I worked on Warhammer Online for nearly two years before it left the offices of Climax Entertainment in Nottingham, England. When I arrived the game was already a couple of years in development, but the focus was on the technology not the game. We had no game, just a test area running on a local server.
There was a design department consisting of 10 people, 4 working on environment and level design, 6 working on quests, the magic system, and general game mechanics. There were 10 artists, 4 animators, and 13 programmers.
You'd think we would get somewhere with such a large team, but we didn't other than developing the underlying tech. The main reason the game design didn't progress was a second design team led by Paul Barnett was sitting in the office above us coming up with another vision for WHO without any interaction between the 2 departments other than meeting with the lead designer occasionally.
When the news came of Climax stopping development of the game it was not surprising to most people working on the title. You could see it coming for months before it happened. It looks as though that continued at Mythic although they did at least manage to ship.
I left a few months before the announcement was made and ended up having two exit interviews. The first was a standard set of questions given by the studio's human resources deaprtment. The second was with a representative of Games Workshop looking for answers as to why development was not progressing as they had hoped. They were in the dark about what was happening with their IP and wanted answers.
I would be annoyed to if I was games workshop, having spent decades painstakingly creating the IP to have a flop of an MMO created that was clearly pushed out before it was done.
A little outside perspective: This is exactly the way it goes with a huge percentage of IT-related projects, in many serious industries. The "Enterprise" is screwed.
My country is poor and lots of developers work in outsourcing firms from the first world. The funny thing is that a friend of mine does class assignments for kids in American universities, perpetuating the cycle of outsourcing need.
This comment needs to be stickied, printed, whatever so that people can ALWAYS see it. This one bit of insight is key to what's happening with American technical talent and managers.
I see MBA students who would happily outsource their work and have no moral qualms about it. They will turn around and work for companies where they will outsource work because they are only thing about 1 thing - cost.
My wife's company is in the process of outsourcing their financial work. Utter failure. I can't even describe what a fucked up process it is with internal financial work being done in 2-3 developing countries. But why outsource it? So managers can cut costs enough to get their quarterly bonuses.
"So we shut up and did what we were told, by people too afraid to tackle real problems. It is a culture of fear [...]"
In my experience, this is passing the buck. Culture is not something dictated by management. Culture is something that every person in an organization takes part in. Anyone can change it any time they like. It just takes a little brass. Shutting up and doing what you're told is not good enough. I've seen it happen in most of the failed startups I've worked for (3-4). When people relinquish responsibility for the well-being of the company and the culture, everyone is the worse for it. It often takes hard work to have your voice heard.
I'm going through this now with a company I just joined that has kludged their codebase into a massive steaming pile of untestable horse shit. There's tons of bugs and development moves crazy slow. The tech lead/architect hasn't really done any architecture beside accepting product's piecemeal direction and submitting to design by accretion. I don't plan to accept things as they are and just keep my head down. I plan to make a difference.
Most people are more afraid of what they might become than what they might fail to become.
Never back down.
This might work at a startup or a small company, but at a large company like EA, it is nearly impossible for a single individual to change the culture. EA has been a staple of bad management in the game industry for years, but it apparently did not impact their bottom line. Why would they change? I am all for not backing down, but you've got to pick your battles carefully.
The curse of the leader is that you cannot lead a group of people out of somewhere if they don't really want to leave. If you try, you end up becoming one of them.
I agree that corporate culture is dynamic and that you can make a difference, but you need to find if there is a group of people that is willing to change. Then you need to understand and put in concrete terms the vision that the group already have but does not quite understands. If there is not vision, the only option is to move on.
This depends heavily on the situation. It from the letter it sounds like the most realistic outcome of making waves is getting fired. Incompetence can become well rooted and surprisingly competent at protecting itself. If I were in this situation, I would keep my head down and start pumping out resumes.
Interesting article. I'm not certain I understand the complaint about the non-existent marketing campaign. According to the author, they sold a million boxes, but lost two thirds of the subscribers in the first month, and kept losing them thereafter. It sounds like they got the bums on the seats, people just hated the show.
I could understand faulting Evans for not pushing back and saying "We can't release this, it it's not ready" But it's hard to see how inducing more people to experience a lousy product would have helped, given that the business case presumably lives or dies on recurring revenue.
Given some of the hype they come out with about the game and the IP it was a given they were going to get a heap of people to give it a shot, same with Age of Conan, it sold a heap of copies initially.
Once you lose the player base it's a real uphill battle to retain them, if Age of Conan released in it's current state it would be a different story for them, would have kept a lot more people initially.
