Electronic Arts Shuts Down Origin Systems? 343
An anonymous reader writes "Waterthread.org has picked up the following on the studio that brought us the popular Ultima and Wing Commander series: 'Game company Electronic Arts is expected to tell its Austin employees this week that the company will be shutting down Origin Systems, its Austin operations, according to sources. Employees will be offered an opportunity to relocate to California or accept a severance package. Company officials could not be reached for comment. Austin is the #3 location in the U.S. for game development with more than 50 companies making major contributions to the game industry, including game development, publishing, tools and middleware and chips and hardware." The Wing Commander CIC has also posted a epitaph for Origin."
Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
Although it still sucks that some people will be losing there job. The PC gaming biz is grim these days.
Where is #1 and #2? (Score:4, Insightful)
Where is the #1 and #2 location for game development?
Why relocate to California? (Score:5, Insightful)
I blame EA for forcing Ultima 9 out too early (Score:0, Insightful)
Im suprised it took so long... (Score:5, Insightful)
After EA bought up Origion Wing Commander went into it's declining stages ending up with the catasrophe that was Privateer 2 on Erin's part and the nuclear holocaust that was the movie (On Chris' part). Thus died one of the finest and most groundbreaking gaming series in history.
I never paid much attention to Ultima but I knew it was a matter of time till EA did the same thing to it, I just read an article about after the success of EverQuest EA starting forcing Origin to make Ultima more Everquest-ish and less Ultima-like and thus removing and in forcing those changes it involved making Ultima un-Ultima-like thereby alienating Ultimas fans.
WAY TO GO ELECTRONIC ARTS - You have sucessfully killed two of the longest run and best gaming series there ever were. May you continue to spoon feed people things like Madden ever year with miminal changes and another $50 price tag.
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To the Origin Guys: Look to the community, we are with you, many would help you start anew to become what you once were. Weh ave confident in you guys.
Re:Origin, Bullfrog (Score:3, Insightful)
Goodbye to the pedigree (Score:5, Insightful)
Killing Origin is just another sad episode in the tale of "EA Lames". We'll see more game console stupidity with John Madden screaming about football, but truly original game concepts are dying, as are the companies who made them.
I will lift a Guiness to my youth, and the hours of fun I had with Origin tonight.
Re:OK. And... (Score:4, Insightful)
Most people don't feel too bad about killing chickens for meat since chickens don't appear to be persons. Unfortunately, many also see nothing wrong with ignoring the effects of relocations and whatnot on the people at the company.
Re:OK. And... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not saying this is definitely the case, but while corporate management may be heartless, it usually isn't malicious. You make it sound like they're moving people just to have something to do.
Expected... (Score:2, Insightful)
Here we go again... (Score:5, Insightful)
EA has bought its way to the top. Bullfrog, Westwood, Maxis, Origin have all fallen before the giant. Eliminating whole divisions--even highly successful ones--is nothing new. Just ask the people [garagegames.com] from Dynamix who got chopped shortly after Tribes 2 became a hit.
Infogrames, er, Atari, is no better. They went a from a small publishing house to one of the titans of the games industry by buying everything they could. Adopting the name "Atari," plastering it over their corporate monolith as a relatively cheap facade (the company was only a few million dollars) is, to me, the most cynical thing I've seen from a gaming company in a long time. Yet, there is no media outrage, not even a notice that they're a completely different company that adopted the same name.
Creativity is dead. There are no more juicy steaks of games, no more Command and Conquers or Homeworlds, the games that bring gaming into a whole new dimension, at least from the major houses. Instead, we get reheated leftovers or ground chuck, tossed on a bun and served up McDonalds style. Yet another game in the same series, yet another Sims expansion back--Is this the future of gaming that you want? This is the future of gaming as in the hands of EA and "Atari." EA did not produce a new, original game in 2003 [slashdot.org]--only rehashes and expansions.
