Hmmm i always was stunned by Morrowind... Then again, i had to buy a system, and then upgrade it enough to play the game, with just enough harddrive space to play it back in 2001-2002. Ahh those were the days...

lol why is this topic still alive?!

Because it's still murky.... i won't poke the nest known as Bethesda directly to see if they are fun loving bees with gifts of honey or if they are hornets angry because the leftovers from decades ago might not be enough for me, but we'll see... At least they seem a little more humble than Square Enix... and miles more than Blizzard.


They could be like Disney, releasing 6 titles or so a year from not on til they catch up (older to newer) and i'd be thrilled! But they could be like [s]Capcom[/s] Ubisoft and release the first of a few series and then just not bother any further... Too bad, i might buy Assassin's Creed if i could get the entire collection in one place. But i won't give them any money if they DRM 95% of their titles and won't bring them here. Just seems pointless. (Sides i've gotten my fill of those games years ago, so it would only be to get my PC collection filled if i were to buy them... Like potato chips, i'm not going to get just one of them :P)

For now it's a wait and see...

All I was expecting was a few laughs and being told to fuck off. Not seven pages for super cereal discussions. :P

When life throws you lemons, you burn down someone's house down... i think... Or was it put sugar in the salt shakers?

Ok, just for you.


fuck off

I just ate a plate full of grilled salmon. It good

Much better, thank you and fuck you too! :P

LOL. They sold well over 2 million units last I heard. They released numerous DLC including one major expansion. The studio was owned by EA. The only way it could have run out of money is if EA run out of money. EA definitely hasn't run out of money. EA has turned a profit off the back of Sim City, even if they could have made a lot more.

Why do you even bother?

I'm not sure they made much of a profit. Remember all sales during the first month, which is the biggest month for sale and probably accounts for at least 1M of those sales you mention, were "refunded" by the way of giving people another, new, shiny EA game. I myself got Dead Space 3, which retailed at $60. If EA did its books by subtracting the full cost of these games to what was earned from sales numbers will have gone down quite a lot.

Then, regarding the DLC: There were smaller bits and an expansion. An overpriced expansion I refused to buy and that many people considered good, yet lacked to address the issues with the base game. Development of the base game, on top of that, was extended by many more months to try and address the many issues the game had or how it failed to deliver on its promises, adding extra expenses to an already expensive development process.

Now, EA probably made some money from it, that's true. But considering the debacle the game was and the myriad of bugs and other issues it had, would you really as a CEO want to keep that company around after that?

Five years before it came out?
But giving a game away is not a lost sale nor a loss of revenue.

Yet it has to be quantified as a loss, because stating that nothing was lost when EA gave away a hundred thousand copies of recent games is also false. And if videogame industry accounting is anything like hollywood accounting, then you can be sure each game given was counted as a $60 loss for EA caused by Maxis.

1. That's speculation on your part.

2. Even if it's true closing a studio usually helps with the bills making the 'success' artificial.

3. AAA games cost tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars to make and nearly an equal amount to market. The same as Hollywood films. This is how a movie that makes $100-$200 million can still lose money for a studio (Cowboys & Aliens, Green Lantern, etc.). It is also how something like Tomb Raider can sell millions of units and be declared a disappointment by the publisher. Given the debacle of the Simcity launch, the added and unexpected costs of making it a single player game, the closing of the studio that made it and relatively low sales it's easy to see any claims of success are little more than PR.

4. Finally EA is clearly making changes due to consumer demands contrary to your glib initial comments that publishers don't care about consumers - turns out their business depends on it. "In the last few months, we have started making changes to the business practices that gamers clearly don't like..."

So as I said before:

Moving on.

I don't know what games they gave away, but probably all of them were outside the golden first month of release (which is the only month most publishers seem to care about). Which to them means that you weren't going to buy those games anyway and the loss is very minimal. Don't forget that it costs them next to nothing to send out a bunch of Origin keys. In fact, given that games like Dead Space 3 have microtransactions, they could even have made money doing that.

When an AAA game is in development they usually have 100 or more people working stupid hours trying to meet the deadline. How many people do you think they had working on the patch? How long do you think they actually spent on it in terms of man hours? Don't forget that the central problem was easily solved by just one customer very quickly who didn't have any source code - just a retail copy of the game - to work with. OK it wasn't perfect, but it just needed polish by people who knew the game better and had the source code. Which Maxis did.

In terms of man hours we're talking sod all here.

No, I don't see EA wanting to keep Maxis around after Sim City. But more because of the other failings that had nothing to do with the DRM than because of it. It simply wasn't up to scratch in any sense. The DRM just finished it off. After all it's perfectly reasonable to assume that the DRM was imposed by EA.

In any case, Maxis fucked up and not for the first time. That, coupled with the fact that EA just likes to close studios, is why they got shut down. Not because they didn't make money.

Oh, it's so refreshing to see young love grow! :-)