7 ms·

I am old enough to remember a time when I had positive associations with being an "EA game". The games in question were on my Commodore 64. But still, there wa

by jerf 1y ago

I am old enough to remember a time when I had positive associations with being an "EA game". The games in question were on my Commodore 64. But still, there was such a time. EA has a reputation for buying companies and draining all of their reputation for money. The first company that the EA of today did that to was EA itself. There was a time it was just a gaming company. Actually it was about up to the Origin acquisition that I still had at least some positive feelings for them, before the pattern really settled in. After that, though, I got nothin'.

fidotron 1y ago
> EA has a reputation for buying companies and draining all of their reputation for money If you saw this from the other side you'd see just how much the reverse was true. This was one of the great mysteries of the place. It's one of those situations where in the public perception the blame all flows up to EA, but the credit is always with the studios. The truth is somewhere else.
- Aeolun 1y ago
  I think this is because the credit can never be with those that purely provide money and dictate terms. Nobody thinks the investors are what make the company. It’s the founders.
  - fidotron 1y ago
    I spent time as a TD on both the dev and publishing sides - the perception all EA (the publisher) is doing is money and terms is very much mistaken. To take the case of Bioware, the SW:TOR launch was a notable disaster. There is no way in hell Bioware by themselves could have recovered from that, and it took a lot of "external" firefighting to get that under control. OTOH various decisions many people assume came from EA were actually made by studio heads, against EA wishes, because the studio head thought it would increase their revenue and thus bonus. One of the reasons Activision outperformed EA was they have a better culture of co-operation between departments. Efforts to improve this at EA never ceased to actually make it worse.
    - johnnyanmac 1y ago
      >One of the reasons Activision outperformed EA was they have a better culture of co-operation between departments. Efforts to improve this at EA never ceased to actually make it worse. Why do you think there was such a clash between departments? There's always some friction because different divisions have different interests, but EA seems to sound particularly bad at this. I also heard that EA was run very "corportate" like, comparatively speaking. In an era where many other studios would still go for this "fun factor" to build relations. Would that more hard-lined bureaucracy wove distrust compared to the executives that felt like they were on the frontlines with the devs?
      - fidotron 1y ago
        > Why do you think there was such a clash between departments? There's always some friction because different divisions have different interests, but EA seems to sound particularly bad at this. A distinct lack of an internal single threat to unify against, like a Steve Jobs style figure. I think the closest I saw to this was Peter Moore, who was a nice guy, but (thankfully) does not tolerate assholes at all. The result was the only serious threats were external, so when playing the PR war the handful of problematic studio heads would blame everything bad on EA, while trying to take credit for everything good. Because of their public positions no one has the power to remove those problems (that would be evil EA being evil), so they would steadily float upwards to positions from which they can then terrorize the well meaning studio and department heads. There were various initiatives I saw (clear billion+ dollar opportunities) that couldn't get going because it required three departments to align in such a way that someone (one of the leaders of the three departments) would get the credit, and the war over who would get the credit would get so intense that the initiative could never happen. (I have heard stories out of Google that suggest this has been even worse there going back to a similar timeframe - some of the VP and above level offsites sounded quite fun). Similarly I saw people with whole production units they knew were trainwrecks publicly align with another department they secretly hated so when their high profile project crashed and burned they would blame it on the other department. This would be worked out before the project even entered production, and was even well known by third parties that tried to exploit it. By far the most successful projects there were born from some historic trauma, such as the EA spouse or a giant technical fubar. Those situations provided the impetus to grow up, and they really did. A consequence of this is the FIFA org, in my era, remains one of the most professional software organizations I ever saw, and I was liasing with most of the big tech companies. This also explains why the prevailing EA view was the PS3 hack saved the Playstation by forcing Sony to grow up or go home.
HankStallone 1y ago
Yeah, in the C64 days, when I could afford to buy a game at retail, it would often be an EA game, because they had some of the best. I still remember the logo flashing through the 16-color set, and how you could tell whether the game had a fast-loader by how fast it flashed. They were pretty universally admired then, as far as I can remember, but not for much longer.
gosub100 1y ago
I loved playing NHLPA hockey on SNES in the mid 99s. I guess they couldn't get the rights to use "NHL" so they used the "players association" instead?
- antasvara 1y ago
  You're correct. The NHL Player's Association (so the PA in NHLPA) is the organization that collectively bargains on behalf of the players in the NHL. That's why all of the players were in the game, but the NHL logo, team logos, and team names weren't.
Aeolun 1y ago
I think the good associations died somewhere after C&C Generals.
skeeter2020 1y ago
you're remembering the start, when Trip Hawkins left Apple and really pushed the industry - both technically and culturally - forward. THose days probably died before the turn of the century.

by jerf 1y ago

fidotron 1y ago

> EA has a reputation for buying companies and draining all of their reputation for money If you saw this from the other side you'd see just how much the reverse was true. This was one of the great mysteries of the place. It's one of those situations where in the public perception the blame all flows up to EA, but the credit is always with the studios. The truth is somewhere else.

