vogon

the evil "Website Boy"

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Campster
@Campster
Cyber-revolutionary-someone
@Cyber-revolutionary-someone asked:

What do you think about Bioware laying off 50 employees to facilitate agile development as they claim? It seems like everyone is either saying Bioware is Bioware in name only or that the next dragon age and Mass effect games is going to be shit.

I'm not sure they ever claimed to be making the cuts to support agile development as a software development methodology, per se. Agile is more about how individual teams breakdown/prioritize stories to facilitate changing requirements as opposed to, say, waterfall. And you can scale agile shops from a dev team of 6 people to a team of 6,000. Chopping 50 people isn't going to make the organization itself adhere to Agile principles any better. Besides, the messaging from Bioware itself seems to indicate that it's more about "being agile" in the "a small team can pivot more easily" sense than it is about capital-A agile software development. Still, "We fired a bunch of people so we can actually be more productive!" is just corporate spin on what is unequivocally bad news.

I think part of the reason people are saying the company's now "Bioware in name only" is because of the big, longstanding names being let go. People who had been there for literally decades and were responsible for writing a lot of beloved titles, from Dragon Age games to Baldur's Gate 1. Hollowing out the old guard as part of generic mass layoffs is never a great sign.

And neither is cutting ties with a unionized QA service. Treating QA contractors like dirt seems to be a common industry practice, though, so who knows if it's proper union busting or simply exercising the ability to cut contractor heads on a whim to save some scratch? It doesn't really matter, I guess: it's an evil move either way.

As to the impact on the games? Only time will tell. The only people that know the internal state of the studio and its projects are the people who are (or were recently) employed there. Maybe they're cutting headcount because some EA accountant demanded burn rate be reduced? This post is EA mentioning how they're going to reduce 6% of their workforce - maybe it just took a while for Bioware to get impacted for some arcane reason? Maybe some unannounced project didn't work out and now there are legitimate redundancies in various departments that needed to be reconciled? Maybe there was a creative power struggle and the old guard lost, and it was seen as a good a time as any to do some union busting along the way? Maybe development on Dragon Age is going even more poorly than has been known (I mean, its director did leave in January which is also not a great sign), causing them to pull resources away from the new Mass Effect's preproduction and letting go of people who wouldn't easily find a position back on the Dragon Age team? Who knows - any of that (and much more) is possible. Saying anything about what's going on or what it means for Bioware's games is pure conjecture.

All we really know for sure is that these layoffs suck and reek of mismanagement, an idea which is bolstered by the titles they've released over the past 6+ years.


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in reply to @Campster's post:

so many of these studios prescribed to the ethos of "the magic will happen and everything will come together in the 11th hour," because the management lacks vision and/or has no capability to plan out realistic project scale so the development staff have to bear the brunt of trying to get the damn thing together through pure crunch

mind boggling, to me at least, to do this type of layoffs when you're LONG in development big-rpg is right around the corner... just the morale hit alone seems not-worth-it when the finish line is in sight. didn't even have the courtesy to do the shitty thing of firing people AFTER a big game ships. sad for bioware, wish nothing but the best for present and former devs. EA management can fuck off

With it being so many senior level devs I wonder if they were burned out after the last two dev cycles and took unpaid leave. It's possible some management type decided that if they were on extended leave they weren't necessary to development and axed them. Also, you can never underestimate how much ageism permeates the industry.

Also, EA's layoffs have been messy in general this year. The LSU Testing Branch layoffs caused such a kerfuffle that in a more reasonable political climate it would have been a scandal to discuss in our state's gubernatorial race this year.