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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."
So essentially the same thing that happens at every large company over time with roots in creating stuff?
It seems like corporations more or less get to a point where they collapse under their own weight and cease to be able to actually do things.
In my experience, that happens right around the time accountants start micro-managing everything, and when winning "buzzword bingo" happens in every company call.
At some point, companies change from being places that create stuff and can get things done, and morph into an entity where you need huge reams of paperwork to get a new pen. At that point, everything you do starts to feel like a futile gesture.
The accountants won't let anything happen, and management is more focused on covering their own asses than building anything new.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
DON'T PANIC!
Upper management still got paid, so everything worked out.
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
As a non-journalist, what is the difference?
Um, IIRC, off the record means I'll talk to you, but you can't publish what I told you. Anonymity is you can print what I said, but not who said it.
"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."-THG
>As a non-journalist, what is the difference?
As an ex-journalist, I have no idea. I'd say it was the same thing. You could possibly argue if you actually quoted someone it would be under anonymity but if you just spoke to people and wrote your own thoughts/conclusions it's off the record.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
X-Wing Alliance came after "X-Wing vs Tie Fighter" It had a decent single player campaign with a story... BUT it also had a solid online multiplayer experience.
While I didn't like it as much as regular "Tie Fighter" I do have to say Alliance was quite fun.
Because one or a few workers can't affect the company like one VP can?
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Amazing they would kill completed games.
It sounds like George Lucas was never able to fully delegate responsibility for the worlds he created, so he had to be involved with everything. The executives would try to manage him by limiting what they told him in order to get a desired result. That kind of gaming killed their gaming.
off the record you can paraphrase or include in background, but on the record yet anonymous you can quote. huge difference.
After they went from making games in house to being just another publisher and then just an agency that licensed the star wars names for games.
This happened in the late 1990's when the X-wing series went from being produced in house and moved to Totally Games. (I don't remember if that was Xwing vs. Tie Fighter or Xwing Alliance). Later on I noticed that they weren't even publishing games. Games were being released by Activision or EA.
I know the space combat sim died 10 and going on 15 years ago. That's why I've spent as much as I have looking forward to Star Citizen.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
It's the difference between "Some sources cite redbull energy drink as a possible cause of the crash" vs "An anonymous source who worked at the plant said "Oh yeah, its clear Redbull and actual bulls are a really bad idea, those steer went crazy and caused the crash."
They grew and decided they needed to hire some newly minted MBAs, accountants and an HR department.
Almost immediately, anyone who did *productive* work was either passively ignored or actively punished for doing anything innovative or productive, while the aforementioned business school parasites determined how best to extract any remaining value in the company and place it into their personal bank accounts before moving on the the next victim.
But of course, that's just a guess. I mean, how often have any of us seen *that* happen?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
The fans consistently told them what they wanted, and they were consistently ignored. This isn't apathy or indecision -- that's flat out incompetence.
Doing what the fans say is not necessarily good, at least for new product design. Fans often tell you to be a derivative of some other game and/or an incremental improvement of your previous game. This sort of thing is a *classic* problem, not specific to the game industry at all, for an established company with a successful product by the way.
;-)
Now for improving a game once it has been released things change dramatically. Fans may not be a good source with respect to potential innovation but they are the ultimate judge of whether a game delivers the fun or not. Your innovation still has to pass the fun test. Developers have to put aside their ego at this point and deliver the fun as fans define it.
That said. Lucas Arts should have done a modernized version of X-Wing vs Tie Fighter. Screw innovation.
It's upper management's job to weed out "laziness and incompetence". Don't blame the workers if you hired incompetent workers. Blame yourself! But of course the trend is cheaper... I want the cheapest. Well, you get the cheapest, someone not qualified or barely qualified for their role. My girlfriend just finished working for a Fortune 500. Her salary was over $100k/yr. The company was trying to hire people for similar positions for much, much less, and surprisingly no one qualified seemed to want the job. Lots of people were interviewed, and they were all rejected. My girlfriend obviously will hold out for a similar salary in her next job. If she doesn't get it from an employer, she can easily get it through consulting. People will pay for the skills, but apparently corporations don't want to keep skilled people on the full time payroll.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
" a company paralyzed by dysfunction, apathy, and indecision from executives at the highest levels."
