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EA is not going to give in though, they have far too much riding on these policy stepping stones. Besides, let's be honest, the game is well tailored to the volume markets of casual and leisure play gaming. For every person having an issue, there's a fair few thousand who simply buy without thinking things through. For EA that means that all the "fuss" is largely irrelevant. For Maxis it is an entirely different issue, but Maxis is just a studio, and studios are just as expendable and locked in as their employees. Besides, the studio has far too much riding in terms of job prospects depending on keeping the noses pointing the same way and continuity prospects dependant on DLC and release maintenance.

Heh. You know, that is exactly how many meetings go in our industry among publisher subsiduaries. Especially the parts of "directives" and "jobs after launch" are pretty much a rule. It's ingrained.

I would advise some caution though, in terms of keeping matters discrete and not easily linked to identities. Especially in light of the latest leaks it may not be a matter of what may or may not be possible, but what may or may not be permissable. It is EA, not Maxis, who decides on strategic directives. Modding is first and foremost in service of EA's MT model. And the Origin platform does have a history of being used as a data mining instrument as well as package validation, tied to the matter of applicable licenses it may be an idea first to find out what is permissable - at least to a degree.

Because EA considers customers as nothing more than resources. Because EA considers its subsiduaries as nothing more than resources. People with such petitions out should probably update the information available on such pages with that link.

Yeah, only a matter of time until some professional pride got in conflict with EA's directives. Bit of a slap in the face of it all.

Give it a few months.

Right, to get back on topic ... Here's a ball going up in the air. Everything is theory. That is why we're always looking for a theory of everything. Science is but an empirical attempt at a process of discovery our ancient belief systems engage on in symbolism (incidentally, with us increasingly finding out that Sagan was right all along, two sides of the same coin discovering at different paces and speaking different languages). Science has the same fundamental challenge as belief, the moment you insert humans into the mix you find out that in any form of organisation there is a severe risk of dogmatizing findings and information alike. This is why science carries syndromes like "not invented here" and "screw that other guy I published first" and "what we cannot see does not exist .. ah crap now we can detect tachyons ffs we got to remove a bunch of old guys from old worn seats because they are now emberassing". And that is also why belief, which is personal and tolerant, is subverted into religion which is dogma and instrumentation of power. Evolution theory, creationism, I am not going to be surprised if at one point we find out that it is just another case similar to a scientist figuring out string theory by following teachings of a buddhist and an old jewish scholar in a scientific process. The really big problem is always that people abuse concepts for power (look at how creationism is used as an instrument of a modern version of the old Jesuit theorem of "give me a child for 5 years and he is mine for life") and that we as humans create our own inertia against the bridging of perspectives. Still, we may very well find out one day that there is a big problem with how we have anthropomorphised the god concept in finding out that our dear old concepts of alpha and omega actually do have a place in a computational multiverse as both science and belief systems are slowly finding out So here is a fun statement, for all those still vested in either scientific dogma or religeous zeal: only those who crave power fear knowledge and the exposure of people to different perspectives.

I will grin if it turns out to be the general issue that arose when the original Spore systems were proposed (later changed and ultimately post release changed again) where the cluster DB system had its bottleneck in the requirement of transferring user and action data + states to a seperate cluster proposed for data mining.

The prime difference, in rough terms, is that American urban development is much more a case of planned development as opposed to European development which is more a case of "evolved / historically grown" development. Ofcourse, differences and different conditions all around, various stages of growth or decline as well, but ultimately American urban development is simply incredibly young compared to European urban development. One result is for example that farming areas on the Eu mainland are not as clearly seperated from urban areas as is more common in the US, often agricultural areas are mixed in with residential and commercial areas in cities of all sizes. A very funny thing in that regard which I came across when I first moved to Europe was seeing commercial areas where highrise buildings have farming floors and rooftops, data centers tied with growhouses, very wierd to see at first. If you look at infrastructural development of urban areas in Europe, it is pretty damn hard to find a city or even a town with a grid structure for roads, predominantly because it has grown to be over far longer than our Republic has existed. The interesting bit is that for US formats of urban development it far more often comes down to following a specific format as opposed to hybridising as is visible in Europe. When that is taken to a simulation game, hard choices have to be made, and the source of the game is a strong point of influence in these matters. The limitations that result from such choices are instruments in service of marketing. Which is only natural.

Metagaming is a design feature, it is deliberately included in order to stimulate user behaviour in support of group dynamics. Think of it as a sort of "we gotta circle the wagons and tell ourselves what we want to hear so we can keep the baddies out" approach.