See APB (All Points Bulletin) for an even bigger recent MMO game fiasco. In development for 5+ years, cost over $50 million to make, closed 2 months after launch.
Over 250 people were laid off, including those working on a different game.
There were some similarities in the situations from what EA Louse is saying to what I experienced. I'll be interested in seeing the Old Republic launch product because of that.
In respect to the RTW failure, senior dev Luke has a series of articles which explain it much more eloquently (and kindly) than I ever could.
I'm actually a little shocked by these numbers. Even movies seem to have a better return on investment. They would do better offering the game freely with 3-6 months of play for the price of a movie to bring in as many as first time players as possible.
As someone who literally has two Warhammer tattoos on his forearms, I was so let down by WHO. I was one of those launch purchases, and I wanted to game to be good so dearly... but it just wasn't.
It's unfortunate when developers are forced to release something that they feel isn't ready.
I had the same reaction with Star Trek Online. I'm a long time trekk{er,ie} and I just couldn't stick with the game. I could deal with the bugs but the game was a skeleton, less content then an average game.
It's interesting to read about the internal workings of EA, but the reason WAR failed was because it was an awful game.
Poorly built, buggy, and not fun, unless waiting for an hour next to the mail box to get your mail is your definition of fun. The in-game bug report tool, which we were urged as beta testers to use to write bug reports along with steps to reproduce was limited to <256 characters! When I reported that as a bug, I was told it wasn't a bug.
But, I think it is wrong to put all the blame for the outcome on EA's execution. I think an additional problem is that Warhammer really wasn't that great an IP. Warhammer is a very dark place and an ugly place. I don't think that is what most people want in a fantasy world. That doesn't mean there wasn't a niche for Warhammer, but it's a smaller niche, and if you also alienate people with poor execution, maybe too small a niche for an MMO to be successful.
I grew up in Vancouver, Canada - home of EA's largest office, and knew many people who worked for them.
They deliver code because the number of glory-seekers is basically infinite. They can afford to burn people out and abuse them to no end because there are a hojillion more lined up outside the door, just begging for someone to get burned out and leave so they can get in. I also knew some testers, and heard about the horrific hours that they voluntarily put themselves through on the vague promises by management that exemplary performance in testing could be a path to development. This rarely actually happened, but it happened enough that the testers would basically pummel themselves with work for that off chance.
At this point I'm unconvinced that the majority of CS grads will realize what a shithole the games industry is in terms of sane employment. It seems to take some first-hand experience (I've also known people who interned with EA and then ran away screaming) for people to realize that making games is a completely different beast than playing them.
A civony/evony clone* with Ultima branding was released in the last year - maybe that? Don't get too excited, the game had no RPG gameplay that I could see; it looked like a city/kingdom sim.
* is Evony a clone of some other web game? I'm not familiar with the genre.
1 job I had, the company could not realize that monitors are important for developers.
The next job all managers from every department pointed fingers at other managers until the entire company went bankrupt. They had the best product on the market and the only reason why it would not sell insanely would have to be due to the sales team. They instead did not dogfood and paid a heavy price, when they tried to dogfood they realized too late that everyone is incompetent.
And now I have a very high-up manager shooting himself in the foot with a shotgun.
This might be a partial explanation of why EA's takeover of Mythic never resulted in a shaping-up of the jaw-droppingly bad programming DAoC still suffers from, 9 years after its launch.
[+] [-] ukdm|15 years ago|reply
There was a design department consisting of 10 people, 4 working on environment and level design, 6 working on quests, the magic system, and general game mechanics. There were 10 artists, 4 animators, and 13 programmers.
You'd think we would get somewhere with such a large team, but we didn't other than developing the underlying tech. The main reason the game design didn't progress was a second design team led by Paul Barnett was sitting in the office above us coming up with another vision for WHO without any interaction between the 2 departments other than meeting with the lead designer occasionally.
When the news came of Climax stopping development of the game it was not surprising to most people working on the title. You could see it coming for months before it happened. It looks as though that continued at Mythic although they did at least manage to ship.
I left a few months before the announcement was made and ended up having two exit interviews. The first was a standard set of questions given by the studio's human resources deaprtment. The second was with a representative of Games Workshop looking for answers as to why development was not progressing as they had hoped. They were in the dark about what was happening with their IP and wanted answers.
[+] [-] Torn|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robryan|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ahoyhere|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] br1|15 years ago|reply
My country is poor and lots of developers work in outsourcing firms from the first world. The funny thing is that a friend of mine does class assignments for kids in American universities, perpetuating the cycle of outsourcing need.
[+] [-] maukdaddy|15 years ago|reply
I see MBA students who would happily outsource their work and have no moral qualms about it. They will turn around and work for companies where they will outsource work because they are only thing about 1 thing - cost.
