10 ms·

I think we are all playing into EA's strategy by calling it Maxis instead of just EA. Simcity 2013 was a failure of EA, but by mentioning Maxis 11 times and EA

I think we are all playing into EA's strategy by calling it Maxis instead of just EA. Simcity 2013 was a failure of EA, but by mentioning Maxis 11 times and EA only once (and in passing), it's as they give EA a carte blanche to fail without the lowered reputation for future games (which means many people will preorder, and so on)

toxican 12y ago
Honestly I think Maxis deserves a ton of blame as well. They operate semi-autonomously for how long and they routinely churned out terrible games. On reddit, I see far more people blame EA than I do Maxis. And while I'm all for EA getting a ton of bad press, I think it's bs that nobody points a finger at Maxis because they're just as guilty, imo. Nostalgia for 90s and early 00s Maxis is blinding people from the reality that Maxis turned into a shit dev
- aero142 12y ago
  Yes, but there is a pattern of EA ruining previously good development houses. It's like expression, "The common element of all your failed relationships is you."
  - TylerE 12y ago
    I don't really think that's a pattern. I think it's a result in AAA development in general being in a slump. If anything, I'd say Ubisoft (outside of one or two lone bright spots like Rayman) has been worse than EA the last few years, with the rotten cherry of Uplay on top.
    - dsl 12y ago
      Have a look at Activision/Blizzard. They built essentially the same thing (Origin/Uplay) but being very customer friendly about it and have had crazy success with Battle.net.
      - edias 12y ago
        You've never played their recent games then. Battle.net 2.0 is routinely called 0.2 and considered a step back in every single way, aside from FB integration I guess. It didn't even have chat channels until recently or clan support. Promises made for starcraft 2 5 years ago have yet to be delivered on. Diablo 3 was a terrible cash grab and mostly abandoned by players. After Activision purchased blizzard it has not been the same company.
        rdsnsca 12y ago
        Diablo 3 was fixed in the expansion when they got rid of the real money AH... its actually enjoyable now.
        VieElm 12y ago
        Blizzard has a huge fan base and have had much success with recent games like Hearthstone and the build up to Heroes of the Storm is also looking very promising. SC2 has stagnated and Diablo had missteps but they've made bold steps in trying to fix those problems. I don't think Activision's stewardship of Blizzard and EA are even in the same league. Blizzard has maintained a very unique and powerful brand with almost Nintendo level IP. There are a lot of characters from Blizzard games that are well known. Also Blizzard's' international presence is very large.
        zeidrich 12y ago
        I'm not sure what you're getting at. You're conflating the battle.net platform that they have built, which is the launcher, the updater, etc. with concerns that people had over matchmaking and chat support. Uplay is a horrendous piece of junk that feels like a horrendous piece of junk that's horrible DRM. Nobody talks about chat channels and clan support in Uplay, because the only function Uplay has is to sell you games and stop you from pirating games. Battle.net serves the same purpose, but it serves it much more gracefully. Apart from some complaints about no offline only mode for Diablo and Starcraft, it's been a pretty quiet system. Even with the new launcher it's pretty respectful to players. I think it's pretty telling that you talk about specific functions like clan support and how Diablo 3 was a cash grab. It means you're talking about gameplay features, and not about the Battle.net platform at all. The fact is, Battle.net is pretty quiet from a DRM perspective. You don't feel violated by installing the launcher like I did when I loaded Uplay. It feels like a tool for interoperability across Blizzard instead of an attempt to outsteam steam while screwing you over trying to lock down your games. Battle.net's launcher got me playing hearthstone, it got me playing HOTS, it let me reconnect with people that I forgot I had on my friends list from when I played WoW. It was a useful tool. This is regardless of how long it took them to get clan support in SC2 or global chat channels or matchmaking concerns or whatever else your pet issue might be. Whatever the case, I didn't feel cheated just by installing it. Whether the games are good or not are different question.
  - georgeecollins 12y ago
    Studios they really cratered: Origin Westwood JAMDAT Pandemic
    - franciscogarcia 12y ago
      I still mourn Westwood and Pandemic. God damn it how could they.
- ianstallings 12y ago
  And honestly their strong suit was never the software itself so much as the awesome ideas that came from the Will Wright, Jeff Braun, and their team. For instance, The Sims. Not a great game technically, not much innovation there are far as game play. In fact it's quite generic. But the idea of creating an AI-driven character that has it's own emotions, it's own life? That's legendary stuff. But they've always seemed to try to appeal to the masses, watering down their games to the point that they become boring over the years. Their games went from interesting complex simulations to disney-like worlds where everything is nicely polished, but not very intriguing. And this doesn't even factor in all the mistakes that EA has made.
  - wlesieutre 12y ago
