Maxis Emeryville, the California-based video game studio, was closed down by publisher Electronic Arts (EA) on March 4, 2015.
This means the end of an era, as the studio is known for making the SimCity and Sims series of games. EA stated that they are consolidating Maxis development into their existing studios. However, EA may be redefining 'consolidation' as a former staff member mentioned everyone was let go.
EA has been criticized in the past for its handling of Maxis titles, perhaps most notably the SimCity 2013 launch fiasco.
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Electronic Arts Closes Maxis Studio
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by ikanreed on Tuesday March 10 2015, @06:16PM
Cities: Skylines is out.
And everything I hear from any sources I trust say it's amazing, and the kind of citybuilder that people have been wanting. This doesn't come with my personal seal of approval yet, because I'm at work, and I think installing steam is frowned on here.
Maxis' departure: inevitable, and already replaced. EA got what they wanted: IPs, and burned everything of actual value along the way.
Someone will come along to do the Sims right sometime too.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday March 10 2015, @06:39PM
Cities: Skylines is out.
Has anyone played this?
I could go for a new citybuilder...
(Score: 4, Funny) by VLM on Tuesday March 10 2015, @07:26PM
I could go for a new citybuilder...
How about Dwarf Fortress?
(Score: 4, Funny) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday March 10 2015, @09:55PM
How about Dwarf Fortress?
I asked for a citybuilder, not a neurosis.
(Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Tuesday March 10 2015, @09:01PM
Haven't played, but there have been pre-release Twitch streams for a few weeks now. It looks great. It appears to be what SCV was supposed to be. It allows for major expansion beyond the initial city squares. (I think my wife intends on purchasing it for my birthday later this month, so I dare not buy it until then if she doesn't.)
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Sir Finkus on Tuesday March 10 2015, @10:16PM
I've played for about an hour, but it seems to be doing everything right except for a few minor warts with the interface. The tutorial and road building could use a little work too. Laying out good looking roads can be a pita, but I suppose that's a price you need to pay for having so much flexibility.
Based on what I've played, I'd recommend it. As an aside the fluid simulation is a blast to play with.
Join our Folding@Home team! [stanford.edu]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 11 2015, @03:51AM
Yeah it hits all the marks. It uses the middle mouse button for rotation (and q/e). So keep that in mind if you are on a laptop.
I agree about the tutorial. It was walking me thru laying out a road then residential. Then thats it. So if you have not played one of these sorts of games before you may be going 'what do I do'. The next steps are power/water/sewage and pretty much all at once. Then some commercial/industrial. I am up to a city of about 1800 after about 2 hours of play.
One of my biggest nits so far is the 'whats in trouble' view. Its a bit different than the simcity 2/3/4 style of a separate window. They overlay it right on the city and color code it. It is also a bit hard to find particular buildings. For example the school I placed. Finding it will be a chore later on.
But overall pretty good.
(Score: 3, Informative) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday March 10 2015, @09:47PM
Also runs on Linux as well. Bonus points.
(Score: 1) by Nugoo on Tuesday March 10 2015, @10:01PM
I came in here to post something similar; I'm downloading Cities: Skylines as I type this. It's ridiculous that the reigning champion in this genre is 12 years old. Maxis has been dead to me for a long time.
On a similar note, I'm not sure the SimCity 2013 launch was as notable as the Spore disappointment.
I explicitly place the above in the public domain.
(Score: 2) by dublet on Wednesday March 11 2015, @01:11PM
I think you just ruined my weekend.
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome. [dublet.org]"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by The Archon V2.0 on Tuesday March 10 2015, @06:26PM
Jim Sterling covered the topic of the closing in this week's YT video. Summary: EA buys studios, milks them for what it can get, forces a damaged corporate culture on them, then shuts them down once their reputation tanks as a sort of scapegoat for EA's own sins. He also predicts Visceral is next on the block.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-hfRytMLUk [youtube.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by GungnirSniper on Tuesday March 10 2015, @07:14PM
Trip Hawkins is the Antichrist. [escapistmagazine.com]
EA has murdered Origin Systems (Ultima, Wing Commander), Bullfrog Productions (Populous, Theme Park), and now Maxis (SimCity, The Sims). [wikipedia.org] The dwindling down of some of those franchises is an incredible waste of value, even by MBA standards. And that's not even mentioning all the talent that EA has let walk away.
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 10 2015, @11:01PM
I'll play devil's advocate and say those are all examples of companies specializing in genres that a window of mass apppeal that came and eventually passed or mutated in a different direction than their series' were inclined to go.
Add Mythic Entertainment to the list. EA bought them to run all of its MMOs. They did for a time, but making the next WOW is no longer a thing that game companies are trying to do and so Mythic's role in EA petered out. The current fad is an arms race of developing the newest freemium scheme and milking it until people develop an immunity to it.
Regardless, EA is a hirrible company, but to some extent they're just a place where things that were going to happen anyway take place.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday March 11 2015, @12:15PM
Bullfrog's Syndicate was one of my all time favorites. It was followed by the bug ridden mess that was Syndicate Wars. That was about a year after EA took over. I'm pretty sure they rushed the game out the door because how else could it have been so buggy. Then they bastardized the franchise turning it into a generic shooter recently. Fuck you EA.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 11 2015, @02:51PM
To be fair those companies were not exactly doing stellar before their buyouts.
