Farewell mate. A sad day for many.
EA has always been somewhat of a horror story. Through all the years of incompetence, I always thought EA suits were just a bunch of old (or aging) folks who couldn't step out of an 80's model of management and were just milking the company to their retirement. All the while mocking their customers while throwing our money at each other. But when times were good the few decent titles they did produce, manifested a cash cannon that they seemed to just fire and forget at whatever problems surfaced.
In UO alone how many clients have been built and failed? How many moves back and forth across the country? How many great developers were shown the door? Who in their right minds thought origin was a good idea?
But through it all I always took comfort that UO was safe and warm under a thick blanket of EA money. It was the only credit I gave EA as they just kept funding attempt after attempt hoping someday they would get it right. The EC failure and dev cut after SA launched were the two largest omens to me that things just weren't going to get any better from that point forward.
Now I feel UO is at a point where it would be if it were owned by a smaller mismanaged struggling company. I feel EA will never recover unless they start acting intelligently with the still considerable resources they have left. But I won't hold my breath. My hope for UO now is that EA decides they want out of the MMO market and just sells it or that sometime in the near future EA decides they have had a nice run of it and puts themselves on the auction block.
EA has always been somewhat of a horror story. Through all the years of incompetence, I always thought EA suits were just a bunch of old (or aging) folks who couldn't step out of an 80's model of management and were just milking the company to their retirement. All the while mocking their customers while throwing our money at each other. But when times were good the few decent titles they did produce, manifested a cash cannon that they seemed to just fire and forget at whatever problems surfaced.
In UO alone how many clients have been built and failed? How many moves back and forth across the country? How many great developers were shown the door? Who in their right minds thought origin was a good idea?
But through it all I always took comfort that UO was safe and warm under a thick blanket of EA money. It was the only credit I gave EA as they just kept funding attempt after attempt hoping someday they would get it right. The EC failure and dev cut after SA launched were the two largest omens to me that things just weren't going to get any better from that point forward.
Now I feel UO is at a point where it would be if it were owned by a smaller mismanaged struggling company. I feel EA will never recover unless they start acting intelligently with the still considerable resources they have left. But I won't hold my breath. My hope for UO now is that EA decides they want out of the MMO market and just sells it or that sometime in the near future EA decides they have had a nice run of it and puts themselves on the auction block.
As someone mentioned in a previous post, you can't go anywhere but up after leaving EA.