    Speaking of that, is there an indie competitor to the Sims out there? My biggest gripe with that series is the $30 game + $6000000 of expansions model, which could be pretty easily replaced with community-made mods to build on a simpler base game.
- ffn 12y ago
  This is the classic symptom of changing oneself to fit the mainstream once one hits the mainstream. Whether it's EA's fault of Maxis's fault is just fruitless finger pointing (it's EA's, these guys are literally the cancer that's killing the video game industry), but the real mistake is updating your game to fit "mainstream standards" of connectivity, social, high quality 3d graphics, etc. Some management official or engineer probably sold these ideas as completely required innovations if Simcity wanted to stay competitive with things like facebook or MMOs (i.e. other time-consumers), and everyone just jumped on board. And it's that very idea of "we need to stay competitive" that really killed Simcity. Here in capitalist societies, we're sold on the idea competition is great, but it's not, it assumes the fact the rules stay the same and focuses attention on what our "enemies" are doing. We become obsessed with not doing what we do best, but with doing what we think will beat the others. In Simcity's case, it was adopting online connectivity and social interaction despite the fact Simcity is inherently a creative game and not a social one (in fact, unless you're a trash-tier mayor, you've spent time researching city layouts, reading through strategies, and possibly even simulating various algorithms and geometries in matlab or whatnot... whereas in a social game, you'd be spending your time name-calling the other players). Strategies and ideas that emerge from competition focus on trying to capture customers from an adversary, and completely ignores the fact people are complicated, don't like change, and that a company can capture them by just being incrementally "better" in some engineering metric. Today, it's too late for simcity, but to a new rising city game like skylines, I hope they ignore what "the competition" are doing and just focus on making their fun city building game more fun (e.g. instead of worrying about online, social, or the 2018 version of online-social which will probably be 3d holograms or something, spend time introducing new mechanics like strategic resources, "work from home" algorithms, flying cars, racism / gentrification, etc.)
  - simcop2387 12y ago
    I think you definitely hit the spot on what killed SimCity, but a 3D holographic city builder would probably be one of the best things ever. Combined with the street level view you can get in City: Skylines it'd actually be really really cool to see.
  - danudey 12y ago
- oatmealsnap 12y ago
  What it seemed like happened was the Maxis developed a great (or at least good) game, and EA came in and stuck their own requirements in where they didn't belong, which then caused all the issues.
- danudey 12y ago
  Most of the people from 'Maxis' left Maxis a long time ago. The current 'Maxis' is just the brand that EA is slapping on stuff from that studio, but it bears almost no relation whatsoever to the Maxis that we all grew up loving.
blueskin_ 12y ago
To many, many gamers, as soon as the word EA comes up, it already means "prepare for disappointment, DRM, and disastrous launches".
- bentcorner 12y ago
  To me they're a mixed bag. I've enjoyed many titles from them (Dragon Age, Titanfall, Dead Space, NFS: HP, Mass Effect, Bulletstorm, BF: BC2, and countless other titles from older gen consoles and even older PC games like Archon and Kings of the Beach). I think that when expectations are set high (most any recent BF release), disappointment is sure to follow.
  - shostack 12y ago
    It's not that expectations are high. It's that the games would be outstanding if EA hadn't crappified them. Many of these games have very player-hostile elements designed purely to suck more money out of people. Maybe it's just me, but for all people like to point out how expansion packs back in the day used to be bad, I don't remember ANYTHING on the level we're seeing with how aggressively they try to milk their customers at the expensive of the experience.
    - blueskin_ 12y ago
      Exactly this. I liked proper expansions where you got a good proportion of a whole game's extra content. I hate DLC where you are encouraged to buy large numbers of small items, because it's a 'death by a thousand cuts' model of sucking way more money out of the player with far less dev effort. I never buy DLC for any game, on principle. If a game has a lot, I'll reconsider buying the game at all.
  - aros 12y ago
    EA didn't develop a majority of the games you listed. They were the publisher.
  - Kalium 12y ago
    Even the Dragon Age games had issues. The first one had "HAY BUY THE DRM" plugs in incredibly irritating spots. The second one had like three maps, which made playing a lot less fun than it should have been.
gdulli 12y ago
It's likely just as unfair to tarnish the Maxis name for the game design failures of the EA SimCity era. Would a pure Maxis game have been as badly received? I guess we can't know for sure.
- TylerE 12y ago
  Doesn't hold up to scrutiny. http://gamerant.com/simcity-maxis-ea-online-connection/ http://gamerant.com/simcity-maxis-ea-online-connection/
  - gdulli 12y ago
    Perhaps not by EA's accounting of the situation.
- nolok 12y ago
  SimCity 3000 and 4 were both made with EA owning Maxis. They were both great.

