New disaster added to Sim City: YOU'RE ALL FIRED! Maxis Emeryville closed.

Maniacal

Maniacal

the green Napoleon
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http://www.beyondsims.com/55229/ea-closes-maxis-emeryville/

EA has closed Maxis Emeryville which leaves the The Sims studios as the only surviving remnants of legacy Will Wright left. What this means for the future of Sim City and any other Maxis IP is unknown, but it is hardly surprising given how badly Maxis has handled their last few games.

RIP Sim City

Spoiler :



Link to video.
For some bloody reason nobody seems to have uploaded the live-action videos from the first Sim City aside from this one.
 
Heres to another year of EA being voted the most hated company then. Again.

I dont think i have ever seen a company that is so consistently bad at treating its customers. Its like they do it on purpose.
 
I know EA is terrible in many ways but in this case I don't really see how they're at fault. This particular outfit hasn't been making any decent games in recent years.

EA is a corporate, not a charity - they can't go on supporting assets that aren't bringing in the cash forever. Or was the current incarnation of SimCity and other IPs doing well in the market?
 
sherbz said:
Heres to another year of EA being voted the most hated company then. Again.

I dont think i have ever seen a company that is so consistently bad at treating its customers. Its like they do it on purpose.
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You must not use cable.

I know EA is terrible in many ways but in this case I don't really see how they're at fault. This particular outfit hasn't been making any decent games in recent years.

EA is a corporate, not a charity - they can't go on supporting assets that aren't bringing in the cash forever. Or was the current incarnation of SimCity and other IPs doing well in the market?
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Pretty much. EA bought Maxis in 1997. It isn't as if EA bought Maxis a few years ago, pushed out SimCity, then decided to strangle it in the crib. The studio's gone downhill, clearly couldn't meet the demands of its parent company, and got shut down. It sucks, but better companies and studios have disappeared for less.
 
Does anyone know how many copies sim city 5 sold vs sim city 4? And relative profit? 5 might have costs a lot more to develop.
 
Very sad. Not THAT surprising considering Maxis screwed some of their titles (like Simcity 2013).
I was hoping someone made a GOOD city builder before I die but I guess that's gone now.
 
J-man said:
I'm a bit skeptical about that title, I played cities in motion 2 and found it was a bit sterile. Also I've been disappointed several times by promises of city builders (Cities X(X)L, Simcity 2013).
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Going from what I've seen so far it basically looks like everything everybody wanted from Simcity 2013 with all the parts everybody hated about Simcity 2013 chucked out. Watch some videos on youtube. You'll be surprised how excellent it looks.
 
Scarlet_King said:
You must not use cable.



Pretty much. EA bought Maxis in 1997. It isn't as if EA bought Maxis a few years ago, pushed out SimCity, then decided to strangle it in the crib. The studio's gone downhill, clearly couldn't meet the demands of its parent company, and got shut down. It sucks, but better companies and studios have disappeared for less.
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Oh c'mon. Sim city was an unmitigated disaster. If EA pushed the Always Online on them, then they might very well be to blame. Because that was the no 1 reason why it bombed.
 
sherbz said:
Heres to another year of EA being voted the most hated company then. Again.

I dont think i have ever seen a company that is so consistently bad at treating its customers. Its like they do it on purpose.
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As pointed out by others, Maxis has been going downhill for years already. Sim City was a critical (after the initial, not long enough played and in a controlled online environment reviews) and public relations disaster.


Scarlet_King said:
Pretty much. EA bought Maxis in 1997. It isn't as if EA bought Maxis a few years ago, pushed out SimCity, then decided to strangle it in the crib. The studio's gone downhill, clearly couldn't meet the demands of its parent company, and got shut down. It sucks, but better companies and studios have disappeared for less.
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Yeah Maxis was apparently in a bad financial position when EA bought it and it was fine until Spore. Meddling from EA and a faction within Maxis itself ruined Spore, Will Wright's dream game and was probably a major reason why he left the company. I don't know how many people left at that time as well, and studios do have lots of people come and go over the years, but it obviously was a loss of talent and direction they never recovered from.

It is partly due to EA's meddling why these studios they bought lost many of their lead people and floundered after that, but EA has also had changes in leadership too.

civvver said:
Does anyone know how many copies sim city 5 sold vs sim city 4? And relative profit? 5 might have costs a lot more to develop.
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I don't recall any numbers released, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was somewhere around breaking even at least, but I doubt it made much of a profit.

sherbz said:
Oh c'mon. Sim city was an unmitigated disaster. If EA pushed the Always Online on them, then they might very well be to blame. Because that was the no 1 reason why it bombed.
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The Always Online wasn't even a main reason, it was a major one, but the game had so many other short comings it was screwed regardless of the BS always online (which was for saving games in the cloud only, all the other "calculations running in the cloud" was total BS and lies) or not.
 
A dev from Maxis posted this comment on /r/simcity:

Money. It all comes down to money. EA as a corporation doesn't share our sense of obligation out of sentimentality. Hence today's announcement.
The long gap is probably caused by several factors. First was that the expansion for SC4 didn't print cash like The Sims was at the time. Sure it made money, but The Sims had a HUGE (I remember reading 16x) return on the investment. So it got deprioritized to make The Sims 2. Which again made huge returns.

