EA Employee on Why Warhammer Failed
A soon to be former employee of EA Bioware/Mythic has written a very lengthy post on why he or she believes Warhammer Online has failed.
“I would think myself to be part of some noble cause, like the original EA Spouse trying to save her husband from a hellish work environment at EA. That had a happy ending, however, with tons of publicity and a total change of overtime wages and salaries and how they are handled within the company. I do not expect a happy ending, so I’ll be personal and selfish, and this is just for me.
So just call me EA Louse.”
The poster pulls absolutely no blows and gets quite personal at times:
“My boss who will not be named, again and again would tell us that Rob Denton, one of the original owners, said we should “do this” and “do that” and we would say “omg it makes NO sense, please explain A, B, and C to him. “And then he’d come back and tell us, after we thought he had gone to talk with him,” No, Rob wants in this way. Jeff agrees, this is what we’re going to do. Understood? ” They never actually talked back to Rob. We didn’t talk back to them.
Rob said jump, our leaders said, “How high?! And on who?”
And the bit about Paul Barnett is just plain nasty:
“Oh yeah, and he needed Paul Barnett. You know him as the crazy British dude that appears in random videos at EA to promote his latest bullshittery. We know him as the crazy British dude who we have no idea of how he still has a job. This man was supposed to be the savior of Warhammer’s vision and design. Now all he can do is promote his strange ideas about his little secret project web Ultima game that’s been almost universally criticized by all of us and focus groups. What’s that? You didn’t know Paul loves one of those old Ultima games sooooo much he’s making a literal copy of it for Facebook? Well, the cats outta the bag. Too bad it sucks ass.”
The discussion in the comments very quickly gets very heated and there are some interesting revelations in there as well, particularly this one describing why famed Community Manager Sanya left the company:
“Wow, Sanya. That was a long time ago.
Yeah, that was actually not Rob Denton. That was her having a fierce, loud fight with Mark Jacobs about forum postings. Sanya had a very hard line stance on developers posting on the boards.
They shouldn’t. That’s community’s job. <- Is what I’m sure she would say.
But Mark Jacobs, who loved posting, especially about things he couldn’t guarantee and made our lives hell because he would essentially promise them, did not like having to play by her rules. She totally called him out on it in an embarrasing way and too many people at the company knew about it, so she was out the door.”
Ah, Games Industry Drama, will we ever bore of it?
Source: EA Louse Blog