It's the mindset today. Shallow behaviour and thinking equals more sales at lower costs. My industry is no exception to any other industry in that regard. It is today's incarnation of the ancient Roman instrumentation of bread & circusses. The problem with it is that it a) does not create wealth, it only concentrates wealth and b) the more such trends become part of a society's economy the quicker the path for the attached society to become increasingly poorer. Ultimately defeating the circle of greed as wealth evaporates. But that is fine, because those whom the system serves are excempt from that anyway. The gaming industry is very interesting to observe for trends like these, because it connects so very close to home of the consumer. For decades the general entertainment (tv, movie) industry was the only industry where you could collect tangible data on variables usable for instigating such trends, while other industries were predominantly restricted to balancing derivative variables. But the gaming industry enables an amazing direct insight in and control over the means to instigate consumer trends on a behavioural level. Most interesting of all is that in contrast to other industries it pays much more directly to invest in these matters, because the link is so short. Other industries for example have levels and tiers of sectors and distribution networks and retailers or resellers between them and the consumer. Incidentally, this is one of the biggest reasons why EA puts so much emphasis in its investor briefs on the prospects of consumer behaviour management and consumer profiling. It is the next cash cow, one which in terms of prospect revenues is prone to dwarf the revenue streams of games themselves. And that is why EA is making these shifts towards online play, casual play and platform service modelling. It is a required step to becoming what was once jokingly described at GDCC as "the google of our industry, but efficient and all encompassing". A speech that yielded massive applause.

The irony is that as long as you are ok with the difference between a global volume market and a global niche market SC4's adoption to fruition by users shows definite and clear prospects ready for business modelling that highlight the financial prospects of building on exactly that kind of potential with an existing title franchise.

SC2013 is a nice game, well tailored for EA's strategic directives, and very much in tune with the artificial trends instigated for the industry today. It delivers exactly what is required to function as a cash cow for a volume market of leisure and casual consumer gameplay. It's a reboot execution, for today's trends and a stepping stone to build towards EA's desired trends of tomorrow. Nothing less, nothing more. It looks ok, it functions, and once you strip away all the marketing it does what it sets out to do. But that also constitutes the limits of the game. A lot of people expected SC2013 to be SC5, an expectation Maxis strongly stimulated by means of marketing in order to generate exposure, messaging and to utilise the strenghts of communities which had nurtured an end of life product (SC4) to fruition. We can argue about whether that is bad or immoral or smart, it does not matter, this is how marketing functions in our industry. A lot of people embraced SC2013 in spite of not being comfortable with the paradigm shifts in DRM, online play, modding (*poof gone*) exactly because SC4 had become an immersive game beyond its intended lifecycle, not because of the actions or inactions of the studio or publisher, but because gamers took it on and nurtured it. It was time to take that nurturing to a next step. Unfortunately, as is now clear, Maxis and EA used that sentiment only to make a reboot instead of building on top of that potential. Which is only logical. For every gamer who goes deep, you have to realise that you have to spend quite a bit more money for support and development after release on that type of gamer than on the type who does not go deep. Plus, for every deep gamer studies show the prospects of the global volume market where you find roughly 4.5k users who do not go deep. It's math, it's money. Aside of the frustrations over the deliberate decisions to create launch issues (as part of a very common school of thinking in marketing as well as service modelling in business management) a lot of people are finding out now that SC2013 does not allow them to go deep, and that it solely rests on a magic promis to somehow magically enable the user to buy a lot more building blocks that might perhaps allow him or her to go deep. Sure, if we forget about EA's announced directives, Maxis's own continued admiration of the pre-corrections Spore model, the track records of EA in support and studio development and so forth, that sort of magic might actually ride in on a unicorn with wings from cloud nine. Some day. But let's be honest, that requires a change of thinking on levels where the decisions have already been made. SC2013 is tailored for an eventual introduction of the next incarnation of The Sims 3 custom content exchanges. Not moddability as users - especially SC4 users - know the concept. It does not pay for either Maxis or EA to provide the raw power of moddability to SC2013 as SC4 users created for and with SC4. Overall SC2013 is a fine social game. No big learning curves, easy to get in to, and easy to get out of. Ideal for grabbing the wallet for shinies to polish the town created, and to blurb about it on social media. If that is what you like, and you don't really want a giant or complex challenge or puzzle, SC2013 is a fine reboot. If you want more than the casual online play DRM concept, it is not the game you are looking for. In that case you might want to look more towards grabbing the heads of people behind (for example) NAM and hook them up with the folks in Austin Texas and jump on the kickstarter project of Civitas. But please realise that you all are now a niche market. You are no longer the focus of mainstream gaming. A very viable niche market, but just not of interest for the big publishers. The irony is that immersive god gaming puzzle challenges, so to speak, are no longer a volume market exactly because people buy the provided casual online play microtransaction games. The volume market exists because people buy without much thought of what publishers (who score worse on brand value and support rating that the worst corrupt and fraudulent banks) want to sell and how that is going to play out for their entertainment in the long run. In a nutshell it is simple. If you don't mind that SC2013 is just a quick shiny game, buy it. If you want more, do not reward companies that want to sell you more by giving you less. Pure and simple. The trend only continues as long as people buy into it.