EA has adopted a greenlight gating process. Where by with little or no capital invested they have a few highly talented senior designers/creative types come up with the framework of a game. They develop what they can as proof of concept, usually simple gameplay prototypes and concept art, which is then presented to EA. This sets up a series of gates and reviews whereby they get more money and manpower as it seems necessary and the time to work on the gameplay, engine, and artistic style. This whole period is called preproduction, and can last from a few months to a few years. At some point you go into production, which means you know what you are making, how you are going to do it, how they are going to sell it and hard numbers to back all of that up. Some time after that, when marketing thinks it is right, they will announce the game to the public. From that point on nothing changes from the public facing. Once locked into 'online-only' there was no way of changing it. People complained that the cities were too small but there was no way to address that without compromising the numbers and forecasts when the game was sold to EA's corporate overseers. EA can't be negotiated with at this level, you can't change their mind, you REALLY have to fight to get dates changed etc.

So, during that 10 year wait there was almost 9 years of silence. 3 or 4 of those years had active development of the game that shipped, with another year or more of a small group of creatives. There were other attempts that never made the light of day, and products (Simcity Societies comes to mind) that didn't deliver that 'SimCity' experience.
I offer all of this with the caveat that they don't even tell us (read 'the devs') all of this and some of it is conjecture.

I also don't fault EA with this process. It is meant to minimize risk and it does pretty well at that. EA is a very large ship, it takes a lot of energy and time to get it to change direction. That long process steers the ship and adds predictability. Smaller companies are able to pivot much faster but lack EA's resources and ability to 'play the long game'. All of this stuff happens out of necessity, and all of it comes down to money.
EA is actually a great place to work these days. In the past there were difficulties (I was part of the EA Spouse/class action) but a lot of that has turned around. They really do want to retain talent and minimize layoffs. Not everyone shares this experience, but I haven't worked back-to-back weekends in almost a decade. EA has a really good benefits package, competitive pay, and a strong sense of progressive public responsibility. Maxis, in particular, the Sims side has what is probably the highest level of gender equality in the industry.
I'm sad to see that studio close, it's been my home for a very long time.
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tl;dr Design and scope of the game has to be mostly planned out before it is in production, can't really be allowed to change anything despite massive negative feedback after it is announced publicly. Maxis still messed up as much as EA did.
 
sherbz said:
Oh c'mon. Sim city was an unmitigated disaster. If EA pushed the Always Online on them, then they might very well be to blame. Because that was the no 1 reason why it bombed.
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Reasons #2 through #10 can't be ignored. Always Online was just the most visible of the reasons why people hated SimCity. EA was not responsible for every pisspoor design decision in SimCity, and if SimCity on its own had financially bombed, but Maxis's other games were still printing money, EA would have easily concluded that Maxis could be kept around.

But it wasn't just SimCity. It was a several year decline in the amount of money the studio was bringing in versus the amount of money being sunk into it.

This actually goes at the heart of the problem when it comes to discussing Electronic Arts. It is painted as a company that is uniformly bad for the studios it buys out, and the studios are painted as saintly organizations that only make design flaws because of evil corporations. It is the same mentality that makes some people blame Disney entirely for Cars and Monster U., and I bet across many industries.

Lets do some comparison.

Sims 4: 1m copies sold in two months
SimCity: 2m copies sold in three months
Sims 3: 1.4m copies in the first week
Spore: 2m copies in the first three weeks
Sims 2: 1m copies in ten days
SimCity 4: Can't find good numbers other than it was the eighth best top selling game of 2008

Two games developed by Maxis, taking into account the costs of keeping the studio open, the rising cost of employing the devs, and rising overhead costs in general, which both likely had large marketing and development costs, bombed back-to-back from a combination of decisions likely forced by EA, and poor design decisions.

At the end of the day, it is sad that Maxis shut down, but we're remembering the Maxis before Spore, not the Maxis as it was when it was closed, and the Maxis it was when it closed can't be blamed entirely on Electronic Arts.

A comment from the Reddit thread linked above.

I'm not sure, but I think that simcity5 was the largest citizen simulator that existed when it was released, but people looked at it as the smallest simcity that had been released instead.
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lolwut

Maxis made a gamble with the design changes to the formula, but it didn't pay off, and now its closing. Skylines comes out next week, so I'm probably set.
 
Leonel said:
That is a ridiculous comment. I remember SimCity Societies!
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Somehow I read the dev post above twice and still managed to forget SimCity Societies existed before I finished.
 
I'm not sure, but I think that simcity5 was the largest citizen simulator that existed when it was released, but people looked at it as the smallest simcity that had been released instead.
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Then one month later Cities in Motion 2 came out with capabilites of hundreds of thousands of citizens agents with persistent housing, workplaces, daily scheduels and social class made by a team of 9 people with citizen simulation not even being a focus of the game!
 
J-man said:
Very sad. Not THAT surprising considering Maxis screwed some of their titles (like Simcity 2013).
I was hoping someone made a GOOD city builder before I die but I guess that's gone now.
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Sim City 4 is still a great game...
 
Maniacal said:
A dev from Maxis posted this comment on /r/simcity:



tl;dr Design and scope of the game has to be mostly planned out before it is in production, can't really be allowed to change anything despite massive negative feedback after it is announced publicly. Maxis still messed up as much as EA did.
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It's quite easy to go to the other extreme and end up with buggy, unplayable crap or abandonware cus game design keeps changing too much. There is a happy medium somewhere.

I'm shocked by the back to back weekend things though, most indie developers seem to bust tail to get games out. I thought the big box ones did too.
 
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