Origin had just pumped out strike commander and Ultima 8. Both were considered pretty bad with system requirements of the day where I couldnt play strike commander for at least 3 years on top end computers. They basically sucked all their resources into that MMO (which did OK). But left the rest of their catalog in shambles. Their software pretty much required you to buy the top of the line computer of the time to play it. WC3 for example need 16 meg of ram, a top end 486, and a cdrom. When most people had 2-4 meg (and even that cost 300-400 dollars), no cdrom (which at the time started around 200 bucks to get one), and a mid range 486. To this day wc3 is the most expensive game I ever bought.
Maxis kept pumping out the original simcity. Just in different flavors and that was showing badly in their numbers. They wanted to build more ambitious games so they decided to get bought out.
Bullfrog pumped out a broken syndicate and a low res powermonger which decimated their sales.
Make no mistake these companies made *great* games. They were also making 'bet all the marbles' games that were bad. Had poor play mechanics or were rehashed versions of previous games.
(Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Wednesday March 11 2015, @06:44PM
Ultima 7 Part 2 was rushed under EA, so Ultima 8 couldn't have been entirely Origin's fault.
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday March 10 2015, @09:23PM
I'll guess the National Semiconductor take over of Cyrix in 1997 have the same hallmarks. Suck out any value and bad corporate culture.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday March 10 2015, @06:29PM
selling the computers, office equipment &c. on eBay, using the proceeds to purchase hookers and blow for EA shareholders.
A while back someone suggested to me that I would enjoy video game coding; I'm heavily into tweaky optimization, I think I really would enjoy enjoy it, so I asked my (now ex-) wife. She said that if I went into video games, she would divorce me. I did embedded instead, which worked out pretty well.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Touché) by ikanreed on Tuesday March 10 2015, @06:30PM
Your story makes it clear that divorcing you was her answer to every question.
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Tuesday March 10 2015, @06:36PM
Relationship through ultimatum!
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday March 10 2015, @09:11PM
Also called high maintaince and long hours to pay for it. Of course when a better muscle or wallet walks along you will be out of the loop and contribute half of your value to your partners new adventure.
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Tuesday March 10 2015, @09:55PM
Baby, can I drive my car?
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 10 2015, @10:07PM
Jeremiah Cornelius, you sound like the kind of man who has had many wild sexual exploits in bed. Will you share some of your glorious stories with us mere mortals?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 11 2015, @03:21PM
Score: 4, Touche???
Clearly the site is divorcing from /. at least. (although adding the accent would've been icing on the cake;)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 11 2015, @06:45PM
> Your story makes it clear that divorcing you was her answer to every question.
Or to the only question that mattered.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 10 2015, @10:04PM
Michael David Crawford, you sound like the kind of man who has had many wild sexual exploits in bed. Will you share some of your glorious stories with us mere mortals?
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday March 10 2015, @06:30PM
Anyone know of a good Maxis back catalogue (besides torrents)? I still have my original simcity 2000 disc and I might still have my sim tower disks. Simcity 2000 runs decently under wine but crashes on a game save (at least the last time I was playing).
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday March 10 2015, @06:33PM
Well... I don't know about anything as recent as SC2000 but if they ran on DOS: they're here [soylentnews.org] courtesy of the internet archive.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Freeman on Tuesday March 10 2015, @07:07PM
Sim City 2000 Special Edition and Sim City 4 Deluxe Edition are available on GOG http://www.gog.com/ [gog.com]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday March 10 2015, @09:49PM
Thansk, Forgot about gog. Though two games is pretty limited. ikanread also had a good link. The sad part is simple games like sim town and sim tower (which were pretty fun from what I remember) will be lost to time.
(Score: 2) by SrLnclt on Tuesday March 10 2015, @10:12PM
As I recall I grabbed SC4 off of Steam a couple years ago in lieu of messing with the new version when it came out.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday March 10 2015, @06:37PM
I was once offered a job writing video game cheats based on the way I used MacsBug to cheat on the original sim city:
I realized that the amount of money you had (or that your city had, to spend on stuff like paving roads) was stored in memory somewhere. I converted it to hex then used MacsBug's search function to find where it was stored in memory, then changed it to any amount of money I desired. However this was complicated by the fact that the same value typically was found in a few different places, I had to alter just the right one.
After I showed a couple friends my little 'sploit, I was never able to get any peace. I mean like they'd wake me out of bed to add money to their city coffers.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday March 10 2015, @07:10PM
Now there's Poke. http://codefromthe70s.org/poke.aspx [codefromthe70s.org] It's simple enough even your friends can use it.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 4, Funny) by The Archon V2.0 on Tuesday March 10 2015, @09:23PM
>I mean like they'd wake me out of bed to add money to their city coffers.
Shoulda charged real money based on how much of a boost they got - you would have got the microtransaction market off the ground decades early!
(At least, then, we'd know who to kill.)
(Score: 2) by kaganar on Tuesday March 10 2015, @07:32PM
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 11 2015, @12:14AM
Maxis died when EA acquired it in 1997. This is just pissing on the grave.
(Score: 2) by Entropy on Wednesday March 11 2015, @02:20PM
That's a lesson I learned long ago. Everything they acquire--They destroy. C&C, Battlefield... The only way
they seem to be able to complete in the market is to buy every good game series and make it as terrible
as every other game they make.