OFFICIAL Sim's Maxis HQ closed (Announcement)

[RCoon]

EA today sent a statement to Kotaku, explaining that the main Emeryville headquarters for Maxis development studios would be shut down. Maxis’ recent releases have been less than inspiring over recent years, with the last real bastion of quality game being developed as late back as 2009, which shortly after, Will Wright left the company. No reason for the closure has been given by EA, whether it was cheaper to split the employees to the studios in Redwood Shors, Salt Lake City, Helsinki or Melbourne, or whether the HQ was just leaking money when it came to production costs and profits.

Here’s the statement to Kotaku:

“Today we are consolidating Maxis IP development to our studios in Redwood Shores, Salt Lake City, Helsinki and Melbourne locations as we close our Emeryville location. Maxis continues to support and develop new experiences for current Sims and SimCity players, while expanding our franchises to new platforms and developing new cross-platform IP.

These changes do not impact our plans for The Sims. Players will continue to see rich new experiences in The Sims 4, with our first expansion pack coming soon along with a full slate of additional updates and content in the pipeline.

All employees impacted by the changes today will be given opportunities to explore other positions within the Maxis studios and throughout EA. For those that are leaving the company, we are working to ensure the best possible transition with separation packages and career assistance.”

Maxis as a whole isn’t being totally shut down, but one has to wonder if this is the beginning of the end for what was left of the “old-school” Maxis. The other satellite studios will remain in place, absorbing what employees are left to fill the ranks. I don’t imagine we’ll see anything from the glory days of SimCity 4 or the Sims 3.

 

[MilkyWay]

Im not even sad, they havn't made a great game in a long time. Bit shit for the developers out of a job.
The Sims has been a separate studio for awhile now, its not the same studio as the one that got shut down.

 

[newtekie1]

 

[Vayra86]

EA... what can we say.

I think the comic above my comment sums it up rather nicely

But the funny thing is: all these disgruntled developers are coming back with a vengeance in the 'indie' scene or with their own projects. That is why the current market for gaming has exploded, really. EA/Ubisoft and other big publishers are basically destroying their own market potential for the long term.

Bottom line: nothing to be worried about.

 

[Easy Rhino]

Heh. The last Maxis game I bought was SimCity 2000 released in 1993. All of there other games were complete crap other than the Sims 2 which I did not "purchase"

 

[FordGT90Concept]

I figured it was coming because SimCity only got one major expansion. I wonder what they were doing since then.

Old school Maxis ended around 2000 with the sellout to EA. They revived momentarily with Spore (a project Will Wright was brought back for) and they've never come back since.

 

[Ahhzz]

I figured it was coming because SimCity only got one major expansion. I wonder what they were doing since then.

Old school Maxis ended around 2000 with the sellout to EA. They revived momentarily with Spore (a project Will Wright was brought back for) and they've never come back since.

I agree, except for the Spore reference, and the only issue I take there is that disastrous DRM mess. I saw this news before 'Coon posted, but just really couldn't find it in myself to be that upset. It's just EA doing what EA does. Hopefully, they'll be able to make something of themselves away from that studio.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

The DRM mess was entirely EA's fault. The reason why it garnered so much hate isn't because of the DRM itself, but the fact that Spore was the first to ship with SecuROM's activation limit as well as reactivation every 10 days. EA removed the reactivation part and increased 3 activations to 5. This DRM scheme appeared on virtually every title released by EA after Spore and before the move to Origin.

Everytime EA revives a property, they utterly destroy it be it SimCity, Syndicate, or Dungeon Keeper. Spore was something great but EA made sure that died too by not conceding to consumer demands driving many potential buyers to pirate it.

The Steam version released months later doesn't have SecuROM but the damage was already done at that point.

 

[Ahhzz]

*sigh* I'd forgotten about the Dungeon Keeper android release... I was SO ticked off about that, almost as much as the Spore fiasco. I've actually got a copy of Spore, but only because a client I was relating the story to, bought me a copy for Christmas. Still sitting on the top shelf....

 

[FordGT90Concept]

You should install it and give it a play. It is a lot of fun.

You may actually be able to redeem the code in Origin then install from Origin. I don't think the Origin version has SecuROM.

 

[rooivalk]

Am I the only one who actually like the latest SimCity?

I like the graphic more so than the blandness of cities XL or cities in motion, I like the cooperation and specialization between cities,
I have mixed feeling towards city size but ultimately I think it's more manageable in smaller size. I hate to devote attention to one part of the city only to let other part crumble at the same time, not to mention to avoid resource hogging like in cities XL. I think the online part is rather unneeded but don't you think it's hugely exaggerated as it's probably only affect small percentage of actual users.

If you still can't accept all of that or if you think you're hardcore, there's always SimCity 4 with NAM mods.
A proper game - big size, lots of mods, offline, and still pretty, people still not buying it much (according to a Maxis developer). Come on.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

I liked it enough to put over 100 hours in it. I just don't like how the game clock slows so much on big cities. I also don't like that there isn't more forms of mass transit like subways. There's also massive problems with cities transferring stuff like workers, students, and resources. From my experimentation, it was clearly impossible to break a city up into multiple parts (e.g. make a commercial district, industrial district, and various residential and suburb districts). If they fixed all the problems with it and allowed people to host their own regions on their own machines getting EA out of the loop, the game would have been epic. The problem is, and like virtually every title from EA, EA got in the way from the title achieving greatness.

I've seen times when the online servers were unreliable, constantly kicking players. I think I've even seen cities get unrecoverably corrupted. Not to mention, the online functions most likely won't work a decade from now.

I still think SimCity 3000 was the last of the great SimCity titles. If only it had other title support like SimCity 2000.