Support an independent developer with fresh ideas, or support an open-source game. Look to the endless parade of closed studios and stifled creativity, sequels following the same pattern, only with few shiny new features. Is this the way you want your games? Or do you want something fresh and new?
About you (Score:3, Insightful)
You should apply for a moderator position at freerepublic.com and/or democraticundeground.com as you moderation system fits in a lot better at those two sites.
Origin WAS great, but what have they done lately? (Score:5, Insightful)
Origin died when Garriot was forced out (Score:5, Insightful)
Branding under one name, such as EA, is very attractive to corporations. Having "subsidiaries" with their own creative control is a big no-no for corporations. EA also pretty much ran Westwood Studios (famous for Dune, and C&C) down to the ground as well.
Origin may have died...but Ultima and Wing Commander will live on in our memories
Sivaram Velauthapillai
origin. looking glass. why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe they're making their living on the kind of games I've generally considered "beneath me" - sports, car racing games and the like. But that leaves me wondering why they'd buy out a company that makes games in a totally seperate genre. What genre? Hardcore geek - Intelligent - True cyberpunk - Worth the money because the game is absorbing. Examples that I've played: System Shock 1 and 2, Asheron's Call, anything by blizzard, Deus Ex.
Did anyone ever play system shock 1? It was made by looking glass studios back in the early 80's. EA bought them. I just replayed that game a few months back. (took weeks of hacking just to get it to run on a modern machine) It's 20 years old, made on low budget, and it's STILL better than anything I ever played from EA.
It sounds to me like EA needs to parse out its game planning into seperate departments, because there's alot of talent that they've wasted in the process of assimilation. If they're aquiring good geek companies and making crappy geek games, they're losing something major.
My first guess is that they've got a non-geek calling the shots in what should be their insular geek games department. And that ain't good, because the mindset that makes Indy500 entertaining is not sufficient to keep a true geek satisfied.
If I don't like it, I don't play it. So in a way it's not a problem for me, but it saddens me that EA has taken so many good programmers off of interesting game projects, and cubbyholed them into EA style games.. all the while forgetting that it wasn't just programming that made the parent companies good. It was vision.
I can't help but hope that somebody at EA reads this, and somehow fixes the problem. It would be nice to be able to say: "I remember back when EA games weren't any good. It took them a while, but they finally got their act together."
It all but happened years ago... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:EA kills another great developer (Score:5, Insightful)
In hindsight, though, OSI has been in decline since the U8 days. EA may have preserved OSI's existance by buying them out, but their managerial influence certainly did not seem to help the company. Everything else that went wrong in the company is, to me, largely irellevant compared to, or caused directly/indirectly by, the EA buyout.
Sadly, OSI's future probably rested on the success of Ultima IX. UO was good for them financially(or so I am told), but it obviously was not enough to make the dev house survive independant of the consolidated EA house. I still remember seeing Myst-like screenshots of the original U9 concept years ago(1995) before any serious work on UO had begun. I also remembered reading that the old U9 project was suspended to put work into developing UO, and that when focus returned to U9, the entire old project was tossed, forcing them to start anew(and then start over again and again as design concepts changes. Avatar Raider anyone?).
It would seem to me that, had they never made UO in the first place, or had they finished Ultima 9 first, the house might still be alive today. Maybe.
Re:Ah well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ultima 7 & SI are still two of the greatest and most fun games ever invented in my book, though. Too bad U8 was downhill and U9 wasn't even done. I hope Mr. Garriot can afford to keep his house with the secret room and the 5000 watt stereo - it would be a shame for him to have to get creative and make a good game again.
Losing another "back in the day" developer (Score:3, Insightful)
Privateer 2 was something else: it didn't even bear the wing commander name nor Universe. Privateer 2 was the last DOS game I ever bought and never did complete it...I lost interest and had other things going on in my High School years.
But, hey, Sierra killed of my other favorite developer from back in the day, Dynmix or something like that...the folks that made the Aces series of flight sims. It was the gold standard until Combat Sim by microsoft came out...
