I try to avoid buying from EA because of this. The only exceptions I have are Secret World (which is just damn good) and Alice: Madness Returns (I bought it on Steam when it was on sale and honestly forgot it WAS an EA game until I first loaded it and saw their logo).
Maxis' failure was a foreseeable occurrence. EA always does the same thing: They buy a company, let them make hugely successful games, then start making demands which cause drops in quality to meet, then keep making more demands until the studio has a commercial flop, after which EA dissolves them.
I'd be sadder about this except I already cried all my tears at how EA gutted and ruined Maxis. This is just putting the poor victim out of its misery at this point.
[url=#user_comment_359029]@Orc[/url]: Exactly, that's it. You missed the point bro. EA keeps eating smaller but talented studios (Maxis, Westwood, Bullfrog...do I need to continue?) and degrades their games to shadows of their former selves. It's horrible, man. Imagine if these studios kept making their games properly without EA.
This sort of thing is actually indirectly good for the industry. All the devs that are worth a damn will then jump on kickstarter or, patreon or, whatever and make us sweet indie games. Of coarse that just leave the matter of companies like EA buying and sitting on Intellectual Properties.
Visually speaking, Brutal Legend is amazing, specially the opening. But they ruined with the gameplay. Usually the gameplay is in third person but in some missions is a RTS!... and not a good one.
[url=#user_comment_359029]@Orc[/url]: Exactly, that's it. You missed the point bro. EA keeps eating smaller but talented studios (Maxis, Westwood, Bullfrog...do I need to continue?) and degrades their games to shadows of their former selves. It's horrible, man. Imagine if these studios kept making their games properly without EA.
[url=#user_comment_359029]@Orc[/url]: Exactly, that's it. You missed the point bro. EA keeps eating smaller but talented studios (Maxis, Westwood, Bullfrog...do I need to continue?) and degrades their games to shadows of their former selves. It's horrible, man. Imagine if these studios kept making their games properly without EA.
Orc
almost 10 years ago
EA are not that bad. At least, they made Brutal Legend happen.
A guy just quit working at Maxis not long ago, and he described on 4chan how EA is the worst company on Earth and how they treated them like shit. Also, he said some other interesting stuff like EA is making a shitty Star Wars-themed SimCity-clone when SW7 is ready.
Kinda heartbraking for an old fuck like me. Sim city was one of the first games I played (the Godzilla version, for some reason in later versions the monster was replaced...).
Later, Sim City 2000 became one of my most played games back in the golden MS-Dos gamer era.
And now it's probably over...
Because a lot of you seem to be confused, Maxis wasn't shut down. It was one of Maxis's studios, the one responsible for the more recent Sim City that was closed. No way in hell was EA going to mothball Maxis; The Sims are one of their biggest cash cows.
It's easy to point fingers at EA for being the bad guy, but Maxis wasn't particularly uninvolved in their own downfall.
I read somewhere that they had a quite high amount of freedom while designing the desaster that SimCity became.
Sgt_flyer
almost 10 years ago
That art reminds me more about another old & often forgotten maxis title - Sim Tower :)
The age-old EA question: did the closed-down company go under because its games were bad, or did orders from on high force them to make games with unpopular features which were poorly received, thus making the company go under?
I feel like many of the companies that go under whilst controlled by EA did it to themselves. Maxis was an ailing company when they were bought out, EA just used the brand recognition to force them to push games out.
Sim City in particular had major problems internally, agents comes to mind.
