Former EA Chicago Employee Speaks Out 48
The closing of EA Chicago came as a bit of a surprise to everyone, including EA Chicago employees. Still dealing with the layoff, an anonymous EA Chicago employee laid out what it was like in the last days to 1up. He touched on the cold reaction to the closure from online readers, and the reality of EA expectations: "In Gibeau's memo, he cited the low chance of short term profitability as an overarching reason for shutting down EA Chicago. Our source claims the company simply had impractical expectations. 'I believe we were never given a fair shake. Fight Night was a huge success,' he said, but 'Def Jam was another story. The estimates for Def Jam's sales were extremely unrealistic for the game. Even if it had done well it would have never hit the unrealistic goals and projections that the marketing department made.'" Update: 11/12 21:31 GMT by Z : Corrected link. Additionally, the folks at Infinity Ward have now offered ex-EA Chicagoans the chance to work with them.
That would be... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:MARKETING DEPARTMENT !!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Sweet Vengeance (Score:4, Insightful)
How to kill innovation (Score:5, Insightful)
Innovation might be EA's mantra, but their actions are fighting against it. When you're working in the fields of innovation, for every spectacular success, there will be at least one spectacular failure. And probably many more than one. If you're not willing to accept those failures as the cost of innovation, then you have no business calling yourself an innovative company. EA just told every one of their developers "don't take a risk. Do it the safe way."
If you want to blame anyone, blame the management. With proper technique, they should have known well before final production which games would make it and which would flop. EA is obviously a company on the decline.
Brian
Re:Story? (Score:5, Insightful)
One thing that got me is that he seems to solely blame the marketing department for Def Jam's failure, even though all the reviews of it seem to suggest that the game just plain sucked. Sure, marketing may have overhyped it, but that doesn't make them responsible for the technical issues that likely contributed heavily to poor sales.
It sucks that these people lost their jobs, and I sympathize with the fact that they're being lambasted for sucking all over the Internet, but on the other hand they made crappy games that sold poorly. On top of that, they worked for a company viewed as evil by most people who care about these things. So now, instead of being mocked for working for a lousy company on lousy games, they can now be mocked for formerly working for a lousy company and formerly working on lousy games.
My advice to this guy would be to step away from the Internet until the chatter dies down. If hearing that EA sucks and EA Chicago deserved to go down because they sucked is going to get him depressed, he should avoid the kinds of sites that are likely to say those things. This whole story will die down as soon as people like him stop contacting game sites to complain about it.
Welcome to the world of work (Score:3, Insightful)
At the same time when I hear these stories of development locations or developers being closed down and the subsequently whining by a few of them I can't help but think "welcome to the world of work". Seriously, gaming is a business like any other and regardless of realistic or unrealistic expectations, or just random unfairness stuff like this happens.
Re:Sweet Vengeance (Score:2, Insightful)
So, while it may be depressing, it is far from the end of the world. Besides, if they REALLY don't want to move, there are still a small number of developers in Chicago that I'm sure would be more than happy to take on new experienced staff. Experience in this industry is lacking.
Just my 2 cents.
Re:Sweet Vengeance (Score:3, Insightful)
Working crunch at EA may "only" take 80 hours of your week, but trust me, there's nothing left after that because the work is challenging. If you're pushing much over 80, your job is time-consuming but easy, or you're just planning on a quickly approaching burnout sometime soon.
Re:Sweet Vengeance (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Welcome to the world of work (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that game development is a creative endeavor. Part of what makes a team work well is team chemistry, and it's not easy to go to a new place and instantly feel that chemistry. That's one of the problems with modern game development, because otherwise promising teams are axed merely by looking at the bottom line and ignoring the other factors that can't be put in terms of dollars and cents on the balance sheet. Game development, despite it's similarities with software development, is much more similar to putting together a movie or play rather than coding a business application.
Yes, game development is a business; I was an editor for a book [psychochild.org] on that very topic. But, there's much more to maximizing profits in the industry than simply increasing profit and/or lowering costs.