Developers hit out at EA after dropping Command & Conquer FPS

Posted at: 5:38pm 3rd October 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

After Tiberium is disbanded, a number of game developers anonymously hit back at EA’s management

Back in Issue Issue 54 of Custom PC, we reported that EA was working on a new first person shooter based on the Command & Conquer universe. Called Tiberium, the game promised a ‘unique blend of first-person shooting and tactical squad combat,’ but it’s now been canned and a number of game developers, who may have worked on the Tiberium team, are now trying to expose EA’s bad management tactics anonymously.

In Gamasutra’s comments section for the story about Tiberium being canned, you can see a large number of anonymous comments lambasting EA management for allowing the game’s development to get into such a poor state. A lot of detail is revealed, among various choice pseudonyms. The general opinion appears to be that inexperienced people were promoted to senior roles, instead of the experienced devs already there, resulting a management bungle that ultimately led to the project’s collapse.

It all starts in the first post, where an anonymous poster claims that ‘no one wanted to make a design decision’ on the game, adding that ‘5 years later, Dan and team had changed the weapons 5 times. Hired a myriad of clown hack jr designers, all who wanted to be the "AI designer!" Dan was let go, and in came Tim Coolidge, who left after 2 weeks.’ Interestingly, he also says that EA ‘hired a couple of more less than jr designers to save the project’ instead of experienced designers. Apparently, ‘one was let go after 1 week.’

Further down, another anonymous comment claims to have worked with the first poster, and has more to say on the matter. They claim that ‘every step of the way, the new management team sabotaged Tiberium from intentional failings of milestones from day one, to laying off of key contributers [sic] to its success so far at the desperate end. If you want to know who wasn't pulling their weight on Tiberium, they were the last ones left. Up until the last day you could walk around the office and look into almost any cube at random, witnessing people surf the web, due to purposely misscheduled [sic] workloads.’

A large debate then follows, with plenty more anonymous comments that appear to be a real eye-opener onto the business of game developing. If you have the time, we recommend having a good read through the posts to see how game developers and coders really feel about their industry, and how the management system appears to work.

Do you work in the games industry? If so, can you identify with these complaints? Were you looking forward to playing Tiberium? Let us know your thoughts (anonymous or not) in the comments section below.

Via Gamasutra