After the last Sim City? Forgive me if I am not going to shed a tear......
Although really it is the fault of publishers why quite often companies go down. Just a shame that the devs always take the fall. Add this to the list of companies that EA have raped to death.
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+1 Sad story about maxis, but that is the destiny of all the companies that sell their soul to EA D:
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Wait, Criterion Games got 'taken over'? I was completely unaware.
EDIT: Also, Pandemic? Are you kidding me? I thought Star Wars : Battlefront simply 'died off' because they were moving on. It really hit the peak on the PS2.
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snif... westwood and bullfrog made my favourite games.
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+1
I will always hate EA for killing Westwood and the C&C series. Turned it into garbage.
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The best ever RTS series (imo) turned into one of the worse.
Can't get any worse. :/
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I still remember when Origin was actually a great game company, not the current download service.
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You don't even have to read the article, it was pasted in the topic post, they didn't make the new one they made most of the older better sim city games. It doesn't mean there won't be more Sim City games it just means there won't be any more made by Maxis. Apparently EA had been keeping them around probably outsourcing lame shit to do on their lame bastardizations of their franchise dragging out their inevitable canning. So yeah it sucks. But maybe some of them could start a kickstarter for a new game or something like that, who knows.
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So many hours playing simfarm and simcity in my childhood...
But of course not in the last years so I don't care.
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EA is closing many studios they own in order to cut the expenses over the last 18 months. Nothing new here.
The devs will still work for the company, they will simply move to a new studio.
Thanks for the heads up!
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I feel like EA is trying to sharpen up their business. They have been giving away free games every... month(?) on Origin. Not a surprise because they have a terrible reputation.
Sims 4 and the latest Sim City didn't have a great reputation either.
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EA's Reputation is so bad that people even refuse to accept free games from them. Wonder if that's finally starting to hurt them?
Probably not since idiots keep buying their products.
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so many morons hate EA for no reason, just jumping on the band wagon like a little sheep, very few have a proper reason for the dislike. some do.
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After their ShitCity fiasco, people can hate EA for no reason.
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Maxis released many awesome games. The Sims were really successful and great (although not my cup of tea, but my sisters love it). I sunk countless hours into Spore and it was a great game despite it's flaws (awful DRM, shutting down the online services, but then again blame EA not the devs for that). I sunk countless hours into SimCity on Windows 95/98 (I had it on a floppy disk). Now I don't know why people are so entitled, judging a studio with a huge legacy and fanbase based on one failure, seems unfair to me.
It's sad to see them go, the gaming world became a bit smaller today.
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Interestingly, with easy to use tools nowadays, there have been so much growing space for Developers, most notably indies.
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^This.
Maxis may not be on my top 3 of the list Houdini posted (i'm certainly gonna miss Westwood above all, then probably Bullfrog and Bioware), but i very much liked SimCity and also sunk countless hours into it.
It also set the standard for that specific kind of game, it's really sad that a lot of people don't even know this much.
Also as pointed out, who's to say that the failure(s) is/are Maxis's doing alone?
Sure, some companies sit on their spoils and/or are a 1-hit wonder to sort of speak...
Or just lose their creative spark, even the other day someone had a thread opened about Civ and i was commenting on my disappointment and they're the same people still.
But... i mean, it can't just be a coincidence that EA, time and time again takes over smaller companies that have made successful great games and shortly after (or somewhere along the line) they're producing crap. And most noticeably the kind of crap that reeks of the EA kind of crap, with the same fundamental and unforgiving flaws, not the least of which bugs galore needing more patches than a boat about to sink or game engines that take such a toll on your pc that make them unplayable mostly because of disastrously inefficient programming and/or assumptions we've all got the fresh out of the store top of the line pc.
Don't get me started on dramatic changes on the things that made for the very essence of the previous games in certain sequels.
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Oh well. Was good while it lasted, even with some disappointing release issues. I always likes the Sims. Although I have never gotten one to stay alive for more than a day. And SimCity was always fun, again though, my cities always failed within a few hours of playing.
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Well, Maxis did not managed to produce another super/mega/ultra hit with Sims 4. Three failures in a row and that was coming (Spore/Sim City 2014/Sims4). The old Maxis died when Will Wright and his team left (after the Spore failure). Now it's just the closing of a brand studio.
This just seals the passing into oblivion of another company bought by EA.