I don't buy games anymore for computers. For starters, I use Macintosh now, second off, just don't have the time. Although its a shame to see such an old vetern fade away...
Re:EA kills another great developer (Score:5, Insightful)
UO was released with just as many bugs as U9, and _stayed_ buggy. In fact, around 2002 when I last tried it, they were still blundering through patches which broke 2 things for each 1 bug fixed. I've seen patches released and rolled back within 4 hours... during which, they wrecked pure havoc upon those unlucky to download them. Patches which seemed to never have been tested at all.
UO also was released in a sad unfinished state, which since then has become the de-facto standard release for MMO games.
For starters, half the skills were either totally useless, or useless for anyone who wasn't playing a grief player. E.g., tinkering skill could only create trapped chests. Except no NPC ever opened a chest. So in effect the only use was to kill newbies.
The gameplay and game design itself was a poorly thought out catastrophe. Most of the issues were already known and tested for decades on MUDs, but UO just had to repeat every single mistake in the book.
E.g., it was dead predictable that someone will deadlock their original economy. The problem of people actually working hard to take non-renewable resources out of the game -- e.g., by stashing them in vaults or in the inventory of 100 non-played avatars -- was known on MUDs for ages. And blimey, who would have guessed? The exact same issue deadlocked UO's economy.
And how about listening to the customers? It took _years_ of screaming in anguish for a non-PK option, which Origin mostly just ignored. UO lost players hand-over-fist over that issue. Meanwhile Sony and Microsoft basically made "we're the place where you won't get repeadedly PK'ed like on UO" their _main_ claim to glory.
It was already known on MUDs that purely player-enforced justice does not work. Ever. RL justice works only because you do care about what happens to your RL self. But on virtual world you can _count_ on having a hefty share of players who just don't care about their virtual avatars. There is _nothing_ you can do in-character to keep them inline, because they aren't in-character to start with.
Etc.
Basically I'm saying that UO and U9 were both equally half-arsed efforts. Which one came first and which was delayed... does it even make that much of a difference? I believe that even if they came out the other way around, they'd still have been half-arsed. And still, basically, just a sympthom of the fact that something was already rotten at Origin.
Re:OK. And... (Score:2, Insightful)
they won't be able to afford to keep the Austin office open, at all?
Then, they should drop their 500% profits and profit expectations to something lower!!! I am sick of this: the "upper" management to decide the fate of hundrends of people!!! they don't have a clue what is it to live in an unstable environment where you don't know if the next paycheck will arrive and when. They live a luxurius life, with big houses and cars, and they don't give a fscking damn about their employers.
And I am not talking specifically about OSI (they may be good, after all). Take a look around and you will see. US corporation profits have been raised to 300% since the 80s, yet unmployment and uncertainty is at an all-time high.
Re:Here we go again... (Score:2, Insightful)
Story of a Game (Score:3, Insightful)
In 1990 I was finally able to fulfill that longing in the rec room of the Tiger's Claw, where there was, you guessed it, a standup video arcade simulation. Before I ever flew a mission I got scores in the millions fighting wave after wave of Dralthi. From then until the fireworks at the end, I was totally absorbed in the world that was Wing Commander. For the next several years, every time an expansion came out I was there. Malcom McDowell, Mark Hammell, John Rheys-Daves and even Ginger Lynn Allen!
In 1996 Chris Roberts, the man behind the Eing Commander Universe left for two projects. One is Digital Anvil [gamespot.com] the other was an extension of the movie sequences.
When Wing Commander [imdb.com] hit the big screen in 1999 Chris finally made it to the big screen himself as the pilot of the salvage ship that rescues 1st Lt Blair.
Chris went on to Freelancer [gamespot.com] and other games, and we've moved on as well. But Chris and the whole team at Origin will always be remembered as the ones who first brought true 3D space combat to a computer near us!
Re:Im suprised it took so long... (Score:2, Insightful)