Aeolun 1y ago
I think this is because the credit can never be with those that purely provide money and dictate terms. Nobody thinks the investors are what make the company. It’s the founders.
- fidotron 1y ago
  I spent time as a TD on both the dev and publishing sides - the perception all EA (the publisher) is doing is money and terms is very much mistaken. To take the case of Bioware, the SW:TOR launch was a notable disaster. There is no way in hell Bioware by themselves could have recovered from that, and it took a lot of "external" firefighting to get that under control. OTOH various decisions many people assume came from EA were actually made by studio heads, against EA wishes, because the studio head thought it would increase their revenue and thus bonus. One of the reasons Activision outperformed EA was they have a better culture of co-operation between departments. Efforts to improve this at EA never ceased to actually make it worse.
  - johnnyanmac 1y ago
    >One of the reasons Activision outperformed EA was they have a better culture of co-operation between departments. Efforts to improve this at EA never ceased to actually make it worse. Why do you think there was such a clash between departments? There's always some friction because different divisions have different interests, but EA seems to sound particularly bad at this. I also heard that EA was run very "corportate" like, comparatively speaking. In an era where many other studios would still go for this "fun factor" to build relations. Would that more hard-lined bureaucracy wove distrust compared to the executives that felt like they were on the frontlines with the devs?
    - fidotron 1y ago
      > Why do you think there was such a clash between departments? There's always some friction because different divisions have different interests, but EA seems to sound particularly bad at this. A distinct lack of an internal single threat to unify against, like a Steve Jobs style figure. I think the closest I saw to this was Peter Moore, who was a nice guy, but (thankfully) does not tolerate assholes at all. The result was the only serious threats were external, so when playing the PR war the handful of problematic studio heads would blame everything bad on EA, while trying to take credit for everything good. Because of their public positions no one has the power to remove those problems (that would be evil EA being evil), so they would steadily float upwards to positions from which they can then terrorize the well meaning studio and department heads. There were various initiatives I saw (clear billion+ dollar opportunities) that couldn't get going because it required three departments to align in such a way that someone (one of the leaders of the three departments) would get the credit, and the war over who would get the credit would get so intense that the initiative could never happen. (I have heard stories out of Google that suggest this has been even worse there going back to a similar timeframe - some of the VP and above level offsites sounded quite fun). Similarly I saw people with whole production units they knew were trainwrecks publicly align with another department they secretly hated so when their high profile project crashed and burned they would blame it on the other department. This would be worked out before the project even entered production, and was even well known by third parties that tried to exploit it. By far the most successful projects there were born from some historic trauma, such as the EA spouse or a giant technical fubar. Those situations provided the impetus to grow up, and they really did. A consequence of this is the FIFA org, in my era, remains one of the most professional software organizations I ever saw, and I was liasing with most of the big tech companies. This also explains why the prevailing EA view was the PS3 hack saved the Playstation by forcing Sony to grow up or go home.

HankStallone 1y ago

Yeah, in the C64 days, when I could afford to buy a game at retail, it would often be an EA game, because they had some of the best. I still remember the logo flashing through the 16-color set, and how you could tell whether the game had a fast-loader by how fast it flashed. They were pretty universally admired then, as far as I can remember, but not for much longer.

gosub100 1y ago

I loved playing NHLPA hockey on SNES in the mid 99s. I guess they couldn't get the rights to use "NHL" so they used the "players association" instead?

antasvara 1y ago
You're correct. The NHL Player's Association (so the PA in NHLPA) is the organization that collectively bargains on behalf of the players in the NHL. That's why all of the players were in the game, but the NHL logo, team logos, and team names weren't.

Aeolun 1y ago

I think the good associations died somewhere after C&C Generals.

skeeter2020 1y ago

you're remembering the start, when Trip Hawkins left Apple and really pushed the industry - both technically and culturally - forward. THose days probably died before the turn of the century.