to completion and roughly 50% of the team would either be syphered off for a new game by the same company, or get fired for having no further use.
Worse, many of the people let go were Junior Members of staff, so they never truely had a name for themselves.
Worse YET, many of these people worked at near poverty level on the promise of "Profit Sharing"... which they never got to see because they were let go before release.
I have a friend I worked with on 2 seperate projects with a story:
Upon release we were all promised something, I hadn't been paid in 2 months, and had been living in a horrible hotel, so I was looking forward to my money. My boss showed up and presented me with a Matchbook Car that I had modeled for the game. Smiled. And handed me my release papers.
If that's not enough for you, or you need MMO equivalent stories:
http://days-since-cheyenne-mountain-employees-have-been-paid.com/
That's for StarGate Worlds...
Doesn't anybody remember what happened to all of Sigil right after Vanguard's release?
How about Flagship Studios after HellGate?
This new "worry" is just because people are reading it and having a field day... this has always been how the industry works...
- CaesarsGhost
Lead Gameplay and Gameworld Designer for a yet unnamed MMO Title.
"When people tell me designing a game is easy, I try to get them to design a board game. Most people don't last 5 minutes, the rest rarely last more then a day. The final few realize it's neither fun nor easy."
I am looking forward to more info from you since you seem to be one of the best information sources on this forum so keep writing and well done
i'm not gonna lie... EA has destroyed way too many good things in my life. EA was founded with the idea of helping game developers distrubute their art, aka games. Somewhere along the lines, EA turned into hungry hungry hippo, and used underhand tactics to buy out as much as they can. Then they would dump the company and look for another one to feed off of. Some of the most popular creative companies were destroyed by this parasite. EA has damaged the gaming industry like no other.
Microsoft is in a short second though. After they started playing their hand at games and consoles, they started aquiring other companies and selling off their projects, then dumping the company after they took the few developers or projects they wanted.
This kind of business practice should be against the law.... even though it wont change.
It isn't just EA. A company I helped get off the ground was bought by a large three-letter corporation (not IBM, I hasten to say) and they've done nothing but alienate our customers, misunderstand the marketplace, and contribute to brain-drain as just about all the people (other than myself) with any skills at all have left. I'm still there because I'm getting a little old to go job hunting--but who knows? If the idiocy continues, I'm going to have to leave.
Arguing with me will not make you right.
And we thought things can not get worse....
By the way. Bioware , sadly we all knew what will happen. Tried to believe it will not...but its just mater of time before it will hit the fan.
EA tried releasing new IP's last year and they didn't sell and besides this cutting down on the work force every company is doing right now due to the economy.... I for one think EA are great because they release all their titles for the PC aswel as consoles where as most other publishers forget about the PC. I love their buddies program which has helped developers like Valve and Crytek and ID Software for Rage and lots of others. I like how they bought Bioware and Dice.
I loved Dead Space and Mirror's Edge from last year.
I just hope EA get their hands on publishing GTA.
blasphemy. If the new IPs didnt sell, its because the games were medicore or bad. The moment GTA falls into EA's hands is they day i start playing with dolls instead of PC games.
blasphemy. If the new IPs didnt sell, its because the games were medicore or bad. The moment GTA falls into EA's hands is they day i start playing with dolls instead of PC games.
Why?
Bioware, Valve, Id Software, The Burnout guys and Crytek are all given creative freedom.
Rockstar make so much money that so would they have creative freedom.
blasphemy. If the new IPs didnt sell, its because the games were medicore or bad. The moment GTA falls into EA's hands is they day i start playing with dolls instead of PC games.
Why?
Bioware, Valve, Id Software, The Burnout guys and Crytek are all given creative freedom.
Rockstar make so much money that so would they have creative freedom.
For the record:
Valve is an independent studio who's only affiliation with EA is through their "EA Partners" program... all EA does is box the game for shelves. You can bypass EA completely by buying the game through Steam.
id (lowercase, get it right) Software is also NOT owned by EA... they're an independent studio as well. They've published with Midway, Activision, and EA... I guess whoever gives them the best deal for the title.
- CaesarsGhost
Lead Gameplay and Gameworld Designer for a yet unnamed MMO Title.
