Emily (aka Domino) Taylor pentapod "Seems like the second floor ghost has been making the elevator stop at the third floor too lately." "Maybe he's been asked to work on Anthem?" "No! Bad ghost! It's a LIVE service! Back to the second floor!" #overheardintheoffice #AnthemGame #BioWareProblems 😄
Jason Schreier @jasonschreier What went wrong with Anthem? This is the story, based on interviews with 19 people who worked on or close to the game, of why BioWare's loot shooter was such a mess. It's also a story about a legendary RPG studio facing a burnout crisis.
Jason Schreier @jasonschreier While reporting this story, I learned the names of dozens and dozens of people who have left BioWare over the past two years. Those who talked to me said they believe that something desperately needs to change, and that they hope making it public will help.
We’d like to take a moment to address an article published this morning about BioWare, and Anthem’s development. First and foremost, we wholeheartedly stand behind every current and former member of our team that worked on the game, including leadership. It takes a massive amount of effort, energy and dedication to make any game, and making Anthem would not have been possible without every single one of their efforts. We chose not to comment or participate in this story because we felt there was an unfair focus on specific team members and leaders, who did their absolute best to bring this totally new idea to fans. We didn’t want to be part of something that was attempting to bring them down as individuals. We respect them all, and we built this game as a team.
We put a great emphasis on our workplace culture in our studios. The health and well-being of our team members is something we take very seriously. We have built a new leadership team over the last couple of years, starting with Casey Hudson as our GM in 2017, which has helped us make big steps to improve studio culture and our creative focus. We hear the criticisms that were raised by the people in the piece today, and we’re looking at that alongside feedback that we receive in our internal team surveys. We put a lot of focus on better planning to avoid “crunch time,” and it was not a major topic of feedback in our internal postmortems. Making games, especially new IP, will always be one of the hardest entertainment challenges. We do everything we can to try and make it healthy and stress-free, but we also know there is always room to improve.
As a studio and a team, we accept all criticisms that will come our way for the games we make, especially from our players. The creative process is often difficult. The struggles and challenges of making video games are very real. But the reward of putting something we created into the hands of our players is amazing. People in this industry put so much passion and energy into making something fun. We don’t see the value in tearing down one another, or one another’s work. We don’t believe articles that do that are making our industry and craft better.
Our full focus is on our players and continuing to make Anthem everything it can be for our community. Thank you to our fans for your support – we do what we do for you.
Jason Schreier @jasonschreier EA and BioWare declined to comment or provide any interviews for this story, but they did just put up this blog post, written before they could read the article. Very interesting, if somewhat dismissive. Hopefully they're serious about better planning.
Post by Hanako Ikezawa on Apr 2, 2019 15:38:01 GMT
Jason Schreier @jasonschreier BioWare wrote and published this about my story before they even had a chance to read it, which is perhaps itself testament to some of the problems that I highlighted this morning. Defensiveness, belief in BioWare magic... blog.bioware.com/2019/04/02/anthem-game-development/ …
Post by Hanako Ikezawa on Apr 2, 2019 15:47:38 GMT
Jason Schreier @jasonschreier The more I reread and think about this BioWare response, the more I'm amazed by how cowardly it is. Written before they even read the article, attacking a journalist for reporting the truth about a company in crisis... It's almost hard to believe.
The Good Ryan @thesmuspaz The one thing I will say about the ANTHEM article: If you come away thinking that kind of stress and bad project environments are isolated to BioWare or EA, you do not understand the sad reality of the industry right now.
Blair Brown @blairbroon Making a game shouldn’t be so difficult that you burst into tears at the deli counter on a random weekday because of the stress. The games industry would be much better with a union.
Emily (aka Domino) Taylor pentapod Today I had meetings from 9:30am to 5:10pm with only an hour break for lunch, so my brain basically melted. BUT there were so many good meetings and so much important stuff was decided, it was worth it! I didn’t need that brain anyway 😝 Also cupcakes help 😜🧁
Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda, SWTOR, Anthem, Mass Effect Legendary Edition, Dragon Age The Veilguard Prime Posts: 3,912 Prime Likes: 9733 Posts: 2,894 Likes: 12,961
Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda, SWTOR, Anthem, Mass Effect Legendary Edition, Dragon Age The Veilguard
The Good Ryan @thesmuspaz The one thing I will say about the ANTHEM article: If you come away thinking that kind of stress and bad project environments are isolated to BioWare or EA, you do not understand the sad reality of the industry right now.
Follow up tweet: The Good Ryan @thesmuspaz Ok I will say one more thing about the Kotaku article, in regards to the Stress Leave.
That was something the Edmonton employees got. Not the Austin employees.
Just to give you an idea bout how the two countries’ healthcare systems work
Jesse Anderson @darokaz I've seen some people asking if there is going to be an #AnthemGame livestream today and the answer is no. We're working on when exactly the next livestream will be to show the new content coming in our big April update.
Jason Schreier @jasonschreier I've gotten a number of messages from developers who work or worked at beloved AAA studios saying, "Replace BioWare with [my studio] and it's the same story." Which is heartbreaking. But I can't imagine anything changing unless we keep reporting and talking about these stories.
On a related note, I'm told by a couple of BioWare employees that so far, studio management hasn't talked to staff about the article. Instead, the company sent out emails yesterday with one main message: "Don't talk to the press."
Jesse Anderson @darokaz I've seen some people asking if there is going to be an #AnthemGame livestream today and the answer is no. We're working on when exactly the next livestream will be to show the new content coming in our big April update.
Ryan hanley @rurydaryan Thank you for the info. I appreciate what you guys do. I still love the game despite all the haters. Any idea or a ballpark of when the update will go live? Something closer than sometime in April. Even if its early april, mid april, or late april. Just so I have a better idea
Jesse Anderson @darokaz I don't have any exact timelines for it, but it's safe to say it'll be in the second half of April. We'll have a smaller update as well that fixes some bugs. Once the dates get closer we'll share them.
“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
Casey Hudson @caseydhudson I think some people are seeing our support for our developers named in the article as dismissing the need to continue making improvements in our workplace. Not at all...
Part of what interested me about returning to BioWare was the challenge of building a new leadership team around solving precisely these problems. We have more to do, but creating a happy and rewarding work environment remains our top priority.
UPDATE: Yesterday afternoon, not long after this tweet, Bioware GM Casey Hudson sent a long email to the whole studio acknowledging the raised issues and promising further discussion at an all-hands meeting next week. Here's an excerpt:
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