We too remember the slightly underrated Amazing Island. But it’s worth pointing out the emperor’s lack of clothes every now and again. There’s nothing to be done about it, of course. The combined income of FIFA, Madden, and Battlefield means that their tank keeps rolling no matter how clueless they are, or how many opportunities they blow up. He must be a great driver!” EA gobbled up a lot of valuable IP and talent around the turn of the century, and the leadership has been coasting on that inertia for over a decade now. If I put a monkey in the driver’s seat of a tank and turn him loose on the freeway, eventually people will start to say, “Man, that monkey is unstoppable. Sometimes a complete moron will have a good run at the blackjack table. Sometimes losers run things because they’re insulated from their mistakes. It was a reactionary move by people who had no vision or insight. (Technology? User base? IP? Talent?) They closed the studio just a few years later. They didn’t get around to entering the casual market until it had basically peaked, and ended up paying a premium (over 300 million dollars) for a small-fry studio when it was clear they weren’t sure what they needed or wanted. Remember when EA bought Playfish? They didn’t see the rise of the casual market until it had come, rolled over them, and left. They have no understanding of their audience and their entire decision-making process could be boiled down to about 100 lines of computer code. His team didn’t just copy products, they invented them. Steve Jobs was reportedly a massive jackass, but I have to give the guy credit that he was good at doing exactly this. They need to have some kind of knack for perceiving or predicting trends, or discovering previously unknown customer demand. Once you’re paying someone millions of dollars, they ought to be offering leadership. The EA plan is pretty simple: If a game makes above threshold X, then it’s a success and you begin pumping out sequels and DLC and mobile version.īut Shamus! That’s what executives do! They’re just doing their job, which is to make money! There’s a lot of fancy tech you need to make Spore work, and the people who invented that tech have moved on. If this were a car company, then they’ve fired all the engineers and held onto the assembly-line workers. EA unloaded a bunch of people at Maxis, and my guess is that EA has shed all of the creative people in charge of coming up with new gameplay mechanics and systems to simulate, and has retained the content-producing people for the purposes of cranking out Sims titles and DLC. Wright has moved on, and other important names are gone as well. I should qualify that by saying that I’d like to see Spore get another chance at being made by Will Wright and the creative team at Maxis. My column this week is a look back at Spore.Īt the end of the column I say that (spoiler) I’d like to see Spore get another chance.
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