My wife's company is in the process of outsourcing their financial work. Utter failure. I can't even describe what a fucked up process it is with internal financial work being done in 2-3 developing countries. But why outsource it? So managers can cut costs enough to get their quarterly bonuses.
[+] [-] KevBurnsJr|15 years ago|reply
In my experience, this is passing the buck. Culture is not something dictated by management. Culture is something that every person in an organization takes part in. Anyone can change it any time they like. It just takes a little brass. Shutting up and doing what you're told is not good enough. I've seen it happen in most of the failed startups I've worked for (3-4). When people relinquish responsibility for the well-being of the company and the culture, everyone is the worse for it. It often takes hard work to have your voice heard.
I'm going through this now with a company I just joined that has kludged their codebase into a massive steaming pile of untestable horse shit. There's tons of bugs and development moves crazy slow. The tech lead/architect hasn't really done any architecture beside accepting product's piecemeal direction and submitting to design by accretion. I don't plan to accept things as they are and just keep my head down. I plan to make a difference.
Most people are more afraid of what they might become than what they might fail to become. Never back down.
[+] [-] nickelplate|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crpatino|15 years ago|reply
I agree that corporate culture is dynamic and that you can make a difference, but you need to find if there is a group of people that is willing to change. Then you need to understand and put in concrete terms the vision that the group already have but does not quite understands. If there is not vision, the only option is to move on.
[+] [-] flogic|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msabalau|15 years ago|reply
I could understand faulting Evans for not pushing back and saying "We can't release this, it it's not ready" But it's hard to see how inducing more people to experience a lousy product would have helped, given that the business case presumably lives or dies on recurring revenue.
[+] [-] robryan|15 years ago|reply
Once you lose the player base it's a real uphill battle to retain them, if Age of Conan released in it's current state it would be a different story for them, would have kept a lot more people initially.
[+] [-] pilkers|15 years ago|reply
Over 250 people were laid off, including those working on a different game.
[+] [-] rthng|15 years ago|reply
In respect to the RTW failure, senior dev Luke has a series of articles which explain it much more eloquently (and kindly) than I ever could.
http://lukehalliwell.wordpress.com/2010/09/15/where-realtime...
[+] [-] heresyforme|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Xero|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hitonagashi|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanc|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steveklabnik|15 years ago|reply
It's unfortunate when developers are forced to release something that they feel isn't ready.
[+] [-] nkassis|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whyenot|15 years ago|reply
Poorly built, buggy, and not fun, unless waiting for an hour next to the mail box to get your mail is your definition of fun. The in-game bug report tool, which we were urged as beta testers to use to write bug reports along with steps to reproduce was limited to <256 characters! When I reported that as a bug, I was told it wasn't a bug.
But, I think it is wrong to put all the blame for the outcome on EA's execution. I think an additional problem is that Warhammer really wasn't that great an IP. Warhammer is a very dark place and an ugly place. I don't think that is what most people want in a fantasy world. That doesn't mean there wasn't a niche for Warhammer, but it's a smaller niche, and if you also alienate people with poor execution, maybe too small a niche for an MMO to be successful.
[+] [-] billjings|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattm|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] potatolicious|15 years ago|reply
They deliver code because the number of glory-seekers is basically infinite. They can afford to burn people out and abuse them to no end because there are a hojillion more lined up outside the door, just begging for someone to get burned out and leave so they can get in. I also knew some testers, and heard about the horrific hours that they voluntarily put themselves through on the vague promises by management that exemplary performance in testing could be a path to development. This rarely actually happened, but it happened enough that the testers would basically pummel themselves with work for that off chance.
At this point I'm unconvinced that the majority of CS grads will realize what a shithole the games industry is in terms of sane employment. It seems to take some first-hand experience (I've also known people who interned with EA and then ran away screaming) for people to realize that making games is a completely different beast than playing them.
[+] [-] teamonkey|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yesimahuman|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tyrant505|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xsmasher|15 years ago|reply
* is Evony a clone of some other web game? I'm not familiar with the genre.
[+] [-] magamiako|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] GrandMasterBirt|15 years ago|reply
1 job I had, the company could not realize that monitors are important for developers.
The next job all managers from every department pointed fingers at other managers until the entire company went bankrupt. They had the best product on the market and the only reason why it would not sell insanely would have to be due to the sales team. They instead did not dogfood and paid a heavy price, when they tried to dogfood they realized too late that everyone is incompetent.
And now I have a very high-up manager shooting himself in the foot with a shotgun.
[+] [-] losethos|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hackermom|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
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