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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.'"
Well, bringing some best pratices into any software project cant be a bad thing? Or is this a bad thing (c) because we hate EA?
Kidding, of course, this means they can churn out more dreck with the same number of slaves.
"Something's wrong with you...and I hope we never do meet again." - Deftones When Girls Telephone Boys
Hopefully with these tools we can get what we really want, bi-yearly editions of our favorite sports titles! Madden 2007: Summer Edition. Sweet!
EA's best kept secret is not bad, but you better watch the one Take-Two is working on, code named Stacker!
Hosting 20G hd, 1Tb bw! ssh $7.95
They still won't drop game prices a penny.
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?
1) Halve development costs
2) Charge an extra $10 this gen due to "rising game development costs".
3) Profit
I wish it were a joke...
"BuildForge provides development automation solutions for Real-World Application Lifecycle Management.
"BuildForge FullControl is a powerful, adaptive framework that allows development teams to automate, integrate, and analyze their development lifecycle using the tools they have in place today."
I copied/pasted that from the BuildForge website. Raise your hand if hearing the above slogans parroted by some annoying MBA in charge of your department would cause you to immediately post your resume on the internet.
Instead of working 40 people 60 hours a week without overtime pay, now EA can work 20 people 60 hours a week without overtime pay! All hail that Buildthingy!