List of the relevant studios closed by EA:
1.Origin Systems (Ultima, Wing Commander series)
2.Bullfrog Productions ( Dungeon Keeper and Theme Park/Theme Hospital series)
3.Pandemic (Mercenaries, The Saboteur, Star Wars Battlefront)
4.Westwood (Command & Conquer/Red Alert/Dune series, Kyrandia series, Lands of Lore series, Eye of the Beholder series, Blade Runner, Nox)
5.Phenomic (Spellforce 1 and the first two Spellforce 2 games - Shadow Wars and Dragon Storm)
6.DreamWorks Interactive/Danger Close/EA LosAngeles (Medal of Honor Pacific Assault/Airborne/Reboot/Warfighter, Command and Conquer 3/Red Alert 3, Lords of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth series)
7.EA UK/Bright Light (Harry Potter games)
8.Mythic (Dark Ages of Camelot and Warhammer Online)
- DICE Canada ( in case that you missed the memo, DICE is OWNED by EA and EA's first move was to close the canadian branch)
List of studios OWNED and in danger to be closed:
- Criterion Games (Burnout games - founders left the company, 80% staf laid off in in 2013, employees left in 2014 - 25, projects working on - none)
- Ghost Games (made from ex SimBin/Criterion employees, had only NFS Rivals, employees were scattered after the failure of the game)
Other major studios owned by EA:
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DICE (Battlefield series, fully accquired in 2006)
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Bioware: Baldur's Gate series, Neverwinter Nights 1, KOTOR 1, Jade Empire, Dragon Age Series, Mass Effect series, SWTOR - fully acquired by EA in 2007 (Dragon Age: Origins was almost finished by that time and Mass Effect 1 was out already, published by Microsoft at the time). In 2012, the Bioware's founders left the sinking ship. At the time, most of the old employees moved to either Obsidian ( a place well known for receiving an influx of talents from both EA and Lucas Arts) or studios that had ties with Bioware in the past (like inxile). Some opened their own indie studios. So basically, what you have since 2010 it's a brand studio, the old studio being a thing of the past. And seeing the success of EA with ME3 and DA2/DA: Inquisition...When was last time when you've seen a big title having 40% discount in two months since launch and constant 33% discount (DA:I since Christmas 2014)?!
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Pandemic is probably what pisses me off the most about this list... I never knew about them and their 'situation'. Star Wars Battlefront, Mercenaries and The Saboteur were all good games (Although I never played The Saboteur).
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Loved Saboteur. It has an unsettling mood, solid story and gameplay. But again, Pandemic did amazing with SW: Battlefront and Merecenaries, so no wonder that their last game ( Saboteur) was as good as their other titles. Poorly marketed, poorly presented, the game provided a lot of fun. You can get it in sales for 2.50$/euro, which is a great price for a rather very good game (only on Origin, unfortunately).
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Something has popped into my mind and I thought I'd ask since I'd hate to make a fool of myself down the road.
EA is a Publishing/Distribution company, right? They don't actually make games? I remember discussing this once about how the biggest issue that tends to get brought up is the time-constraints put on games by the publishers, EA being a big one. What I don't understand is that in the same thread there was a discussion about why they don't just drop the publisher and someone else replied that you NEED to have a publisher. So, my question is really about why the hell don't companies try and get different publishers? EA isn't the only one out there and even then there's lots of companies that seem to be doing perfectly fine on their own.
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Money. EA has the means to buy out smaller, promising studios. It then forces them into the EA model of crappy games with tons of DLC, the people who are the soul of the company leaves and the brand is simply shut down by EA who keeps the IP.
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Doesn't really explain the NEED to buy into EA's crap though.
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If EA is the only one offering you money, or if they are offering you considerably better terms than their competitors, then chances are that you'll be going with EA.
And while many companies do well on their own, many are not able to do what they want to do without outside funding.
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I 'unno, I just feel that most of the companies are lazy and they immedietally jump to EA for a source of 'quick success'. See : Mass Effect. Say what you will, but their so called 'selling out' of ME2/3 still made the games enjoyable and sellable to a certain demographic, it just happens that the complaining-demographic had more people willing to actually care enough to make countless videos and threads about how 'bad' it was.
I'm not saying that it's the developer's faults... It just doesn't make sense why they HAVE to go with EA, especially now-a-days with the history they have.
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It still falls back on the "who is going to give you money?". If you have a game studio with more than a bunch of friends just doing it for fun, people are going to require money, even if you are not actually designing your game. And if you can't get this money, your studio will have to shut down. While in a game project you are likely to hire outside help for certain tasks, you are still going to have a group of people who are constant employees. If you can't secure an outside cash source, your company is going to die. So here is your dilemma: Take EA's money, or let the studio die? This is a common issue that a lot of independent studios face.
In the case of EA, they offered the owners of Bioware a large wad of money and said "Hey, we want to own your company, here is a lot of cash, and we will also fund your future games, sounds good?" (Very simplified, obviously).
And EA is not really the only big bad in the playground. I would call them shortsighted rather than evil. Look what SquareEnix did to a company that one of my friends worked at
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I wonder if this has anything to do with Cities Skylines?
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Pretty much what was left from the original Maxis. First move that EA did when they bought Maxis was to close their HQ's and move them to Emeryville. There were developed Sims 1+2, Sim City 4, Spore and some expansions of Sims3, plus the new Sims 4.
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http://www.beyondsims.com/55229/ea-closes-maxis-emeryville/
"This is an extremely sad day for all Maxis fans. Today, on the 4th March 2015, EA have announced they will be closing Maxis Emeryville. Known for older Sims titles before The Sims Studio, Spore and the latest SimCity, Maxis Emeryville has been around for many years and has created many fan favourites...."
I guess that was expected
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