Will Wright "quits" EA

[Soln]

WSJ link

SAN FRANCISCO (Dow Jones)--Influential video-game designer Will Wright said Wednesday he is leaving Electronics Arts Inc. (ERTS), a likely blow to the company for which he created best-selling hits like "The Sims" and "Spore."

Wright, who is in his late 40s, said in a statement he was resigning from the Redwood City, Calif., game maker to concentrate on Stupid Fun Club, an entertainment think tank he founded in 2001. Wright had been at Electronic Arts for 12 years. A company representative didn't comment when asked if there were any additional reasons for the departure.

Electronic Arts and Wright will own an equal share of Stupid Fun Club, with a third, unnamed investor owning a much smaller share. Electronic Arts will also have the right of first refusal to commercialize any concepts the think tank generates. It didn't disclose the amount of its investment.

"This is definitely a loss of talents for Electronic Arts," said Signal Hill analyst Todd Greenwald. "He was one of their most well-known and respected elders there, and was responsible for its most profitable franchises."

Wright's departure comes as Electronic Arts struggles with its product lineup. Though the game maker has established franchises in sports titles, like the "Madden NFL" series of football games, Electronic Arts has had trouble developing new games with mass appeal, increasingly important to game companies as the development of titles becomes more and more costly.

The news shook Electronic Arts shares, which went from trading 2.5% higher to falling 0.2% to $19.14 in the minutes after the news was released. They were last trading up 1% to $19.56. Shares are down more than 60% from a year ago, which is worse than rivals' share performance.

Electronic Arts continues to count on games Wright developed for a significant part of its annual sales, particularly "The Sims." Electronic Arts has already sold more than 100 million copies of "The Sims" franchise for a total of more than $1 billion.

Lucy Bradshaw, general manager of game-development company Maxis, where Wright was chief designer, expressed confidence in the company's future performance. "Will is such a unique person, so nobody can take his shoes," she said. "We have incredible talent at the studio, and we continue to invest in those individuals."

Wright founded Maxis along with Jeff Braun in the mid-1980s, and rose to prominence after releasing the first of "The Sims" games. The games were novel at the time because they can't be won or lost; rather the game play is in managing characters interactions with other characters.

Maxis, a publicly traded company, was bought by Electronic Arts in 1997 in a stock-swap deal valued at $125 million. The company then published "The Sims" in February 2000, which remains Wright's biggest success. It appears Wright's last significant game developed for Electronic Arts will be "Spore," which has sold more than 2 million copies since it was released last September.

Edit: agreeing

[schild]

I've said this to others, but I think he was asked to leave. He hasn't done anything wonderful since The Sims, it takes him 7 years to come up with a good idea and even then it's a mess and before the Sims, he had a period of genius in DOS. He probably cost more than few hundred K to keep on staff and is frankly, well, not worth it at all. Here's to hoping the Think Tank has a door that only opens when he has a truly, truly good idea.

[tazelbain]

Fuck I want that job! A fellow at a Video Game Think Tank.

Come on WW's "disaster" was still head and shoulder above your average game in sells.

[Reg]

Without Wright's protection I'll bet Maxis is going to be absorbed into the collective now.

[naum]

http://venturebeat.com/2009/04/08/legendary-game-designer-will-wright-leaves-electronic-arts/

So what is the Stupid Fun Club? Well, the group’s web site is rather cryptic, but here’s a profile Newsweek published back in 2002. At the time, it was described as an effort Wright founded and funded to break into Hollywood, with a focus on robots. The announcement doesn’t say whether the group will still be all about the robots, or whether it will broaden its scope now that Wright is working there full-time. It does sound like the vision has expanded beyond Hollywood to include video games (hence EA’s involvement), as well as television shows, toys, and more. For the non-game projects, the Fun Club will probably work with other media companies.

[schild]

Without Wright's protection I'll bet Maxis is going to be absorbed into the collective now.

After umpteen Sims expansions and crappy Spore expansions (released and on the horizon), you're under the impression they weren't already high ranking officers in The Hivemind? Is there a joke I'm missing?

[Reg]

Losing the name and the separate location is the last nail in the coffin.

[Tale]

Maybe he could remake another game from 1987.

[Trippy]

Without Wright's protection I'll bet Maxis is going to be absorbed into the collective now.

Most of Maxis was absorbed into the collective a while back. They moved everybody but the Spore team from Maxis' old East Bay office to the EA offices on the Peninsula side of the Bay Area.

[Velorath]

Without Wright's protection I'll bet Maxis is going to be absorbed into the collective now.

Most of Maxis was absorbed into the collective a while back. They moved everybody but the Spore team from Maxis' old East Bay office to the EA offices on the Peninsula side of the Bay Area.

Which should be seen as a blessing because the East Bay sucks.

[Trippy]

Unless you live there because, you know, that's where your job is and the commute is a lot easier, and then being forced to work on the other side means having an incredibly fucked up bridge commute everyday. Also, Redwood Shores is not exactly paradise on Earth.

[Prospero]

Yeah, I'd take the East Bay over Redwood Shores any day. I've been to the EA site a few times, and while the offices are awesome the local area sucks a lot.