"When people tell me designing a game is easy, I try to get them to design a board game. Most people don't last 5 minutes, the rest rarely last more then a day. The final few realize it's neither fun nor easy."
well... Banks give less credit, and a scary number of (poorly managed) videogame companies run day-to-day on credit then pay off once the game is gold. If your companies has no liquid assests to use and the banks no longer hand out a couple million just by saying please, your going to need to cut employees just because you no longer have access to the money... which quite frankly I think somebody other than the QA department should take the brunt of this mistake.
As for the non-legit reasons... the recession is being used as a scape-goat to kill risky projects or ones that arent performing up to standard. It doenst matter where you read, but everyone agrees the videogame industry is recession proof, peoples logical process seems to melt away as soon as you say "recession" and thus People are blowing it out the wazoo to avoid futher questioning.
after 6 or so years, I had to change it a little...
blasphemy. If the new IPs didnt sell, its because the games were medicore or bad. The moment GTA falls into EA's hands is they day i start playing with dolls instead of PC games.
Why?
Bioware, Valve, Id Software, The Burnout guys and Crytek are all given creative freedom.
Rockstar make so much money that so would they have creative freedom.
For the record:
Valve is an independent studio who's only affiliation with EA is through their "EA Partners" program... all EA does is box the game for shelves. You can bypass EA completely by buying the game through Steam.
id (lowercase, get it right) Software is also NOT owned by EA... they're an independent studio as well. They've published with Midway, Activision, and EA... I guess whoever gives them the best deal for the title.
Yeh and whos to say Rockstar couldn't join the EA Partners?
Valve solder over 2 million copies of Left 4 Dead retail through EA Partners.
Id softwares Rage is being published through EA Partners.
I mixed up developers to show that they're all given creative freedom.
Bioware ... what will happend?
Caesar nailed it when he said this has been going on in this industry for years.
As to Bioware, EA bought them, they ALWAYS do this, no matter how good the studio.
If you put all the execs from EA and SOE in a room to change one light bulb, it would remain dark forever!
Word on the street in that they were going to delay Dragon Age (PC version) anyways, so you never know.
But this can't be good news for BioWares MMO. If I was short on money making an MMO would be the last thing on my list. Unless I was Blizzard.
In some ways, EA is extremely smart. They take your money and run, and get rich off of your misery a year or two down the road. Of course on the other hand EA couldn't even spell customer loyalty, much less know any way to manage it. So in the long term, EA is retarded. In the short term, they're taking your money (and admittedly mine too) and laughing all the way to the bank.
SOE couldn't get any worse and all EA would have to do is fire Smedley and straight away theres an improvement.
Dragon Age as EA's top title. Well, I'm going to fall just short of saying this thread is rooted completely in fantasy land.
If _everything_ comes together _perfectly_, Dragon Age _might_ beat Madden. Might. With the lack of publicity (ironic since Ricky himself highlighted this as a problem in his recent interview), the only thing going for Dragon Age is the Bioware brand behind it. That's something, definitely, but I doubt it will be enough. Fallout 3 had massive hype, an incredible pair of brands behind it (both the franchise and the studio), and when it launched, numerous articles talked about how it sold exceedingly well. Fallout 03 was considered a big hit. Looking at the first four months of Fallout 3 and Madden 09 sales, they're pretty close together. So all that coming together means you beat Madden narrowly for your first few months. Still, if the quality is there, I can see it happening.
Beating an entirely new installation of the Sims, though? Funny. Admittedly, Sims games don't have massive launch sales, and games like Dragon Age tend to have extremely front-loaded sales, but looking at a six month timeframe after launch, I'd be extremely surprised if Dragon Age outdid it.
If EA launches a marketing blitz and the game is in perfect shape at launch, I'd peg the chances of it being the top EA title of 09 at about 10%. I'd only even give it that because if it's truly awesome, leading to one of the best word of mouth campaigns ever, it might pull it off.
Well for how bad everyone says they are they are still making a pile of cash and very successful.
If you really want to hit them you have to not buy ANYTHING associated with them, but good luck with that since they are involved in someway or another in so many games.
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Get Paid to Play Video Games
Since earth and beyond I have not bought or supported any ea-games product, its not hard to do, they suck unless ya like 50 versions of madden which i dont lol.
playing eq2 and two worlds
http://www.gameogre.com/mmograveyard.htm ea-games has almost half of these games at this site lol.
playing eq2 and two worlds
i second this it really hurt me when they took over westwood and destroyed it. i believe that the westwood and blizzard rts competion they had going on produced some of the best games ever (command and conquer series, starcraft, warcraft)