Everyone who realises the artificial constraints should also realise that they are not the type of customer that EA wants for its portfolio.

Indeed, just look at the very first question. Question 1: How is this debacle something you didn't forecast? Can you explain the business rationale or justification for how this happened? Answer: Metrics/beta was fairly conservative and live ops stressed our game server DB’s in ways that we did not experience in Beta or Load Test. Let's be honest, constraints on infrastructure for release is a deliberate decision part of a school of thinking in marketing & sales as well as general service management where you guide behavioural patterns based on the presence of bottlenecks providing constraints to the various user types and categories you market to. It's one of the few instances where the view is longer than instant validation, because it is in service of stabilising and guiding desired trends. It shakes off the users that tend to cost you over time (in various forms) and is always buffered by symbolic service management to strengthen the influx of the desired user types from a volume market. But that aside, even more simple. Projections based on demo rounds (which today are called beta's) are a very simple thing. You tally the already calculated prospects, the various channels of purchase, the ratios of those for registrations, and so forth. It is really fundamental and stupendously simple modelling that enables you to work out exactly what the minimum requirements are going to be for an online infrastructure in service of a release. It is bog standard industry modelling. It is absolutely impossible to screw up these kinds of projections. Sure, there are differences between various types of tests and scenarios mapped for projections, and there is always the variables of a technical nature. but that is what this kind of projection modelling in our industry also takes in to account. It is extremely easy to buffer against the most severe of issues, it is just a decision to allocate the resources to create those buffers. Anything other than a catastrophic failure of a DB cluster on a hardware level can be mitigated in advance. So forgive the bluntness, but any statements along the lines of "we underestimated" are bull. The situation is a result of conscious decisions. Ofcourse that is something we cannot give customers insight in, because that would undermine the willingness of volume markets to spend money without thinking (after all, who likes having customers who use their brains, pesky and costly), so we once again use the instrument of marketing to try and guide the messaging and the narrative. That last part is the only thing of prime interest to EA, narrative control. That this costs customers now is fine, and is part of strategic modelling. After all, those customers who use their brains are costly, it is far more desired to focus on volume markets where you have shedded these types and can just hook up those who follow. I know, in many ways this is insulting, but this is the reality of our industry. We're not an exception in that regard. Most industries that have a direct market connection with consumers function this way, or strive to achieve such functioning. It is reality, a reality maintained by consumer behaviour.

Ofcourse he likes it, the man wants to continue a career. Incidentally, the same goes for Sid.

Does anybody believe this? I mean, do people really think this whole always online system was Maxis' idea, and not forced upon them through EA's policy to make everything an online, F2P game? No, it is a nice display of how people who do the actual work are seperated from the levels where strategic decisions are made. EA gives its directives, studio execs translate those in a guided format to the grunts, and those get to work. And EA's directives have been clear for ages, it is something they always present at investor briefs. What is accurate though is that the Maxis leads still take the original Spore model as a grand example of inspiration for next steps. They embrace the directives. They cater to them. That a coder or an artist is not aware of that is a requirement of operational management.

Because we as a society do not invest in checks & balances to offset the intrinsic relationship between various pathologies and paths of power. We have passed the point where this is possible even, as it has become a self serving system. Most of our high level economics are in functions held by people who score surprisingly high on the psychopathy scale. Quite interesting. Politics is no exception either.

She is doing great at directing perception. She is really not answering any tough questions in a manner that shows an open and honest insight into strategy or policy. But that is smart, at this point turning the curve is within reach but still at a slight risk of creating negative trends that can be caused by customers realising what their position is within the strategies executed. Personally I would recommend her for an upcoming vacancy in one of the marketeering seats at EA this fall.

