Ensemble, Pandemic Blame Company Cultures for Studio Closures

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Ensemble, Pandemic Blame Company Cultures for Studio Closures

Staffers blame "crunch cultures" for their closures, not Microsoft or Electronic Arts.

By Kris Pigna, 03/14/2010


When a small studio is shut down by their big publishers, it's easy to jump to a reactionary conclusion that the big publishers are to blame. But speaking at the Game Developers Conference (via Eurogamer), staffers from two recently shut-down studios didn't blame their owners -- they blamed themselves.

Paul Bettner, who worked at Ensemble Studios for 12 years before it was shut down by Microsoft in 2008, blamed their own internal "crunch culture" on the studio's demise. "The reality is that every single game we shipped took twice as long as we said it was going to take, and cost twice as much to make," Bettner said. "Microsoft is a public company, they answer to their shareholders, and we were simply too expensive."

Part of the problem, Bettner explained, was that a culture grew in Ensemble where "everyone was a workaholic" and "addicted" to repeated successes with the Age of Empires series, leading to high project costs and poor quality of life for employees. And, he argued, it's a problem that's industry-wide: "This is a horrible vicious cycle. We burn out all our best people. We destroy these precious artists, we wreck their families and we sacrifice their youth. So they leave, and they take all their experience with them," he said.

Then there was former Pandemic Studios employee Carey Chico, who argued the studio's closure late last year also had more to do with their own culture -- a lack of accountability internally -- than with Electronic Arts. Chico explained the problems started when they began getting large funding after the merger with BioWare: "When you have your own money, what happens is that you have to maintain your own accountability internally, and if you don't have that, you just f**k everything up," he said. In fact, Chico also said working under tighter restrictions under a publisher's schedule "are actually good restraints in a lot of ways."

Bettner is now at iPhone developer NewToy, and Chico is now the president of new developer GlobeX.

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Now we can all cut EA and MS some slacks for these studios closure. They are not the bad guys!