The Sims 4 will continue into 2018!

"Triplis;c-15727835" wrote:

"Erpe;c-15727110" wrote:
Understandable. Patrick Kelly was always believed in this forum of ordinary simmers. But from the very beginning the forum on modthesims was very suspicious about him exactly because his stories didn't make any sense to people who knew just a little about the game industry, game programming and modding.

The game industry isn't small at all. Actually it is big business. Just look at the following facts about EA (from 2016):
Number of employees: 8500
Revenue: $4.396 billion
Operating income: $898 million
Net income: $1.156 billion
Total assets: $7.050 billion
Total equity: $3.396 billion

EA has departments all over the world and is actually a huge company even though people easily thinks "But they only make cheap games!" The problem with this kind of thinking just is that EA makes many different games each year and each of them often sell in millions of copies.

So if Patrick Kelly really betrayed EA by giving us confidential information then EA would have made a lawsuit against him and also made sure that he never would have had a chance to get a job again in a big company anywhere.

But if he only made a practical joke by using some scenes from an old abandoned game like TS2 for consoles then EA wouldn't care because this old code was of no use for anybody. This is totally different from releasing secret inside information about EA's future games. So if EA didn't like it then it would always have been enough for EA just to tell people about the practical joke and maybe require Patrick Kelly to do the same. But EA apparently just didn't even care enough about "the secret Olympus" to do that!

Gamers often think that working in the game industry is just about playing favorite games all day long. But that is a dream which couldn't be farther from the real world.

Games are made by teams and a team has the following types of developers:
Producers, who are just the bosses who supervise the development of the game. The executive producer is the boss at the top who takes all major decisions (and in EA's case negotiates the main issues with EA).
Artists, who only make small parts of the graphics.
Programmers, who write game code and test and correct the bugs.
Testers, who only test the game and reports issues to the producers or the programmers.
And there are also game designers who's job it is to design (some of) the gameplay.

But each member of the team only has a tiny part of the game as his/her responsibility. Developers are also often just transferred to other teams for completely different games. A good example is the developers in EA Melbourne who earlier only made racing games but then suddenly were given the task to make the Sims Freeplay too. Did they like both racing games and Sims games? We don't know because nobody asked them. But I doubt it and I also don't believe that the developers in Maxis chose to work there because they liked Sims games. They just wanted a good job in a big company like EA and likely also to work in the good locations in Redwood. So they took the job and was then told by EA to work on the Sims games and also which small part of the game that they should see as their responsibility. If they had wanted to work on a different game instead then they would probably have had to move to another city far away from their family. So they accepted to just work on a tiny part of a Sims game even though they maybe never had wanted to play such games themselves.

If you only should work on a small part of a Sims game which you were told to target on 13 yrs olds (especially girls) as an easy simulation of mainly dating and prepared for a huge number of SPs would that be enough for you to work on 8 hrs a day in the next 5 yrs?

I don't think I made my meaning clear. When I say the industry is small, I'm saying it's small relative to other industries, in terms of talent. It has grown a lot over the years, but the number of experienced devs? I can't remember the source now, but I remember reading/hearing somewhere that part of the reason so many MMOs have such similar base designs is because it's a lot of the same devs going from project to project. That should give you an idea of what I'm talking about.

This isn't true at all. I play several MMOs. But they aren't made by the same company or even in the same country. They are made by developers and companies in the US, Australia, Russia and other countries. So no, they aren't made by the same devs at all.

But I agree that they are similar and based on similar ideas. The reason for this is though that the companies and the developers copy each other's ideas. They can do that because the ideas aren't really protected by any laws or patents. So if a game seems to be successful then other companies of course want to make a similar game. This is especially true for MMOs because they often start as small games that are easy to make even for new small companies.

As for what "gamers often think," I said nothing about "playing favorite games all day long"??? Game design was my college major. I'm saying what I'm saying from the perspective of knowing things about the industry, not from the perspective of a gamer. Like I said in the post you quoted, I'm not saying it's a job that is fun 24/7. But the game industry is not as easy to break into as some industries are and the pay is generally not exactly wealth aspirations territory, so you pretty much need to have a passion for making games to make it in the industry. Wanting to play games is ancillary to that; certainly most, if not all, game devs have a history in enjoying playing games, but they are in it because they also enjoy *creating* games to a significant degree.

I didn't say that you thought that way yourself. Only that I think that the majority of the simmers in this forum do which usually is why most of the discussions about "everything being the fault of the devs" and the idea that any dev knows everything because "EA only sells the games" dominate the forum.

I can state it again and again that that doesn't mean they enjoy every job they have all the time. But this scenario you're creating about how you doubt that a dev would like both racing games and Sims games is just plain ignorant about game developers. It's a bit like looking at an actor and saying, "Well nobody asked them, do they enjoy both creating a baseball movie and creating an action hero movie?" They might like one more than the other, but they're both acting and that's what they're in it for, not the genre.

What most of the devs do isn't in any way similar to acting which has much more variation.

You are talking about designing a game which is only done by a couple of game designers if we talk about a big game like TS4 and only a small part of the time. Most of the work of the other devs is much more trivial. I agree that liking games is why you would become a game designer. But how about being an artist and make 5 SPs each year for a game like TS4? There isn't really any game design in that because it is only stuff and not gameplay.

Being a programmer and work many hours each day on finding and removing bugs or to just test and give some details in a game a little better balance is monotonous work too and I would hate it. It isn't like being an actor at all but much more like having a job to make sure that all the things (clothes, bottles, tools, hats and similar stuff) for the actors are present and given to the actors at the right time.

EA isn't different from other big companies who develop new products. In such companies guests are never allowed access to rooms where new things are developed and the employees there have usually signed documents where they accept that the projects under development are secrets and all the information about such things is confidential and can't be revealed before the projects have become products and released. The secrecy can even also exist later than that. If a developer leaves the company then this developer is still bound by his/her signature on such a document and if the company can prove that the developer has revealed anything anyway then the company can sue the developer for many millions of dollars. Patrick Kelly would likely lose his car, his house and all his money savings and still have a big debt to EA if he really gave inside information about a not yet announced EA project in 2013.

So the official story about Patrick Kelly is extremely unlikely to be true. We would also have heard about EA's conflict with Patrick Kelly from EA and other sources if it had been true.

So what is the real story? Theoretically it could be that "Patrick Kelly" wasn't his real name and that he has fled and now is hiding in a country where neither EA nor the police can find him. But that isn't likely either.

But the huge similarity between the sims in Olympus and in TS2 for consoles (both in the way they look and in the way they move) gives a much more likely explanation which as mentioned is that Olympus was only a practical joke invented by Patrick Kelly and a couple of his friends. Therefore this is the explanation that I personally believe is correct. I just don't think that it is a coincidence that the sims in the Olympus videos looks exactly like the sims in TS2 for consoles and not like the sims in any other Sims games. The information that Patrick Kelly actually worked on the UI for TS2 for consoles just makes this seem even more correct.