toxican 12y ago

Honestly I think Maxis deserves a ton of blame as well. They operate semi-autonomously for how long and they routinely churned out terrible games. On reddit, I see far more people blame EA than I do Maxis. And while I'm all for EA getting a ton of bad press, I think it's bs that nobody points a finger at Maxis because they're just as guilty, imo. Nostalgia for 90s and early 00s Maxis is blinding people from the reality that Maxis turned into a shit dev

aero142 12y ago
Yes, but there is a pattern of EA ruining previously good development houses. It's like expression, "The common element of all your failed relationships is you."
- TylerE 12y ago
  I don't really think that's a pattern. I think it's a result in AAA development in general being in a slump. If anything, I'd say Ubisoft (outside of one or two lone bright spots like Rayman) has been worse than EA the last few years, with the rotten cherry of Uplay on top.
  - dsl 12y ago
    Have a look at Activision/Blizzard. They built essentially the same thing (Origin/Uplay) but being very customer friendly about it and have had crazy success with Battle.net.
    - edias 12y ago
      You've never played their recent games then. Battle.net 2.0 is routinely called 0.2 and considered a step back in every single way, aside from FB integration I guess. It didn't even have chat channels until recently or clan support. Promises made for starcraft 2 5 years ago have yet to be delivered on. Diablo 3 was a terrible cash grab and mostly abandoned by players. After Activision purchased blizzard it has not been the same company.
      - rdsnsca 12y ago
        Diablo 3 was fixed in the expansion when they got rid of the real money AH... its actually enjoyable now.
      - VieElm 12y ago
        Blizzard has a huge fan base and have had much success with recent games like Hearthstone and the build up to Heroes of the Storm is also looking very promising. SC2 has stagnated and Diablo had missteps but they've made bold steps in trying to fix those problems. I don't think Activision's stewardship of Blizzard and EA are even in the same league. Blizzard has maintained a very unique and powerful brand with almost Nintendo level IP. There are a lot of characters from Blizzard games that are well known. Also Blizzard's' international presence is very large.
      - zeidrich 12y ago
        I'm not sure what you're getting at. You're conflating the battle.net platform that they have built, which is the launcher, the updater, etc. with concerns that people had over matchmaking and chat support. Uplay is a horrendous piece of junk that feels like a horrendous piece of junk that's horrible DRM. Nobody talks about chat channels and clan support in Uplay, because the only function Uplay has is to sell you games and stop you from pirating games. Battle.net serves the same purpose, but it serves it much more gracefully. Apart from some complaints about no offline only mode for Diablo and Starcraft, it's been a pretty quiet system. Even with the new launcher it's pretty respectful to players. I think it's pretty telling that you talk about specific functions like clan support and how Diablo 3 was a cash grab. It means you're talking about gameplay features, and not about the Battle.net platform at all. The fact is, Battle.net is pretty quiet from a DRM perspective. You don't feel violated by installing the launcher like I did when I loaded Uplay. It feels like a tool for interoperability across Blizzard instead of an attempt to outsteam steam while screwing you over trying to lock down your games. Battle.net's launcher got me playing hearthstone, it got me playing HOTS, it let me reconnect with people that I forgot I had on my friends list from when I played WoW. It was a useful tool. This is regardless of how long it took them to get clan support in SC2 or global chat channels or matchmaking concerns or whatever else your pet issue might be. Whatever the case, I didn't feel cheated just by installing it. Whether the games are good or not are different question.
- georgeecollins 12y ago
  Studios they really cratered: Origin Westwood JAMDAT Pandemic
  - franciscogarcia 12y ago
    I still mourn Westwood and Pandemic. God damn it how could they.
ianstallings 12y ago
And honestly their strong suit was never the software itself so much as the awesome ideas that came from the Will Wright, Jeff Braun, and their team. For instance, The Sims. Not a great game technically, not much innovation there are far as game play. In fact it's quite generic. But the idea of creating an AI-driven character that has it's own emotions, it's own life? That's legendary stuff. But they've always seemed to try to appeal to the masses, watering down their games to the point that they become boring over the years. Their games went from interesting complex simulations to disney-like worlds where everything is nicely polished, but not very intriguing. And this doesn't even factor in all the mistakes that EA has made.
- wlesieutre 12y ago
  Speaking of that, is there an indie competitor to the Sims out there? My biggest gripe with that series is the $30 game + $6000000 of expansions model, which could be pretty easily replaced with community-made mods to build on a simpler base game.
ffn 12y ago
This is the classic symptom of changing oneself to fit the mainstream once one hits the mainstream. Whether it's EA's fault of Maxis's fault is just fruitless finger pointing (it's EA's, these guys are literally the cancer that's killing the video game industry), but the real mistake is updating your game to fit "mainstream standards" of connectivity, social, high quality 3d graphics, etc. Some management official or engineer probably sold these ideas as completely required innovations if Simcity wanted to stay competitive with things like facebook or MMOs (i.e. other time-consumers), and everyone just jumped on board. And it's that very idea of "we need to stay competitive" that really killed Simcity. Here in capitalist societies, we're sold on the idea competition is great, but it's not, it assumes the fact the rules stay the same and focuses attention on what our "enemies" are doing. We become obsessed with not doing what we do best, but with doing what we think will beat the others. In Simcity's case, it was adopting online connectivity and social interaction despite the fact Simcity is inherently a creative game and not a social one (in fact, unless you're a trash-tier mayor, you've spent time researching city layouts, reading through strategies, and possibly even simulating various algorithms and geometries in matlab or whatnot... whereas in a social game, you'd be spending your time name-calling the other players). Strategies and ideas that emerge from competition focus on trying to capture customers from an adversary, and completely ignores the fact people are complicated, don't like change, and that a company can capture them by just being incrementally "better" in some engineering metric. Today, it's too late for simcity, but to a new rising city game like skylines, I hope they ignore what "the competition" are doing and just focus on making their fun city building game more fun (e.g. instead of worrying about online, social, or the 2018 version of online-social which will probably be 3d holograms or something, spend time introducing new mechanics like strategic resources, "work from home" algorithms, flying cars, racism / gentrification, etc.)
- simcop2387 12y ago
  I think you definitely hit the spot on what killed SimCity, but a 3D holographic city builder would probably be one of the best things ever. Combined with the street level view you can get in City: Skylines it'd actually be really really cool to see.
- danudey 12y ago
oatmealsnap 12y ago
What it seemed like happened was the Maxis developed a great (or at least good) game, and EA came in and stuck their own requirements in where they didn't belong, which then caused all the issues.
danudey 12y ago
Most of the people from 'Maxis' left Maxis a long time ago. The current 'Maxis' is just the brand that EA is slapping on stuff from that studio, but it bears almost no relation whatsoever to the Maxis that we all grew up loving.

