This is the New Normal

As usual Jason Schreier does a fantastic job of digging in and examining what went wrong with Anthem in a piece on Kotaku.

TL;DR: these sort of disasters are starting to demonstrate somewhat similar underpinnings:

• Insistence on software engines not built for --or robust enough-- to handle the development process. This can be also known as the Frostbite Curse. EA's insistence on using Frostbite for all games --as a cost saving measure, among other things-- basically loses all cost savings as the difficulty in working with the engine adds time to the development process. Additionally, BioWare keeps "reinventing the wheel" with Frostbite in every large project, and never seems to settle on a "good enough" interface with the engine. The same problems that plagued Dragon Age: Inquisition and Mass Effect: Andromeda plagued Anthem. Admittedly some of those problems wouldn't have been able to be avoided unless BioWare gave Frostbite the middle finger, but others were definitely avoidable.
  
• Not having a rock solid design. I'd call this the Destiny problem, as Destiny's disastrous rollout was due in no small measure to the constantly shifting aspects of basic game and story design. In Anthem's case, after the original concept went out the window, nobody could seem to decide on a story and game design; nobody seemed to know who or what Anthem really was. It was only when there was less than a year remaining until release that Anthem's design began to crystallize, but that was far far too late in the process.
  
• Belief that since things had worked out in the past, it was always going to work out in the end. Crunch, that period of development when you're working insane hours trying to get the product out the door in reasonable shape, happens with all software houses. Some software houses, such as Naughty Dog, are legendary for having brutal crunch periods. BioWare is no stranger to crunch, but the crunch of Dragon Age: Inquisition was particularly bad, and the result of a DA:I that won awards in the game industry gave BioWare's management the idea that if they just crunched hard enough the old "BioWare Magic" would work wonders and they'd get a great product in the end.
  
  I've been in software houses that believed that sort of thing, and I'm here to tell you that crunch like that does no favors to either management or the devs. The devs get burned out, and management buys into the false belief that they can keep doing this indefinitely. Apparently, the crunch for Anthem was so bad there were fairly large numbers of people who had the equivalent of a nervous breakdown and had to simply stop showing up to work for months at a time. A lot of experienced developers and senior staff quit. And maybe, just maybe, BioWare finally learned that you can't push devs too hard or bad things happen.
  
• Infighting between development staff. The Edmonton and the Austin BioWare studios were often at odds on Anthem development. Edmonton called the shots, and although Austin had a lot of experience in similar games with all of their work on SWTOR, all of their suggestions were repeatedly shot down. You'd think that when the MMO devs are telling Edmonton that "hey, we've been down this road and here's how to fix it", Edmonton would listen. But that was frequently not the case.
  
  Again, I have experience here, and it's never fun when you end up feeling like Cassandra right before that wooden horse is brought behind Troy's walls.
  
• Interference from the Big Dog. People kind of expect this at EA owned companies, right? Only that pretty much all major development houses are doing the same thing now, from Activision Blizzard to EA to Bethesda. The decision to use Frostbite is due to the EA bigwig who is VP over the division that makes Frostbite. The decision to not budge from the March 2019 release date is because of the end of the fiscal year for EA, not because BioWare or EA thought the game was ready for release. If anything EA should have let Anthem slide into June, giving the devs and extra three months to fix bugs and add material to the game, but EA wanted the release on its balance sheet for the last fiscal year, and they got what they wanted. The entire "games as a service" model --and EA's particular disdain for single player games that you play once and you're finished-- have also had their impact on Anthem.
  
  But what is likely one of the worst parts of the EA interference was the time when FIFA was migrating to Frostbite, and because FIFA makes EA a metric ton of money to the tune of a couple of orders of magnitude of cash from BioWare's releases, EA sucked away all the Frostbite experts into helping FIFA get out the door, right when Anthem really could have used them the most.

I could go on, but you've got the idea. After Fallout 76 and Anthem, and the associated Bungie divorce, the major development houses aren't exactly in the good graces of gamers. But here's the thing: if gamers think that they have a say in how the dev houses are run, unfortunately they don't. The major dev houses make a lot of money on games that the hardcore gamer likely turns their nose up at: the annual Madden or FIFA releases, the latest Call of Duty iteration, or the tons of mobile games. The big dev houses don't cater to the hardcore gamer, but rather the investor first and then the type of gamer that Gevlon would call the "morons and slackers". Sure, it doesn't have to be this way, but it's only when the investors start to get antsy will things change with the major dev houses.