And none of it is going to affect EAs policies or strategic directives. Online play as DRM on top of microtransactions is the adopted business model. A return from that would present severe issues for investment dependancies. It is just not going to happen. EA knows full well that for every person who turns it into a matter of principle or discontent there is a global volume market of alternates who take a lot less handling to keep buying quietly.

First of all, the person with whom the general message originates has absolutely zero understanding of how EA functions. Admittedly, most EA employees have no idea either. It is an integral part of the corporate narrative to maintain a strict seperation between the enterprise and its resources, the latter is what employees are a part of. Many publishers and even big studios suffer deliberately from this syndrome, because to create an environment where all noses point the same way without question is vital for the execution of corporate vision and policy alike. 2K Games has had similar upheavals on the release of Civilization V, mostly internal to the industry, aside of a minor blurb none of it really made it beyond the usual talk of the conference type of exchange. Firaxis had a somewhat larger issue, where two employees were a bit too verbal on the divide between the studio and the publisher prior to the title release. Ubisoft has had similar hiccups a few years ago in regards to advocated DRM policies. Blizzard has had a few people fired over small leaks showing dissent. CCP Games nearly broke itself when corporate management became so seperated from its product and so oblivious to the actual realities of both the company and the business that pants dropped over the course of several years in employee reviews of the company on industry job sites and ultimately a series of massive leaks showing utter disdain by the corporate management for the customer. It's nothing out of the ordinary for our industry. Truth be told, it does not even matter any more whether a leak or an open letter is from an employee, a former employee, the husband of the employee or a studio slave. It's symptomatic for something that most people who work in the industry tend to be completely oblivious to. Everything is marketing. Marketing serves to have noses point the same way. That goes for customers. That goes for employees. Both are keen to embrace a project, a game, want to give it all they can, and the external and internal marketing serves to make that so. In the mean time the corporate affair, so to speak, could not give any rat's ass less about either. Resources. Expendable. Giving anything your all is not a factor. Company values are marketing. Pure and simple. I hate to say it, but every so often studios send fresh meat to industry conferences and conventions, who quickly find themselves torn in two categories. Those that quickly shun the veterans because they do not see their work as a privilige and an awesome challenge, and those who still believe the marketing. The next year the first have shut up and still have a job, the second have been replaced by even fresher meat. Irony pure and simple. The reality is that believing in anything you are told in this industry is only of interest if it serves a career progression, and that only works if you are smart enough to ditch across projects in the long run. Because ultimately everything and everyone is just as expendable as the workers good old Ford picked from at the gates of his first factory when the T model started to roll off the factory line. And people hate that realisation, especially in this industry because it is such a dream for so many. Working in this industry, making games, being awesome. And finding out that it is just another industry hurts enough already, finding out that you are less than a cog hurts even more for many. Incidentally, this is also why so many people who do find out while working in studios tend to just suck it up and try to keep their noses pointing the same way. Something which is one of the biggest reasons of all why projects go beyond budget or suffer severely in quality and service management. But that is something which on the enterprise level is factored in and calculated for. It is a non factor. What people should realise where it comes to EA is that it is an enterprise which functions as an investment fund manager utilising venture capital. The current mess surrounding the SC2013 release I can assure you all was already factored in on two levels. That of the executive where people just provide that which serves the narrative, and just below that where the sharks fight to get to the executive level where a few smart ones actually succeed in working the good old paradigm of "there is no such thing as bad press" to achieve targets. I know, it sounds crazy, but anyone who has ever worked as a manager at the larger publishers can attest to the climate and the business models in play. This is how it works. Sure, it steps on dreams of those who do the actual work, but those do not matter in any way or form. Enterprise development is resource management first and foremost with the prime instrument of narrative control. Why do you think companies send employees to bootcamps? Why do you think companies invest in a corporate culture? Because it serves sales. Now on that open letter, I sincerely doubt that anyone working at EA would have posted that. I know quite a few, and the sheep mentality reigns supreme. And of those few that do observe the reality of our industry none would even dream to make waves. At best it's something posted by a friend of relation of an employee. Personally I think it is much more likely that a customer wrote it. If anything, it is far too eloquent for any EA environment But as I said, it does not matter who wrote it. Nobody who sets policy is going to do more than laugh about it. It is irrelevant, because it provides no arguments that affect the business model. I can't make it any more clear than that. All nice talk, but zero relevance.

