EA's Best-kept Secret

jkdove writes "GamerGod recently held an interview with top executives at BuildForge and learned a little known trade secret of video game industry giant Electronic Arts' arsenal. Granting the ability to reduce costs of 80 million dollar titles to an only 40 million, there can be little doubt that BuildForge will find its way into many more of the game industry's top production firms. From the article: 'Utilizing BuildForge's capabilities result in dramatic reductions in team workload and build/release cycle time - typically creating 4-20x efficiency improvements over in-house or open source systems. This is what EA is looking to do by bringing in automation, better practices and standards into those process that have been traditionally more free wheeling.'"

Best Pratices

[nb caffeine]

Well, bringing some best pratices into any software project cant be a bad thing? Or is this a bad thing (c) because we hate EA?

Kidding, of course, this means they can churn out more dreck with the same number of slaves.

Neither...

[hackwrench]

We should be righteously peeved because it's a press release for buildforge. I consider this a new low for Zonk. Seriously, he's the only person I've considered hiding. I went so far as to hide him for about a half hour, then I reconsidered and unhid him because every so often he does post a good story.

Re:New Record

[cornface]

And not to be outdone, Zonk adds a gratuitous misspelling in the department.

Nicely played, all of you! Guiness will surely be knocking on your doors soon! ;-D

YM Guinness.

HTH.

HAND.

People at EA work?

[Strell]

I figured it was just a computer running Statchanger.exe over and over.

Faster Turn-around?

[AlephZero]

Hopefully with these tools we can get what we really want, bi-yearly editions of our favorite sports titles! Madden 2007: Summer Edition. Sweet!

Well

[Saiyine]

EA's best kept secret is not bad, but you better watch the one Take-Two is working on, code named Stacker [theonion.com]!

Re:Well

[superpulpsicle]

If this idea is for real I'd say it is the most bold and ballsy concept to ever land on shelf. After all who thought Katamari would be a hit at first.

Even after they cut their costs in half..

[tansey]

They still won't drop game prices a penny.

Re:Even after they cut their costs in half..

[MalleusEBHC]

Why should they? I don't remember much from econ, but if they can get the cash for it, go for the higher prices.

Cough cough...

[ivan256]

Granting the ability to reduce costs of 80 million dollar titles to an only 40 million,

That story summary is just plain wrong. The submitter earns an 'F' in reading comprehension.

The interview doesn't say that... It doesn't even come close to saying that. It says they are always looking for ways to do that, and that they're also looking for tools to help them streamline development. If $40m of an $80m goes to licensing, marketing, distribution, and placement, no process automation is going to accomplish that, clearly the two goals were stated independantly.

If anybody thinks that $80 million goes into the development budget of any game, they're crazy. Development is only a fraction of the cost, and looking at EA's list of games and licences, I'd guess it's frequently less than half.

What is the world coming to when even the submitter doesn't read the article?

Re:Cough cough...

[Jeff DeMaagd]

What is the world coming to when even the submitter doesn't read the article?

That * * Beatles Beatles had joined forces with Zonk in an unholy war against the last of Slashdot community sanity?

Re:Cough cough...

[drinkypoo]

The submitter (jkdove) also gets an "F" in writing. Reading the title told me precisely jack shit about what I was looking at (probably because the submitter himself didn't know) and also gave me no clue whatsoever about which link I was supposed to be clicking on to get the main story. Unless it was all fucked up by Zonk (not at all unlikely, now I think of it) the guy has no fucking idea how to write comprehensible HTML (WRT placement and naming of hyperlinks.)

I smell marketing

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never heard/used/tried BuildForge so I don't know much about it. But this interview sounds like all marketing to me.

>With the ability to, for example, take your ten thousand images/graphics and render them on a variety
>of machines at the same time instead of doing it serially, you can make your cycles shorter and get
>your feedback earlier.
Isn't that just a render farm? Are they going to supply with a render farm?!

>Now let's look at what happens when a build fails. Now you have five hundre

EA's second- and third-best kept secret

[mcgroarty]

Burned out interns make good mulch, and timid programmers work longer hours after witnessing a single mulching.

"Dat yer tools intern friend in the shredder there, Mr. Probst?"

Math

[Gogo0]

1) Halve development costs
2) Charge an extra $10 this gen due to "rising game development costs".
3) Profit

I wish it were a joke...

Re:Math

[ad0gg]

1) Halve development costs
2) Charge an extra $10 this gen due to "rising game development costs".
3) Profit

Come on this is EA.

1) Take last years Madden NFL and update character stats
2) Charge an extra $10 this gen due to "rising game development costs".
3) Profit

Re:Math

[Snowmit]

1) Keep production costs as low as possible
2) Charge what the market will bear
3) Profit

That's, uh, good business.

So what?

[cortana]

Who is holding the gun to your head? ;)

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:A sneaky jab at open-source development?

[mnemonic_]

Yes, I noticed it. Is badmouthing open source software not allowed? (No, I'm not new around here.)

Beware of BS!

[supabeast!]

"BuildForge provides development automation solutions for Real-World Application Lifecycle Management.

"BuildForge FullControl is a powerful, adaptive framework that allows development teams to automate, integrate, and analyze their development lifecycle using the tools they have in place today."

I copied/pasted that from the BuildForge website. Raise your hand if hearing the above slogans parroted by some annoying MBA in charge of your department would cause you to immediately post your resume on the internet.

Re:Beware of BS!

[Trollll]

Okay, now everyone raise their hand who works for a company that doesn't have annoying MBAs parroting random phrases targeted to management. And self-employed coders don't count.

The age old Zombie vs Robot debate:

[AcidLacedPenguiN]

Great so now instead of playing games that were made by mindless zombie workers (working sometimes even 48hours a day), we get them from emotionless robots. good Job EA!!

their secret

[exodion]

their secret is releasing beta games as complete versions bf2 for example :/

What a deal!

[superultra]

Instead of working 40 people 60 hours a week without overtime pay, now EA can work 20 people 60 hours a week without overtime pay! All hail that Buildthingy!