People were very quick to blame EA for destroying a lot of the studios they bought but the scuttlebutt places it mostly in the developers' own laps. Ensemble: extremely mismanaged studio and it...
People were very quick to blame EA for destroying a lot of the studios they bought but the scuttlebutt places it mostly in the developers' own laps.
Ensemble: extremely mismanaged studio and it came to a head during the development of Halo Wars when it turned out a good portion of the company simply chose to not work on the game and instead start making some MMO. Microsoft, who was funding only Halo Wars, was not happy when they learned of what was basically embezzlement from a totally owned subsidiary. The studio was shut down immediately on Halo Wars' release.
Pandemic: Whether mismanagement or too much staff turnover, they just couldn't produce a good product on time once the X360 arrived in the market. Saboteur wound up being pretty good but it was too little, too late after the disastrous Mercenaries 2 and that awful Lord of the Rings Dynasty Warriors game that nobody remembers. EA had to help them finish Saboteur too.
BioWare: to borrow a quote, if BioWare had a gun with two bullets and was in a room with bin Laden and Hitler, it would shoot itself in the foot twice. I used to count them among my favourite developers ever so this one is especially disappointing.
Maxis: after the departure of Wright (who went over to EA proper), it was never quite the same. Spore, SimCity, and Sims 4 all had disappointing choices made in their developments that really limited the appeal and success of the games.
Westwood and Origin are the two I don't really know about because they happened so long ago that any information is either lost to the wind or sealed up very tightly.
Westwood and Origin are the ones that have EA the bad reputation to begin with. Both studios were making solid games at the time, but not all of them had the wide appeal they were hoping for....
Westwood and Origin are the ones that have EA the bad reputation to begin with.
Both studios were making solid games at the time, but not all of them had the wide appeal they were hoping for. After they were bought up by EA they made the same kinds of games for a while, but they were massive downgrades in quality. Ultima IX in particular stands out as a buggy mess. EA forcing them to release games that needed more work just provided a feedback loop that eventually lead to them being shut down and absorbed.
So it's either that they ruined the studios when they purchased them or studios only make themselves available once they're at the brink of failing, anyway. From a player's perspective, that still...
So it's either that they ruined the studios when they purchased them or studios only make themselves available once they're at the brink of failing, anyway. From a player's perspective, that still makes any such news alarming.
Personally – while I believe that truth tends to be complicated, generally lying between two extremes – I do think the purchases directly hurt those studios in some way. Think of it this way, if some publisher literally owns you, anything you actually want to do as a studio has to get approved at the very least. So even if they say, in interviews, "They didn't force us to do anything, it was our choice to cram that game full of microtransactions and change the theme to match some random brand", well, it's basically "either you choose this or you're fired". It's easy to guess what EA/Microsoft wants. They're replacing passion for a specific game with a corporate plan. That's how Rare was forced to do 360 avatars and Kinect crap. That's how Lionhead was forced to do Kinect crap (although Molyneux probably was easily enough talked into it). That's why Sim City 2013 had mandatory always-online integration with EA Origin.
Microsoft has lately chosen to pay a little more and at least get functioning studios, which generally makes the result more pleasant. But you can already feel mandatory Xbox shit creeping into new versions of Minecraft and I weep for Bethesda. No fucking way they're not paying $7 billion to force people into some shit.
Where that breaks down for me is when multiple games have different kinds of issues entirely, as in the case with Maxis, Bioware, and Pandemic. Those can't all be the publisher forcing those...
Where that breaks down for me is when multiple games have different kinds of issues entirely, as in the case with Maxis, Bioware, and Pandemic. Those can't all be the publisher forcing those changes, especially not decisions like Spore.
Meanwhile, there have been great coverages of what happened with development in-depth with some of these games, like Kotaku's coverage of Anthem which gets all the way to the bottom of EA's and Bioware's relationship together. In that case, it's plain to see that EA wasn't forcing anything and the one thing they did, jetpacks and flight, is one of Anthem's most popular and iconic components.
Some of these games really do not fit the theme. Treyarch was not a big name when they were purchased, and while Mojang was definately a big purchase, it wasn't some giant studio and they only had...