Can really describe any decent-sized company.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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.
> RED TAILS.
Did they make a game out of that?
That could be a cool game if you did it right.
In general, they should have brought the flight sims back and released them on every platform available. Slap their brand on every kind of game out there.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I really don't know how execs get placed who have no knowledge of what their product is, or what makes it good or bad.
I've seen executives saying and believing something along these lines: that their job is to be executives, that what they need to know is how to execute, and that the specifics of the business they're executing (pun intended) doesn't matter since you can replace one business for another and at their level it all boils down to the same thing, so why bother? Sure, some experience in the area is a bonus, but by no means a requirement.
History has shown time and again that's not how reality works, but as the saying goes few things are more difficult than to make someone understand something when his job depends on him not understanding it.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
One ex-LucasArts employee told me they think the franchise is in more competent hands under EA than it ever was with LucasFilm.
Then LucasArts was truly fscked.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
We're all familiar with the works of George Lucas. How could any of us be even a tiny bit surprised to hear that game development under his direction turned out to be an endless re-write?
Same for my GF..
She's been a hard worker for the same place for years, knows everything that goes on, and makes a decent amount. One day they lay her off and hire on someone at less than half her old salary. A month later they are calling her and asking that she comes back; new person is slower and does not know as much, they would have had to hire two more people to keep pace with her old workload.
Companies all over want loyalty and quality work for employees; they just dont want to pay for it.
Doing what the fans say is not necessarily good, at least for new product design.
You're using qualifying statements here to avoid being backed into a corner you rightly deserve to be.
I'm using qualifiers because the world is not black and white, there is no correct answer 100% of the time. Yet history shows that time and time again companies get into trouble and are displaced because they merely deliver what customers ask for. Similar-too products and incremental products. Game developers are *not* immune from this problem. This problem is so common it has a well known name, "The Innovator's Dilemma".
"successful companies can put too much emphasis on customers' current needs, and fail to adopt new technology or business models that will meet customers' unstated or future needs"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma
Note the word "unstated". The role of a good designer is to discover these unstated needs.
The notion that fans are a poor resource ...
Sometimes a poor resource. Being a game designer takes a *lot* more than being a fan of a particular game or genre.
Wrong. If Linus Torvalds had listened to fans of operating systems back in the day he would have used a monolithic kernel in Linux.
Wrong again. For example Linux development is largely corporate sponsored. With such sponsorship comes direction. Linus is not even in the top 100 source code contributors for the Linux kernel.
You've spent your entire post here largely asserting that the fans are wrong ...
Sometimes wrong.
Fans rarely state, or are even aware of, all the things they will be fun for them to do. Or more generally customers often fail to state, or are aware of, all their needs or wants.
I really don't know how execs get placed who have no knowledge of what their product is, or what makes it good or bad.
I've seen executives saying and believing something along these lines: that their job is to be executives, that what they need to know is how to execute, and that the specifics of the business they're executing (pun intended) doesn't matter since you can replace one business for another and at their level it all boils down to the same thing, so why bother? Sure, some experience in the area is a bonus, but by no means a requirement.
That sort of gets back to why they have to do market research. It's like that Tom Hanks movie Big where he's trying to play with some transformer-like toy and says it's not playable. If you actually play video games and like to play them, you'll know yourself whether it's working for you or not. I think the real secret of success is that everybody likes something uber-specific but what certain folks like is liked by more people than other ideas. Think Minecraft or Sims, both written originally so the authors could enjoy the game. Rockstar developers play their own games and it shows. Other lesser-known and less profitable companies do the same thing. They aren't hits because they aren't hits; not because the people aren't paying attention. A game that appeals only to Star Wars geeks has less possibility of market penetration than a game for anyone who has been shat upon by a bird.
But then you have the companies run by managers and accountants who hire market researchers and play by the numbers like an insurance company. That's actually workable for awhile, but only in a growing market.
Looks like someone didn't read the article. In the article, every once in a while, Lucas would push for changes to the games. For example 1313 after multiple changes in direction from Lucas was going to be about a bounty hunter. Then Lucas announced without warning to the press it was going to be about Boba Fett which had the development teams scrambling because the entire game was revolved around a generic bounty hunter. At the very minimum new CGI models had to be developed.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
How long ago is that in parsecs?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."