EA has shut down Maxis Emeryville, the main Maxis studio and longrunning developer behind SimCity and Spore, among other games. Though the Maxis brand will carry on, the studio that most people knew as “Maxis” is no more.
I played so much SimCity 2000 as a kid. Sad news.
Boo!
But the SimCity 2013 launch and execution was beyond terrible. I was floored that I couldn’t play my game with my friends for 5 days after we all purchased it.
What will it take for studios to stop selling their souls to the likes of EA?
It’s so disgusting. First they rushed Maxis into the blunder that Simcity (latest game) was and now, because it did not make the money they expected, they’re shutting them down.
It’s like Westwood all over again. I just can’t…
Yup, inevitable. EA is like the Moloch of gaming, and Maxis threw itself into the fiery arms.
Yeah, somehow it’s Maxis taking the fall for everything but the fuck-up has EA written all over it: micro-transactions, always on DRM.
And that horrendous piece of shit AKA Origin.
I’ll get hate for saying this but…how long are we gonna blame EA for others choices? Nobody stuck a gun to their head, forced them to sign the contracts, they CHOSE to sell to a much larger company so they would have big budgets, it was all them on that. In fact EA’s love of DRM killing Spore and Sim City 2013 is really all I can legitimately blame EA for.
But I’d say anybody who sells to a megacorp chooses to take the gamble. You might give them a PARTIAL pass since Maxxis was sold back when EA didn’t suck, but I would say with the ease of indie sales today any dev house has ZERO excuses to sign with a megacorp today.
And one final thing…why the booing? Why not cheers? It seems like these dev houses that get fired usually end up going indie and creating really good stuff, see the Diablo II guys that Made Torchlight for example. I would really be surprised if they don’t form a new dev house to go back to making games the way they used to.
That’s what happens when you don’t make a good sim game since … Sim City 2000.
Almost all of the studios I grew up with are no more, and most of them because they stopped making good games. Others take their place. It’s only natural.
That said, I’ll miss Maxis nevertheless.
Are you implying that The Sims wasn’t a good game?
Not sure …
Shame that this natural order of things does not seem to apply to EA.
Simcity 4 was very good with the Network Addon Mod
Eh, it was inevitable. EA will kill off every good franchise and replace it with factory produced lifeless drivel for the iTard generation.
Edited 2015-03-05 14:07 UTC
I know the Sims 4 was not a good seller compared to Sims 3, but that is a bit harsh. After all The Sims 3 is the biggest cash cow EA has ever had bringing in billions upon billions to the company. It would be hard to follow that for anyone.
What a shame… Maxis was synonym of quality in the late 80s and early 90s. Sim City was really revolutionary back then, I remember people taking about it even in the TV news.
BTW I didn’t give a shit about Sim City… my favorite Maxis game was Sim Ant… I played it hundred of hours in my 286 with Hercules monitor (I was 7 or 8 years old and playing with “virtual” ants in the computer was something really amazing for me)… sniff
Does anyone assume that whoever worked at Maxis now had anything to do with the old, playable Sim City games?
I’m sure every competent individual was long gone, and all who were left were the ones who would have trouble getting another job…
torp,
It’s a bit harsh to say they’re not competent. It is likely the EA/Maxim management who were responsible for the always on DRM crap, not the regular employees. If my experience tells me anything, it’s that the employees probably both knew and warned about the usability problems to upper management but they refused to listen.
Edited 2015-03-05 14:12 UTC
… and since they were ignored, everyone who could easily leave (i.e. the best) have probably left already
torp,
Corporate politics happen everywhere though. Even in small companies that started out with a strong sense of idealism, it breaks down with growth and they begin to mirror the rest of the industry.
http://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/Google-Emp…
http://techcrunch.com/2009/01/18/why-google-employees-quit/
http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Microsoft-RVW46887…
http://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Reviews/Employee-Review-Oracle-RVW261034…
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2410298/Forget-free-food-dr…
Please note that my point here isn’t necessarily to say these are bad companies to work for, but rather to point out that employees really do experience the drama even in top companies. I’m not convinced there is any correlation between employee competence and the absence of these politics.
Edited 2015-03-05 19:55 UTC