And frequently, those changes are not for the better.

The Slow Creeping Onslaught of the Bean Counters

Jason Schreier has been busy, following up the Diablo mobile game announcement at Blizzcon 2018 with an indepth article about Diablo, and by extension, Blizzard itself.

The Past, Present, and Future of Diablo dropped on Wednesday, right before Thanksgiving in the US, so it is understandable if you happened to miss it then. But go and read it, then come back here.

I'll wait.

***

Pulling the Diablo expac from development speaks volumes to me. It tells me that upper management was feeling the pressure from the lousy D3 release, and they didn't have confidence that the first D3 expac would right the ship. That was a big departure from Blizzard's previous behavior, where they were willing to wait and work on something before it was good enough to release.

As much as Titan was considered a "failure" by many internally because they never got it across that goal line, it does provide a big peek into Blizzard's thought process. Because Blizzard had the WoW money coming in --as well as a lot of customer goodwill-- Blizzard could afford to throw money at something that ultimately became a "failure", although the release of Overwatch from the ashes of Titan proved that Blizzard could still make a fantastic game from the leftover pieces. I realize that people would argue that Blizzard could afford to do that because of the WoW money, but that ethos was baked into Blizzard's culture from the get-go. The WoW money only allowed Blizzard more space to try to make a failure work.

However, once Activision Blizzard struck out on their own, there was bound to be a culture clash from the two entities as to which vision would ultimate win out.When A-B was part of Vivendi, this sort of clash wasn't necessary because A-B was a small part of the Vivendi conglomerate. When A-B went solo, however, they couldn't afford "poor sales" like they could in the past. So how would this end up?

Well, we do have a previous merger that provides look into the dynamics of how this would work out, and ironically enough it involves two major computer companies, Compaq and Hewlett-Packard.

***

In one corner, there was Compaq; the maker of the first PC clone that challenged the IBM for dominance in the PC space. In the other was HP, which built its reputation first on lab electronics and calculators, and then later on PCs. The two were big players in the PC market, and when HP's Carly Fiorina first announced the merger the business analysts weren't so sure about how the merger would work out, suggesting that the companies didn't complement each other very well. However, in spite of a revolt led by Walter Hewlett, son of one of the two founders Bill Hewlett, Carly got her wish and the merger happened.

The two corporate cultures, however, couldn't be more different. Compaq was very much a "fly by the seat of your pants" outfit that would throw products against the wall to see what would stick and then patch things to make them work, while HP was more ingrained in a slower, methodical, make-sure-it-works-before-releasing style of development, based on openness and trust, the legendary HP Way. (Does this sound familiar?) Perhaps bruised by the revolt and stung by the criticism from analysts, Carly used the merger to throw out most of HP management and replace them with Compaq people, leading to the eventual loss of the HP corporate culture within its own company.

With Activision Blizzard, we are seeing a similar fight appearing. Activision is very much a "release every year with some changes but with a formula that doesn't vary very much" type of outfit. Blizzard works on things until it is perfect enough to release. Alas, the signs don't look good for Blizzard in the long run, as the killing off of the second D3 expac was the first unofficial sign that Blizzard's management was starting to feel the "what have you done for me this quarter?" that seems to infest publicly traded companies the past 3-4 decades. The end of the article, where Blizzard's new finance person has started talking about "cost cutting", is another ominous sign that Blizzard's management is starting to lose its battle to remain independent from direct control by Bobby Kotick's and the bean counters from the Activision side of the company.

***

In my personal opinion, I think it's time for Blizzard to spin off and become a privately held company. They may not need to do it to develop games, but if they want to develop games the way they've always done it, they'll need to be free from the influence of an alien corporate culture (Activision) and the pressure to perform by shareholders (publicly traded on the market). The freedom to fail is a powerful thing, because it leads to risk and innovation. If a company becomes risk adverse and settles for churning out products that vary little from year to year, they may make money but their dreams become smaller, concerned with focus groups and earnings per share and not rocking the boat. If Blizzard wants to continue to dream big, they need to control their own destiny.