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How LucasArts Fell Apart
An anonymous reader sends this story from Kotaku's Jason Schreier about the downfall of LucasArts:
"Over the last five months, I've talked to a dozen people connected to LucasArts, including ex-employees at the company's highest levels, in an attempt to figure out just how the studio collapsed. Some spoke off the record; others spoke under condition of anonymity. They told me about the failed deals, the drastic shifts in direction, the cancelled projects with codenames like Smuggler and Outpost. They told me the stories behind the fantastic-looking Star Wars 1313 and the multi-tiered plans for a new Battlefront starting with the multiplayer game known as Star Wars: First Assault. All of these people helped paint a single picture: Even before Disney purchased LucasFilm, the parent company of LucasArts, in November of 2012, the studio faced serious issues. LucasArts was a company paralyzed by dysfunction, apathy, and indecision from executives at the highest levels."
LucasArts was a company paralyzed by dysfunction, apathy, and indecision from executives at the highest levels."
LucasArts was a company paralyzed by greed, overconfidence, and incompetence from executives at the highest levels. The fans consistently told them what they wanted, and they were consistently ignored. This isn't apathy or indecision -- that's flat out incompetence. They mismanaged SS LucasArts into a iceberg, then locked the workers below-decks and abandoned ship while the band played the Imperial March.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
There is a huge different between "losing creative vision and putting out mindless crap" and "driving the company financially into the ground".
Disney has undoubtedly made some crap over the years - and honestly, Pixar's last few efforts (Cars 2, Brave, Monsters University) haven't been even close to their earlier ones. But they are still making money hand over fist.
Same with EA - poster child of game company losing sight of creativity and pumping out sequels, but unlike LucasArts, they do in fact have clear business goals and are making a ton of money from their mostly mediocre/repetitive offerings.
I've been at places where the bean counters have put so much work on people it's impossible to get their jobs done.
I know people who have to enter their time into no less than 4 different time systems every week. Because the people who own those systems don't have any integration and expect everyone else to make their horribly flawed process work.
My timesheets have to be submitted by Friday at noon, despite that I often work after hours work on Friday nights because that's our change window. They want accurate timesheets in place before the work is done, and get upset when you have to change it later. I've been told on more than one occasion that I need to provide 100% accurate data, even if that means providing it before I know. If I don't know how late I'm working, how can I provide you with a value for how many hours I worked until I'm done? I can't tell you in advance if we'll be done at 9pm or 1am depending on what we're doing.
Hell, at one company we were asked to provide our time accounting in five minute increments, but they got the hint when 2 out of every 5 minutes was classed as "telling you what I've done the last 3 minutes".
I worked at a place where the accountant decided that getting a Solaris machine with a CD-ROM was too expensive, so they updated the PO to drop the CD-ROM -- and then you couldn't install the OS because there was no CD-ROM. The machine sat in a corner for 6 months until we could get a PO for the CD-ROM. We spent FAR more in man-hours fighting with them to get a bloody CD-ROM drive than the initial cost would have been. (In fact, given what they were billing for me at the time, I believe it was about 15 minutes of my time as the client would have paid)
I've been in development shops where accounting decided that building the product cost more than their estimates -- despite them having no bloody clue what was actually involved in the process and their formula being useless. They just came along and said "according to how we calculate this, this took more than it should" -- even the VP was stunned by that one and had to explain to them they needed to go away.
I don't give a damn what their actual title is -- when the micro-managing departments which have no understanding of what is required to make the product are making it impossible to make the product, then from my point of view, the accountants have taken over.
Sorry, but I've worked in far too many corporate environments where the process overshadows the actual work, and the process is frequently divorced from reality.
It's like every Dilbert joke come to life some days, or Office Space. Never underestimate how badly a company can go downhill when the internal business processes make it impossible to actually do the business of the company.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The thing about Lucasarts that's ironic is that they were always at their best when they were *not* making Star Wars games. The ones that many current 27-35 year olds remember are the Monkey Island games, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max, Grim Fandango, and Full Throttle. Monkey Island 1 and 2 have been remastered and are likely making gobs of money compared to production cost, and Sam and Max was a hit for Telltale. But Lucasarts decided around the turn of the century to stop making original IP, cancelled the Full Throttle sequel, and Ron Gilbert, Tim Schafer, and others jumped ship. At that point, Lucasarts *was* the Star Wars company. They lost their creative talent and just became a company with an IP asset but no vision.
The bit in this article that's surprising is that George Lucas himself, ever the twit, was coming in to meddle in the game production of Star Wars 1313. Changing the main character part way into production isn't like rewriting script pages and making a new costume; tons of assets had already been created around that one character. Maybe this unfortunate micromanaging was the reason Lucasarts contracted out their Knights of the Old Republic franchise.
Uhhhh..actually EA has been bleeding money hand over fist for the past few years, hence why the previous CEO is gone. Sure they make money hand over fist...and the previous CEO blew it like a sailor in Vegas by having a single minded obsession in beating Warcraft and Call Of Duty. I don't know if you read the articles over the past year or so but many titles such as Deadspace 3 would have to sell something like 6 million copies just to break even which is why the previous CEO had the gall to say that new games should be $80-$100 a pop!
In a way what happened to EA reminds me of MSFT. Like MSFT they had a CEO that instead of playing to their strengths got obsessed with the other guy, like MSFT they thought that making a half ass clone of the other guy's product would work and like MSFT the CEO thought the answer to any reality showing that his lame brain ideas weren't cutting it was to double down and throw ever larger piles of money on the fire.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Hell that is true everywhere. I was called out on a service call with a "code red" ( means they can't function until i fix the problem, VERY expensive as i have to drop everything and head straight over) at this electronics shop because it turned out the secretary had seen a TV show the night before about how "strong password protect systems" and decided she'd "protect the company" by coming up with a strong password and...well i'm sure you know what happened next.
Well after I got the thing straightened out and this was like my fourth time of dealing with a code red because of that secretary i asked "You know she is costing you a LOT of money with all these service calls, why don't you just let her go?" and the owner got a dreamy smile at the thought, then shook his head and said "Nothing I'd love more but I'm afraid the wife would kill me if I fired our new daughter in law"
As for TFA I think we ALL know whose fault it is...George Lucas. From what I have seen talking about him behind the scenes he reminds me of Gene Roddenberry in that while he has interesting CONCEPTS he just doesn't know how to flesh things out. From the sound of LucasArts he kept coming up with new ideas and the entire place had to suddenly do a 180 every time he opened his mouth because nobody had the balls to say no to him. Look at the Prequels or Indy 4 to see what happens when nobody tells him no, same as Roddenberry kept going for those lame "God is a machine" and "Wesley is great!" stories.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.