"elelunicy;c-16350437" wrote:
EA shut down Maxis Emeryville, the studio that made Spore, Darkspore, SimCity 2013, etc and hadn't been making Sims games since early TS2 days. TS4 was made in the Redwood Shores, the same location that has been developing The Sims for over 10 years.
Yes, I know. It was just easier to post/say it the way I did. Redwood Shores has suffered layoffs in recent years, however if I say EA Redwood Shores not many people know who or what is being described.
Saying the Sims Team is only "a fraction of the size it once was" is not accurate. You realize there are roughly 200 full-time employees working on the TS4, right? (only counting devs at The Sims Studio and not even including people like QA testers at a different EA location) Check the credits of the latest packs if you don't believe me (there is a "Additional Contributors" section that lists people working at the studio but not on that specific pack). While TS3 did have two studios working on the Sims (both EA Salt Lake City and Redwood Shores), the Redwood Shores studio was also in charge of making games The Sims Medieval, MySims, and the console versions of TS3 so the overall number of people working on TS3 couldn't be that greater.
There are not 200 artists and programmers working on The Sims 4 team or rather if they had the ability to pull off something like The Sims 5 with The Sims 4 staff you'd see more of a significant output from The Sims 4 team in terms of content, turn around time, etc. Even if they pooled the resources of The Sims 4, Sims 4 console, and Mobile teams together they still couldn't make a Sims 5 game to the degree that people are demanding/expecting.
Also let me let in a sad unspoken truth of the credits from a lot of major company titles. Not everyone's name you see in credits worked on the game or had anything to do with the game and I'm not just talking higher positions like the CEO of a company.
One of the best examples I can demonstrate this with is the game Scott Pilgrim Vs The World.
The bottom of this blog post from what cut from the game details how small the development team was for the game...
https://boutain.blogspot.com/2010/08/scott-pilgrim-vs-world-game_23.html
//// This is as good as it gets!
We've worked on this project for a year, half of it in Montreal where we were unfortunately very poorly managed, with an unqualified team and inappropriate tools which all got the game nearly canceled and drove everybody on the core team near depression. Then we had 5 crazy über intensive months in Chengdu's studio, where we had no time left and were all going completely crazy trying to pull this off.
Now it's done, it's out there and it should still kick ass pretty good!
Jonathan Lavigne was game designer;
Paul Robertson was lead animator on this and did all playable characters and strikers, almost all bosses and other things here and there;
Animation wise Justin Cyr, Jonathan Kim (persona) and Mariel Cartwright (kinuko) did pretty much all the rest
We also had a lot of help from most of Chengdu's studio, mostly on the programming and secondary animation side;
And I was in charge of all the backgrounds and over all graphics supervision as you can see here.
Hope you guys will like it!
Now weigh that against the game's 14 minute credit sequence
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRZ9B7M62-Q
Who the heck are all these other people? How does the small staff described above warrant a 14 minute credit sequence?
The truth of the matter is that you can find a number of the same people with the same exact credit to their name in many Ubisoft titles released around that time. There are credits for regions and translations for countries the game never came out in or was translated into. So what you have here is a case where Ubisoft (the publisher of the game) is including people in credits who didn't work on the game but saying that they did? To what end? Is it so all these people can pad out their resumes and potentially get more work as a result of having shipped X number of games? FYI the number of completed games a person has shipped looks good a game developers resume. You don't want to have stuff like "Worked on Duke Nukem Forever for a decade" on there. You want a wide variety.
On one hand this can be seen as a good thing for the people who's names are in the credits as it potentially leads to more work for them in the future, but is that really fair to the small team of people that really did all the work?
Most people simply left because the they found better opportunities. I mean, why would they work on video games when they can work for Facebook (where SimGuruRachel went), Google (where SimGuruMax went), or Apple (where SimGuruRyan went)?
Not to mention only a small fraction of the devs are SimGurus. The number of people who left is very small when there are 200+ people working on the game. Moreover, they still constantly hire new people for TS4 (check EA's careers site for the postings).
I'm talking about the difference in staff of when The Sims 4 was in full on production compared to the size of the Sims 4 team now. It's not anywhere close, because it doesn't need to be in order to maintain the game currently and staffs always get downsized for these types of games that have long tails because they don't need the same number of people in the same positions doing the same things because the game no longer requires it. MMOs are a good example of this. They all start out with massive teams then eventually end up being manned by skeleton crews.
If/when a studio staffs up for a new big title it becomes obvious, and it tracks in games media. For instance
"Why is X game studio all of a sudden looking for programmers with open world game experience?" chances are because they're developing a new open world game.
The current staff of 200's output hasn't shown anything for quite awhile that they are able to build something like The Sims 5 at least not from the ground up and not to the degree or expectation of what people are asking for out of a Sims 5.
