EA Shuts Down Maxis

[Vipera]

I don't really care. And considering how people here only mention Simcity 4, they don't either. It's just another "bash EA" train.
To me it's like never taking any interest to any game made by Game Freak and then bashing Nintendo when they close it saying they ruined the whole company and the ongoing projects with Pokémon shuffle. It's hypocrite and it only shows how much of a douche I am.

 

[Subtle Demise]

SimCity 4 was the good one, it's the one after it that was terrible.

 

[FAST6191]

For some reason I had always thought maxis had died (or gone on to become a trademark only style business/name) along with the likes of Bullfrog, New World Computing, SCI and whatever else I enjoyed in the Amiga/DOS/16 bit/3dfx era, at very best I thought they were a kind of zombie company a la Rare post various people leaving (this was before the MS sale).

 

[the_randomizer]

I was hoping EA itself shut down. Oh well.

 

[Steena]

It's the temptation of that huge payoff. Going indie doesn't guarantee success. For every Minecraft, there's thousands of failures that no one has ever heard of.

The risk is there, but then again we hear a lot from the big studios having horrible work conditions, crunch time issues, and also not having that much of a stellar salary unless you're in one of the biggest positions of a team. I read several indie devs saying they made more money going indie, despite their games selling way less than the respective AAA titles they worked on - because the smaller team (and the resources) is more cost-efficient to manage, you don't have a chain of command of 10 bosses above you, and there aren't 400 asset-making grunts working for a single game.