I find it almost hilarious that so many people still do not realise that all the issues of launch fit perfectly in the marketing. It is of severe interest to look at the target user categories for the type of game, and observe the correlations between the management of triggers and stimuli for the variables of exposure and user behaviour. Ofcourse there are launch issues, EA has applied a few lessons from studies and is milking it for what it is worth. More and more people look at the game, there is no such thing as bad press especially when you compensate customers with a free title pick and you can make a grand show of all the effort undertaken on making it right for customers. Ofcourse that is rather simplified, the complexities of this kind of marketing do require a rather intrinsic balance between messaging and trending, but sofar EA is doing very well. And as a bonus it is shedding a few user types who for the long run can pose issues because these user types tend to maintain deeper expectations over time.

It's had its wrists slapped a fair few times in the EU. Remember the major issues around Apple refusing to recognise the legal 2 year minimum warranty terms of the EU Directives. Big and costly lawsuits in most member states, severe conflict with several EU Directorates. Apple however is just a bit smarter than Microsoft in knowing when and where to be quiet. That said, if Apple continues to focus on a lock-in market model it is going to get in conflict with the warnings already given by the Commission on that matter. In that regard the next 36 months will be interesting. Microsoft somehow suffers from a regional economic blindness. Not arrogance as with Apple, but a strange selective blindness. The company did have several strong warnings, but somehow while the EU offices (as reported in the press here) took those serious the American headoffice folks ignored those once again. Back home stateside we are used to lobby mechanisms that prevent this kind of governance interference. In the EU somehow they are managing to balance lobby mechanisms with consumer interests, selective and general interests in balance if you will. What always puzzles me is how European companies tend to make that work in their favour in the long term. Stateside there's just no such long term mentality somehow. Apple will definitely feel the wrath of the EU Commission (or any European court) in the future, and I am pretty sure it will be about their warranty policy which is, I think, not in accordance with EU law. Is it really that bad in the USA? I thought there were also impressive anti-trust lawsuits in the United States. I also don't think this should be called government interference. Anti-trust regulation and litigation are essential elements of a free market economy: they are tools to guarantee that the economy is really free. A country that loves the free market as much as the USA should also appreciate and use these instruments. In the US, under a barrage of decades of propaganda, we have forgotten that liberalism is but one school of thought, liaised to but one model of economics, both dependant on variables and conditions which we have not paid much attention to - control over those has shifted in the previous century from governance to economic forces. We have turned liberalism in to an ideology and we treat it as a belief system, with the natural result that we have made ourselves rather blind to both positive and negative challenges that arise when variables and conditions change.

It's had its wrists slapped a fair few times in the EU. Remember the major issues around Apple refusing to recognise the legal 2 year minimum warranty terms of the EU Directives. Big and costly lawsuits in most member states, severe conflict with several EU Directorates. Apple however is just a bit smarter than Microsoft in knowing when and where to be quiet. That said, if Apple continues to focus on a lock-in market model it is going to get in conflict with the warnings already given by the Commission on that matter. In that regard the next 36 months will be interesting. Microsoft somehow suffers from a regional economic blindness. Not arrogance as with Apple, but a strange selective blindness. The company did have several strong warnings, but somehow while the EU offices (as reported in the press here) took those serious the American headoffice folks ignored those once again. Back home stateside we are used to lobby mechanisms that prevent this kind of governance interference. In the EU somehow they are managing to balance lobby mechanisms with consumer interests, selective and general interests in balance if you will. What always puzzles me is how European companies tend to make that work in their favour in the long term. Stateside there's just no such long term mentality somehow.

Appeasement did not work in 1938 because too many interests required the unleashing of the conflict. Nazi ideology and individual insanity was a relatively minor factor in that (fully recognising that it became a determining factor in how the conflict played out), much more of interest were the economic interests. In that regard we Americans share an enormous part of the burden for the second world war. As for NK, it does not have aspirations beyond the local level (which does include SK I should note), it has interests on a regional level but wisely acknowledges its dependancies on that level. It is not exactly the hotspot it once was, in truth as a country it is taking many steps very similar to the development of China prior to the '90's. Nuclear umbrella first, guided development, regional interests first local second and global only interesting in terms of securing dependancies. The US is very easy to rattle against, mostly because we make it so easy. We need a controlled conflict theatre, we're just not getting one and in the mean time we're having a hard time accepting that there are other (cheaper, and more effective) ways than becoming an empire to reacquire dominance. Let's be honest, what other countries are there with a track record today of the very imperialism the US once was created to break away from. North Korea's leadership would have to become very suddenly very stupid to end up in an actual conflict with the US. Nobody wants to give the Republic that which it requires.