[Reg]

Without Wright's protection I'll bet Maxis is going to be absorbed into the collective now.

Most of Maxis was absorbed into the collective a while back. They moved everybody but the Spore team from Maxis' old East Bay office to the EA offices on the Peninsula side of the Bay Area.

Oh well, that's the end of the last game development house left from my gaming childhood then - Unless you count EA itself which I thought was an awesome company back when I was first playing Bard's Tale on the Commodore 64.

[Simond]

EA used to be good. You can pinpoint the moment they turned EVIL - it's when they stopped using their old cube-sphere-cone logo.

[schild]

EA used to be good. You can pinpoint the moment they turned EVIL - it's when they stopped using their old cube-sphere-cone logo.

haha

[rk47]

hmmm ultima 8 ? 
no wait, even by ultima 7 you were already going after E(lizabeth) and A(braham) who masterminded a plot to bring down brittannia by creating the Fellowship. Hunting down 3 generators shaped like a sphere, cube, and tetrahedron ...what else is there but evil? 

[Sky]

He hasn't done anything wonderful since The Sims, it takes him 7 years to come up with a good idea and even then it's a mess and before the Sims, he had a period of genius in DOS. Here's to hoping the Think Tank has a door that only opens when he has a truly, truly good idea.

Spore /was/ a genius idea. What fucked it up was the gameization of the science toy it should've been. And I think 2 mill counts as a pretty decent title in anyone's book.

[chargerrich]

Without Wright's protection I'll bet Maxis is going to be absorbed into the collective now.

Most of Maxis was absorbed into the collective a while back. They moved everybody but the Spore team from Maxis' old East Bay office to the EA offices on the Peninsula side of the Bay Area.

Oh well, that's the end of the last game development house left from my gaming childhood then - Unless you count EA itself which I thought was an awesome company back when I was first playing Bard's Tale on the Commodore 64.

Wow your right...

SSI - Pools of Raidance Fame - Gone
Dynamix - Football Pro / Red Baron - Gone
Avalon Hill - Super Bowl Sunday - Gone
BullFrog - Syndicate
Origin - Before Garriot got lazy
Maxis - Sim Copter or Sim Elevator anyone?


/depressed. 

[NiX]

I grabbed SimCopter off my grand parents who still had my copy. Man that game was AWESOME!

[justdave]

Yep, that one and the one where you could drive around your cities as well...Got them both as a bundle, IIRC. Unfortunately, I had a later version of the game... looking at the wikipedia article to see if I was remembering the right game, I found the following:

The game gained controversy when a designer inserted sprites of shirtless "himbos" (male bimbos) in Speedo trunks who hugged and kissed each other, who appear in great numbers on certain dates. Their fluorescent nipples were drawn with a special rendering mode usually reserved for fog-piercing runway landing lights, so they could easily be seen from long distances in bad weather.

That's a damn shame...Fog-piercing nipples would have been awesome. Looking at that, though, it sounds like things at Maxis were shitty before EA even accquired them.

I was going to Add Microprose to the list of dearly departed, but it looks like it's back from the dead, apparently. And they're buying Interplay stock. Reading that press release is like watching zombies fuck, in more ways than one. 

[Sky]

Ohh...Descent to Undermountain 2! Obsidian can make it another buggy and unfinished pos, since the lead dev works there now.

[Teleku]

Without Wright's protection I'll bet Maxis is going to be absorbed into the collective now.

Most of Maxis was absorbed into the collective a while back. They moved everybody but the Spore team from Maxis' old East Bay office to the EA offices on the Peninsula side of the Bay Area.

Which should be seen as a blessing because the East Bay sucks.

Hey, fuck you to buddy.  I like it here  .

::as he is looking for jobs/apartments on the peninsula::

[WayAbvPar]

EA used to be good. You can pinpoint the moment they turned EVIL - it's when they stopped using their old cube-sphere-cone logo flat boxes.

FIFY.

[FatuousTwat]

Ohh...Descent to Undermountain 2! Obsidian can make it another buggy and unfinished pos, since the lead dev works there now.

Someone made a pretty great NWN1 online module out of it.

[Tannhauser]

This was the first truly great PC game I owned. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archon_(computer_game)

That's right, nineteen eighty fucking three bitches!

/first comp was an Atari 800

[ghost]

I've said this to others, but I think he was asked to leave.

If he came up with Spore he probably should have been asked to leave.

[schild]

I've said this to others, but I think he was asked to leave.

If he came up with Spore he probably should have been asked to leave.

Spore is selling fine, it's not that. It's that it costs too much to keep him on staff for one decent to good idea (that'll always sell millions) every 7 years when Madden sells millions every year for 1/10th the dev cost.

[Nebu]

This was the first truly great PC game I owned. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archon_(computer_game)

That's right, nineteen eighty fucking three bitches!

/first comp was an Atari 800

This, Mule, Elite, and Star Raiders.  My first comp was also an Atari 800.  I remember saving up to buy a 16k upgrade!

Sounds like we're close to the same vintage.

[Sky]

Bah, kids. Mid-70s ADVENT on a mainframe, bitches. Buncha pussies starting by the white house. Real men started by the brick building.