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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you give people what they ask for, you quickly discover that people don't actually know what they want.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
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.