blueskin_ 12y ago

To many, many gamers, as soon as the word EA comes up, it already means "prepare for disappointment, DRM, and disastrous launches".

bentcorner 12y ago
To me they're a mixed bag. I've enjoyed many titles from them (Dragon Age, Titanfall, Dead Space, NFS: HP, Mass Effect, Bulletstorm, BF: BC2, and countless other titles from older gen consoles and even older PC games like Archon and Kings of the Beach). I think that when expectations are set high (most any recent BF release), disappointment is sure to follow.
- shostack 12y ago
  It's not that expectations are high. It's that the games would be outstanding if EA hadn't crappified them. Many of these games have very player-hostile elements designed purely to suck more money out of people. Maybe it's just me, but for all people like to point out how expansion packs back in the day used to be bad, I don't remember ANYTHING on the level we're seeing with how aggressively they try to milk their customers at the expensive of the experience.
  - blueskin_ 12y ago
    Exactly this. I liked proper expansions where you got a good proportion of a whole game's extra content. I hate DLC where you are encouraged to buy large numbers of small items, because it's a 'death by a thousand cuts' model of sucking way more money out of the player with far less dev effort. I never buy DLC for any game, on principle. If a game has a lot, I'll reconsider buying the game at all.
- aros 12y ago
  EA didn't develop a majority of the games you listed. They were the publisher.
- Kalium 12y ago
  Even the Dragon Age games had issues. The first one had "HAY BUY THE DRM" plugs in incredibly irritating spots. The second one had like three maps, which made playing a lot less fun than it should have been.

gdulli 12y ago

It's likely just as unfair to tarnish the Maxis name for the game design failures of the EA SimCity era. Would a pure Maxis game have been as badly received? I guess we can't know for sure.

TylerE 12y ago
Doesn't hold up to scrutiny. http://gamerant.com/simcity-maxis-ea-online-connection/ http://gamerant.com/simcity-maxis-ea-online-connection/
- gdulli 12y ago
  Perhaps not by EA's accounting of the situation.
nolok 12y ago
SimCity 3000 and 4 were both made with EA owning Maxis. They were both great.