EA Shuts Down Visceral Studios

[hudsoniscool]

shikamaru317 said:

hudsoniscool said:
Everyone says fuck ea. Why? If this game was coming along nicely and was good than they would have finished it. It should have been 50-70% complete by now. It's a huge decision to make.

A year or 2 they where probably in the same position with andromeda. They let it come out and look at it. It's kind of a mess. One can only assume that either the game was of low quality or was way behind schedule. In either case ea was completely justified. It's a loose loose for them.

I find it highly unlikely that they are closing Visceral because the game was shaping up poorly. We're talking about a team of former Dead Space devs (the first two meta'd 89 and 90, the theird was only 78 because EA forced MP and casual features into it), led by Amy Hennig, the director of the 90+ Uncharted series, with assistance by Jade Raymond's Motive studio (creator of Assassin's Creed). That's a recipe for success, not distaster. This isn't like Andromeda, which was rushed and developed by newbie devs, we're talking about veteran developers with a good track record. Sure it has been in development a long time, but that doesn't necessarily mean it was having trouble, it could just mean they were taking their time because they wanted it to be truly great. Look at Rockstar, their games take like 4-6 years each and the quality shows.  

Then there's EA's wording, talking about market trends and pivoting the design, which strongly suggests EA wanted to put multiplayer, games as a service, and/or microtransactions into a planned singleplayer only game (especially given EA's recent forcing of microtransactions into Battlefront 2). I find it far more likely that Amy Hennig and Visceral were fighting EA over EA trying to force MP/GaaS/MT's into the game, and EA got sick of fighting with them so they just shut them down and moved the game to a studio that is willing to play ball and implement the MP/GaaS/MT's that they want. 

Lastly, there is EA's track record of destroying the studios that they have bought over the years, through poor business decisions and overstepping their bounds as a publisher. We're talking about 10+ studios that EA has bought and ruined over the years. Studios like Pandemic (SW Battlefront 1 and 2), Criterion (Burnout), Westwood Studios (Command & Conquer), and Maxis (Sim City, The Sims). 

I mean it's possible but ea is one of the biggest publishers(them and activision). They are extremely successful, you don't get that way by making bad decisions consistently. 

And andromeda did have some names to it. It was not a rushed game they had years. Sooner or later any publisher would be disgruntled with years of sputtering in the sand.