Slashdot Mirror
EA's Best-kept Secret
jkdove writes "GamerGod recently held an interview with top executives at BuildForge and learned a little known trade secret of video game industry giant Electronic Arts' arsenal. Granting the ability to reduce costs of 80 million dollar titles to an only 40 million, there can be little doubt that BuildForge will find its way into many more of the game industry's top production firms. From the article: 'Utilizing BuildForge's capabilities result in dramatic reductions in team workload and build/release cycle time - typically creating 4-20x efficiency improvements over in-house or open source systems. This is what EA is looking to do by bringing in automation, better practices and standards into those process that have been traditionally more free wheeling.'"
Granting the ability to reduce costs of 80 million dollar titles to an only 40 million,
That story summary is just plain wrong. The submitter earns an 'F' in reading comprehension.
The interview doesn't say that... It doesn't even come close to saying that. It says they are always looking for ways to do that, and that they're also looking for tools to help them streamline development. If $40m of an $80m goes to licensing, marketing, distribution, and placement, no process automation is going to accomplish that, clearly the two goals were stated independantly.
If anybody thinks that $80 million goes into the development budget of any game, they're crazy. Development is only a fraction of the cost, and looking at EA's list of games and licences, I'd guess it's frequently less than half.
What is the world coming to when even the submitter doesn't read the article?