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Developers hit out at EA after dropping Command & Conquer FPS
After Tiberium is disbanded, a number of game developers anonymously hit back at EA’s management
Back in Issue Issue 54 of Custom PC, we reported that EA was working on a new first person shooter based on the Command & Conquer universe. Called Tiberium, the game promised a ‘unique blend of first-person shooting and tactical squad combat,’ but it’s now been canned and a number of game developers, who may have worked on the Tiberium team, are now trying to expose EA’s bad management tactics anonymously.
In Gamasutra’s comments section for the story about Tiberium being canned, you can see a large number of anonymous comments lambasting EA management for allowing the game’s development to get into such a poor state. A lot of detail is revealed, among various choice pseudonyms. The general opinion appears to be that inexperienced people were promoted to senior roles, instead of the experienced devs already there, resulting a management bungle that ultimately led to the project’s collapse.
It all starts in the first post, where an anonymous poster claims that ‘no one wanted to make a design decision’ on the game, adding that ‘5 years later, Dan and team had changed the weapons 5 times. Hired a myriad of clown hack jr designers, all who wanted to be the "AI designer!" Dan was let go, and in came Tim Coolidge, who left after 2 weeks.’ Interestingly, he also says that EA ‘hired a couple of more less than jr designers to save the project’ instead of experienced designers. Apparently, ‘one was let go after 1 week.’
Further down, another anonymous comment claims to have worked with the first poster, and has more to say on the matter. They claim that ‘every step of the way, the new management team sabotaged Tiberium from intentional failings of milestones from day one, to laying off of key contributers [sic] to its success so far at the desperate end. If you want to know who wasn't pulling their weight on Tiberium, they were the last ones left. Up until the last day you could walk around the office and look into almost any cube at random, witnessing people surf the web, due to purposely misscheduled [sic] workloads.’
A large debate then follows, with plenty more anonymous comments that appear to be a real eye-opener onto the business of game developing. If you have the time, we recommend having a good read through the posts to see how game developers and coders really feel about their industry, and how the management system appears to work.
Do you work in the games industry? If so, can you identify with these complaints? Were you looking forward to playing Tiberium? Let us know your thoughts (anonymous or not) in the comments section below.
Via Gamasutra
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Any fan of battlefield 2 or 2142 will be quite aware of the months, if not years of bugs and patches we had to go through. Then there was C&C3, which i dont even want to get into! Corporate fat cats is an understatement.
Comment by Hamfunk at 6:28pm 10th October 2008
I work for pcworld. (I know i'm doomed) Anyway the real customer base is sub £500 laptops thats at least 70-80% of our business. Can any of these laptops play any kind of modern graphics intensive game. NO !!! Time to wake up and design for low end machines as a starting point and have the sfx as an optional extra. At least they get cards and mahjong free.
Comment by hardwar5 at 10:09am 10th October 2008
A friend of mine from university worked for EA. It was his job to design flash front ends for console games. He told me that EA are scum. He worked extremely long hours, for months on end, with no days off. In the end, he finished the project and left.
Comment by grimerking at 9:49pm 7th October 2008
After reading through all of that it's made sense to my why so many of EA's releases are just re-makes of old games. They obviously cant organise the proverbial piss up in a brewery, let alone create a new game. $40mil wasted on this project. This is the real reason why they charge so much for a game; they need to sign off on the ones they shelve. It's just a shame that a $40mil loss isn't enough to make EA sit up and listen to what people want.
Comment by SiriusBlack2 at 1:08pm 6th October 2008
With all this bad talk of EA and the industry being run by accountants, surely there is enough intelect in the developer world to do a 'McFly' and become the publishing house themselves? I know big games cost a lot to produce, but isn't a lot of that down to big overheads and the obsession with having the absolute best graphics (which most of us can't even run anyway) rather than good solid gameplay. There must be a different way of doing things and to be able to produce a game in a faction of the time and cost that it takes in a big company?
Comment by bujo1 at 12:51pm 6th October 2008
The Duke was plagued by this all through 96-04 8 years of nearly there than back to the drawing board for some godforsaken reason. I want cool games where is a New Forsaken or Recoil.
Comment by Cool_CR at 5:43pm 5th October 2008
Doesn't this happens all the time in the gaming business. You'll here of a game, see pictures and then....nothing!!! The game never sees the lite of day for whatever reason. Maybe EA could still sell this and hopefully somebody else will pick it up.
Comment by Warrior24_7 at 2:15am 4th October 2008
I am sick of EA destroying orignally good games like the Sims, Command and Conquer, I was looking forward to this as i think a well developed game on C&C could work but of course EA was thinking of their pockets
Comment by cpt_hooker at 10:10pm 3rd October 2008
With EA trying to be the dominant force in gaming on all platforms is that the sort of thing we'll see more of in the future. It doesn't look too good for prospective game designers...
Comment by Mordrin at 7:22pm 3rd October 2008
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