NBA Elite Being Moved to Tiburon, EA Canada Hit by Layoffs (Not Confirmed Yet)

[Boilerbuzz]

Quote: Originally Posted by Pared

The irony of your post is that all this happened in Canada. Or did it? We don't even have confirmation. Hmm...

You beat me to it. Yes, the decisions were made in Canada.

[Boilerbuzz]

Quote: Originally Posted by sroz39

You're being too nice to management, IMO. Those guys are paid to make decisions. If I go to my boss with a revolutionary, crazy new idea on how to do something that was working anyways, and he decides to go along with it, gets all my co-workers on board with this vision, and it fails miserably, is it my fault for suggesting it, my co-workers' fault for doing their job or my boss' for going with the idea? At the end of the day, it's my boss' job to decide what works and what doesn't and if he decides one of his employee's ideas is good and it fails miserably, the blame should fall on him I would think.

I'm pretty sure Littman wasn't one of the people let go.

[Boilerbuzz]

Quote: Originally Posted by sroz39

What are your expectations of the devs? Do you think that they are in line with what EA expects of them, as far as talking about their game? As much as we'd love to have devs come in and tell us "guys, Elite 11 is just not ready for commercial release. Wait it out till 12, unless you really want NBA Jam that's bundled with it", is that a reasonable thing to expect them to do? They'd be out of a job 5 minutes after they said that! EA expects them to talk up their game. Though a dev saying the game he worked on is awesome isn't going to sway me into buying it, you better believe that if a dev came in and said not to, I wouldn't. And it's for that reason you would NEVER see them say something like that. Bottom line, Littman went to EA and said "this works in NHL, it will work with Live" and the suits ate it up, because despite earning the highest reviews since moving to the current gen of consoles, the sales lagged 2K's by a wide margin. So, without paying any mind to the process of what it takes to get the game from what it was in Live 09 to what it became in Live 10 (truly remarkable, really) they ditched Wang's vision for Live less than two years after hiring him away from 2K and went with this new vision. They also failed to see the bigger picture, because yeah, Live 10's sales weren't comparable to 2K's but that's a result of breaking the consumers trust over and over again with sub-par titles. The buzz was beginning to come back with the release of Live 10 but that wasn't good enough so they went and tore the franchise down completely and reset the series. With the cancellation of Elite 11 and (probably) another reset of the series under Tiburon, how long is it going to take to gain the consumers' trust again? How long before the Tiburon game even approaches Live 10 in quality? Somebody deserved to lose their job. Problem is, the good soldiers at EA Canada that worked on this game and bought into the Elite vision (really, what choice did they have) are the ones paying for it, not the handful of execs who completely and totally blew it with their decisions post-Live 10 release.

I couldn't agree more with this post. It's said that the people losing their jobs are the people that had no control of the situation outside of their execution. But let's not get it twisted. Some people in dev did have enough power to step up and say - "This is wrong.". It would SEEM that Wang was one of them. They chose to not listen to him. Luckily for him, he had an alternative and went back to VC. Others don't have that luxury, so I give them the benefit of the doubt.

[sroz39]

Quote: Originally Posted by Boilerbuzz

I'm pretty sure Littman wasn't one of the people let go.

My point exactly. Littman shouldn't get the axe for proposing the idea, that would be silly. Nobody would ever come up with anything revolutionary, fear of losing their jobs and we'd be stuck with the same ol' same ol'. Nor should the workers, in this case the dev team, get any repurcussion. They simply followed orders from the top, tasked with an impossible under-taking when not 5 years earlier, EA made the decision NOT to develop NHL 06 on the 360 to give the dev team more time to introduce the revolutionary Skill Stick. Truth be told, in normal circumstances, even the boss (in this case, the suits at EA) should get the axe because if you discourage management from taking chances, the cycle of reduncancy would set in just the same as if you fired the employee for coming up with the idea.

However, these were NOT normal circumstance. After years of lagging behind the 2K series in quality, Live 10 finally was competitive and in some key aspects (player movement, dribbling, DNA, plays) trumped 2K10. The game was FINALLY on the path of ascension. The sales did not immediately follow and so when Littman presented his Elite vision, the people in charge of making these decisions SHOULD have said "come back to us in a few years, we're going to see this thing through". But no, they cast aside what Mike Wang and the devs worked so hard for like it was no big deal, and went with this idea instead. Everything is still ok up to that point though.

But the moment this game got cancelled, somebody had to pay, obviously. In no way should that have been any of the devs. There is not a dev team out there that could have pulled off what these folks were asked to do, yet here they are, the scapegoats of a terrible decision made by someone else. Under THOSE circumstances, yes, someone deserved the axe but it was nobody outside of the room where the decision was made to go ahead with Elite.

[Db-Ransom]

nba live 11 prolly would have been the best basketball game out, if they kept wang his vision, and built off of the live 10 code.. smh

[Pogo27]

So, I don't really play basketball games, but I was extremely interested in Elite, especially after the demo (because I didn't play it enough to see the glitches I guess).

Knowing now that Elite is being moved from EACanada to Tiburon simply means I won't be purchasing Elite, or any EA Basketball game, for as long as the franchise remains in Tiburon's hands.

I like football too much to not play the NCAA games, but when it comes to sports gaming, with FIFA and the limited amount of NHL I've played, EACanada is definitely doing a lot of things right.

I'm very disappointed.

[jadert]

I get it.....EA is the big bad company, who is not necessarily known for great management...lol

But why when the big series change was announced, there wasn't a big outcry from us, the consumer? The management isn't the only ones that put faith in Littman and his new direction. So we should blame ourselves as well.

However, we expected the execution to be better. Can we blame management for the graphics, horrible animations, and glitches? Or does the developers take at least a little blame? I never said the management shouldn't have responsibility, but come on guys.....

[sroz39]

Quote: Originally Posted by jadert

I get it.....EA is the big bad company, who is not necessarily known for great management...lol But why when the big series change was announced, there wasn't a big outcry from us, the consumer? The management isn't the only ones that put faith in Littman and his new direction. So we should blame ourselves as well. However, we expected the execution to be better. Can we blame management for the graphics, horrible animations, and glitches? Or does the developers take at least a little blame? I never said the management shouldn't have responsibility, but come on guys.....

Why wasn't there an outcry? I remember when Mike Wang's departure was announced, there was a lot of concern and frustration on these boards and many people wondered aloud whether this was the demise of the Live series as we knew it. And they were right, probably moreso than they could have imagined.

And by the time the big change was announced, what can we as consumers do other than what we did, which was collectively say "why didn't they just build on Live 10? Oh well, I'm cautiously optimistic this will work". We as consumers could have protested in front of EA's offices and nothing would have changed, it was April/May by the time we knew the full scope of the new direction the game was headed in. Nothing we did would have changed anything at that point in the cycle.

As far as putting the blame on the devs, like I mentioned above about the whole normal circumstances angle, devs would share in the blame under normal circumstances. These were anything but normal circumstances. This was terrible decision making by people paid very well to make good decisions. I can't reasonably put much, if any, blame at the feet of the dev team when they proved the year before they were more than capable of making a solid game. Maybe they didn't have the right personnel in some places to pull this type of game engine off, but even then, someone else is paid to make sure the right people are in place. Even that's a stretch though, as now we're making assumptions based on zero inside knowledge that this team was lacking in any areas.

I'm sorry, but in my eyes, this whole turn of events after Live 10's release right up until and shortly after the cancellation of Elite 11, falls entirely on the higher ups who seemed to have made one grossly miscalculated mistake after another. And continue to do so with this latest rumour of the mass layoff.