EA's Conquest of Origin 51
amitlu writes "Allen Varney wrote about EA's conquest of Origin in the Escapist this week. He covers much of EA's departure from its original values, and even has some quotes from the Garriotts, including, '[CEO] Larry Probst was often not supportive of the things I was doing, but I respect Larry because he was always clear, rational and consistent in his lack of support'"
Interesting tidbits from the article (Score:5, Interesting)
Upon being willfully acquired by EA, Origin was able to expand greatly, but they did so under their own guidance, and did so poorly. They doubled their staff and projects, entirely with inexperienced people. Many of these new projects failed, and this wasted a lot of money. Not a great way to begin a business relationship. That's when EA started to get involved in Origin management... I would too, if I had acquired a company and they started to be abusive and careless with funding and resources.
Origin barely paid enough for people to live on. EA brought their salaries up to competetive levels. The downside, the author puts it, is that this made it less of a 'cultural, hobbyist' thing and more of a business. But is not a business what they were trying to run? Paying your people a pittance - poverty level, as the author claims Origin paid most it's employees (except for it's star employees, who were paid in excess) - is not something to be proud of. I know for a fact that EA today still pays fairly competetive wages. I also know for a fact that the 'sweatshop conditions' no longer exist, at least at the studio I'm familiar with (which was the one being mentioned in the original blog that started the whole scandal). But Origin was doing that, AND paying poorly, years ahead of that.
The author seems bitter that EA insisted that projects actually stay on schedule. Origins habit of letting projects run until they were done, without clear schedules, is probably what led to them running out of money... the fact that they paid their people poorly explains why they lasted so long to start with.
The MMORPG industry was practically spawned by Garriot, who got the approval for seed funding in the budget for Ultima Online straight from the CEO... nobody at the company really had any understanding of what the game was (and rightly so, this was a totally new genre), but when the 50,000 beta testers volunteers signed up, EA threw full muscle behind it.
Sounds like EA saved the company, and tried to turn it from a playground into a business. Yes, there were poor decisions made - on both sides. But Origin would have been dead years earlier. It looks like it was a culture clash... had Origin not screwed things up on their own earlier on and needed hand holding when they expanded faster than they were capable of, maybe they would have maintained more indepedence.
Insight on how EA works (Score:5, Interesting)
I think this was a fairly well spoken article.
The problem with EA that this article reveals to me is that EA has mixed goals. EA wants to make the highest quality games and they want to make a substantial profit. So to make the high quality games they hire and purchase the top level talent in the industry. However after they have this talent they don't give them any creative freedom and put them on projects that they have no interest in because it makes business sense. One goal is standing in the way of the other.
This article is a good example of EA making a good business move to pick up a talented company that is about to crumble and them completely messing up on the integration of the company.
The example in the article was sending the people that worked hard on Wing Commander Online to work on UO2. Although technically on paper the wing commander online team should would well on UO2 the feel and inspirations completely change and the team looses all interest in making good games. The previously talented employees start to loose their passion for the industry and start feeling like they are working in a factory rather them an entertainment company. After that the talent is either lost though boredom and stagnation that leads to EA firing them or the talent just quits and moves to another company. Later when the former employees become successful again at a new company EA will look at grabbing their new company and starting the cycle over again.
If you don't know who EA got its image or how EA handle business I would say this entire issue of the extremist is worth reading.
Expensive Floppies (Score:3, Interesting)
I can get 2 DVD-Rs or a DVD-RW (with change left over) now for less that a single 720K DSDD floppy back in the good ol' days.
Origin brings back lots of memories (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Interesting tidbits from the article (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry, I misspoke. I should have said "cut for length," not for space. The Escapist pays by the word, and so the more they published, the more they would have to pay me. They gave me a target length of 3,000 words, which is presumably what they budgeted for; in the event, the article was nearly 3,600 words.
I wonder how much... (Score:2, Interesting)