I spent time as a TD on both the dev and publishing sides - the perception all EA (the publisher) is doing is money and terms is very much mistaken.
To take the case of Bioware, the SW:TOR launch was a notable disaster. There is no way in hell Bioware by themselves could have recovered from that, and it took a lot of "external" firefighting to get that under control.
OTOH various decisions many people assume came from EA were actually made by studio heads, against EA wishes, because the studio head thought it would increase their revenue and thus bonus.
One of the reasons Activision outperformed EA was they have a better culture of co-operation between departments. Efforts to improve this at EA never ceased to actually make it worse.
EA had some prime idiots in finance that did indeed make decrees that were problems.
I cannot go into the juicy specifics but on the EA publishing side you would be hard pressed to find someone that did not think the finance department were engaged in cutting off the company nose to spite the face of whoever in the company they didn't want to pay this week. (OTOH this was because there were supposed historical cases of excessive leniency, which from what I heard may even be understating it). I personally had a lot of trouble with the self fulfilling prophecies of marketing like "we didn't make money from X last year, so we won't do it this year", "that's because we didn't try it last year", "your point?" etc. but many were more sympathetic to that.
>One of the reasons Activision outperformed EA was they have a better culture of co-operation between departments. Efforts to improve this at EA never ceased to actually make it worse.
Why do you think there was such a clash between departments? There's always some friction because different divisions have different interests, but EA seems to sound particularly bad at this.
I also heard that EA was run very "corportate" like, comparatively speaking. In an era where many other studios would still go for this "fun factor" to build relations. Would that more hard-lined bureaucracy wove distrust compared to the executives that felt like they were on the frontlines with the devs?
> Why do you think there was such a clash between departments? There's always some friction because different divisions have different interests, but EA seems to sound particularly bad at this.
A distinct lack of an internal single threat to unify against, like a Steve Jobs style figure. I think the closest I saw to this was Peter Moore, who was a nice guy, but (thankfully) does not tolerate assholes at all. The result was the only serious threats were external, so when playing the PR war the handful of problematic studio heads would blame everything bad on EA, while trying to take credit for everything good. Because of their public positions no one has the power to remove those problems (that would be evil EA being evil), so they would steadily float upwards to positions from which they can then terrorize the well meaning studio and department heads.
There were various initiatives I saw (clear billion+ dollar opportunities) that couldn't get going because it required three departments to align in such a way that someone (one of the leaders of the three departments) would get the credit, and the war over who would get the credit would get so intense that the initiative could never happen. (I have heard stories out of Google that suggest this has been even worse there going back to a similar timeframe - some of the VP and above level offsites sounded quite fun).
Similarly I saw people with whole production units they knew were trainwrecks publicly align with another department they secretly hated so when their high profile project crashed and burned they would blame it on the other department. This would be worked out before the project even entered production, and was even well known by third parties that tried to exploit it.
By far the most successful projects there were born from some historic trauma, such as the EA spouse or a giant technical fubar. Those situations provided the impetus to grow up, and they really did. A consequence of this is the FIFA org, in my era, remains one of the most professional software organizations I ever saw, and I was liasing with most of the big tech companies. This also explains why the prevailing EA view was the PS3 hack saved the Playstation by forcing Sony to grow up or go home.
Repairing and recovering from that outage required the Playstation org at Sony to adopt a degree of professionalism wrt all tech dev and operations that started paying off remarkably quickly.
At the time a good number of people thought as a result of all this Sony would be pushed out of the console business.
If you had to guess, do you think that SWTOR would have released in the way it did had BioWare been an independent company? (Notably, incomplete and in many ways an uninteresting WoW clone.)
BioWare would have collapsed as an independent company long before SWTOR ever saw light of day.
They seemed to have failed to understand the scope of preparing to operate a game as a service after launching it until far too late into development, which in fairness was and remains a very common problem for people used to the "fire and forget" style of launches in the past, they just did it in a very high profile way which made all of the problems a hundred times worse.
One thing people overlook a lot is after this died down it was BioWare that bought a small mobile studio called KlickNation. KlickNation were a very interesting team because their expertise was how do you take a tiny audience and make absolutely unheard of amounts of money from them, to a degree that was unbelievable. This obviously appeals to game devs because if you can have 30k players and make the same amount of money as with 3M it saves you a whole lot of trouble.
I cannot really comment any more than that, such is life.
To take the case of Bioware, the SW:TOR launch was a notable disaster. There is no way in hell Bioware by themselves could have recovered from that, and it took a lot of "external" firefighting to get that under control.
OTOH various decisions many people assume came from EA were actually made by studio heads, against EA wishes, because the studio head thought it would increase their revenue and thus bonus.
One of the reasons Activision outperformed EA was they have a better culture of co-operation between departments. Efforts to improve this at EA never ceased to actually make it worse.