Reddit’s member ‘vertexnormal‘ – who is a former Maxis developer – has talked a bit about the closure of Maxis Emeryville, and shed some additional light to it. According to vertexnormal, Maxis Emeryville was closed because the SimCity series was it suffered from The Sims’ huge success. And even though the older SimCity games made a profit, they were not even close to what The Sims had achieved.
vertexnormal started by stating that Maxis closure was a result of its – perhaps underwhelming – returns.
“Money. It all comes down to money. EA as a corporation doesn’t share our sense of obligation out of sentimentality. Hence today’s announcement.” said vertexnormal and revealed why there was such a big gap between the previous and the latest parts of SimCity:
“The long gap is probably caused by several factors. First was that the expansion for SC4 didn’t print cash like The Sims was at the time. Sure it made money, but The Sims had a HUGE (I remember reading 16x) return on the investment. So it got deprioritized to make The Sims 2. Which again made huge returns.”
vertexnormal then explained EA’s greenlight gating process (regarding its projects) and concluded that the last SimCity game was in development for 3-4 years.
“So, during that 10 year wait there was almost 9 years of silence. 3 or 4 of those years had active development of the game that shipped, with another year or more of a small group of creatives. There were other attempts that never made the light of day, and products (Simcity Societies comes to mind) that didn’t deliver that ‘SimCity’ experience.”
As vertexnormal said, it all comes down to money. Regardless of that, vertexnormal closed his huge post by saying that EA is a great place to work nowadays.
“EA is actually a great place to work these days. In the past there were difficulties (I was part of the EA Spouse/class action) but a lot of that has turned around. They really do want to retain talent and minimize layoffs. Not everyone shares this experience, but I haven’t worked back-to-back weekends in almost a decade. EA has a really good benefits package, competitive pay, and a strong sense of progressive public responsibility. Maxis, in particular, the Sims side has what is probably the highest level of gender equality in the industry.”
All in all, Maxis closure was all about business and money. Which also could explain why the game featured small cities (lower budget and a tight dealine equals to a dumbed down game), and that awful always online DRM (that was later removed).
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Where EA puts his finger, rots. Hopefully these dismissed employees start a project on kickstarter and have a “The Sims adult” or a game that makes competition to Sims because this franchise currently has no direct competition and therefore the crap EA does what it wants with her, even to the point of ridicule to blackmail consumers saying that depending on the success of The Sims 4, there will be no 5.
EA you are the worst company. You acquire a developer and when they don’t meet your standards you shut them down. Why don’t you just let them go and let them be independent? This is why I hate the gaming industry with this kind of business decisions. This is a warning to all gaming studios out there, don’t be fooled when you are being bought by a big publisher, when you don’t deliver they’ll close your brand name.
we could have a saboteur 2, but ea shut them down before release and didnt advertize the game.
cant they still get together and make a new studio with new name and say this is the formerly maxis?
It’ll happen. You always hear in news that ex-devs of a formerly debunked gaming studio puts up a new studio and goes independent. What’s sad is that they can’t use the Maxis name anymore.
welcome to capitalism. or were you expecting them to keep studios around for charitable purposes?
sweet i never cared for their FPS games and the only thing i do like is sims and simcity from them and i used to like their NFS series now i don’t have to buy anything from EA and best of all cities skylines comes out in 4 days meaning they will make their money
no love for mirrors edge? 🙁
SimCity did not suffer from The Sims success, SimCity suffered from corporate bigots making rubbish decisions about the end product. Those decisions negatively impacted the game play and most importantly the decision of the fans to buy it.
This is the reason that publisher run dev studios are loosing veteran talent to crowd funded projects and why Indie games are doing so well while big budget games keep flopping.
thank you