Some of these games really do not fit the theme. Treyarch was not a big name when they were purchased, and while Mojang was definately a big purchase, it wasn't some giant studio and they only had one game to their name at the time. Respawn appears to be extra cheating; they only had two games released before they were purchased (one of them a sequel, no less), and before that they were already funded almost exclusively by EA.
Well, at the very least, they all stand as success stories; without them it would have been entirely made up of "Big guys buy small guys, small guys flounder around making failures until they get shuttered".
People were very quick to blame EA for destroying a lot of the studios they bought but the scuttlebutt places it mostly in the developers' own laps.
Ensemble: extremely mismanaged studio and it came to a head during the development of Halo Wars when it turned out a good portion of the company simply chose to not work on the game and instead start making some MMO. Microsoft, who was funding only Halo Wars, was not happy when they learned of what was basically embezzlement from a totally owned subsidiary. The studio was shut down immediately on Halo Wars' release.
Pandemic: Whether mismanagement or too much staff turnover, they just couldn't produce a good product on time once the X360 arrived in the market. Saboteur wound up being pretty good but it was too little, too late after the disastrous Mercenaries 2 and that awful Lord of the Rings Dynasty Warriors game that nobody remembers. EA had to help them finish Saboteur too.
BioWare: to borrow a quote, if BioWare had a gun with two bullets and was in a room with bin Laden and Hitler, it would shoot itself in the foot twice. I used to count them among my favourite developers ever so this one is especially disappointing.
Maxis: after the departure of Wright (who went over to EA proper), it was never quite the same. Spore, SimCity, and Sims 4 all had disappointing choices made in their developments that really limited the appeal and success of the games.
Westwood and Origin are the two I don't really know about because they happened so long ago that any information is either lost to the wind or sealed up very tightly.
Westwood and Origin are the ones that have EA the bad reputation to begin with.
Both studios were making solid games at the time, but not all of them had the wide appeal they were hoping for. After they were bought up by EA they made the same kinds of games for a while, but they were massive downgrades in quality. Ultima IX in particular stands out as a buggy mess. EA forcing them to release games that needed more work just provided a feedback loop that eventually lead to them being shut down and absorbed.
So it's either that they ruined the studios when they purchased them or studios only make themselves available once they're at the brink of failing, anyway. From a player's perspective, that still makes any such news alarming.
Personally – while I believe that truth tends to be complicated, generally lying between two extremes – I do think the purchases directly hurt those studios in some way. Think of it this way, if some publisher literally owns you, anything you actually want to do as a studio has to get approved at the very least. So even if they say, in interviews, "They didn't force us to do anything, it was our choice to cram that game full of microtransactions and change the theme to match some random brand", well, it's basically "either you choose this or you're fired". It's easy to guess what EA/Microsoft wants. They're replacing passion for a specific game with a corporate plan. That's how Rare was forced to do 360 avatars and Kinect crap. That's how Lionhead was forced to do Kinect crap (although Molyneux probably was easily enough talked into it). That's why Sim City 2013 had mandatory always-online integration with EA Origin.
Microsoft has lately chosen to pay a little more and at least get functioning studios, which generally makes the result more pleasant. But you can already feel mandatory Xbox shit creeping into new versions of Minecraft and I weep for Bethesda. No fucking way they're not paying $7 billion to force people into some shit.
Where that breaks down for me is when multiple games have different kinds of issues entirely, as in the case with Maxis, Bioware, and Pandemic. Those can't all be the publisher forcing those changes, especially not decisions like Spore.
Meanwhile, there have been great coverages of what happened with development in-depth with some of these games, like Kotaku's coverage of Anthem which gets all the way to the bottom of EA's and Bioware's relationship together. In that case, it's plain to see that EA wasn't forcing anything and the one thing they did, jetpacks and flight, is one of Anthem's most popular and iconic components.
Some of these games really do not fit the theme. Treyarch was not a big name when they were purchased, and while Mojang was definately a big purchase, it wasn't some giant studio and they only had one game to their name at the time. Respawn appears to be extra cheating; they only had two games released before they were purchased (one of them a sequel, no less), and before that they were already funded almost exclusively by EA.
Well, at the very least, they all stand as success stories; without them it would have been entirely made up of "Big guys buy small guys, small guys flounder around making failures until they get shuttered".