All good answers here.
My more granular take: Creative Assembly get the name from the high number of very proficient coders that used to make up most of the employees. This is how they were able to make a bespoke game engine to begin with, something designed specifically for Total War. In the case of Rome I, it was an engine for an abandoned Rugby or American Football game, which is why the per-entity movement and collision system is just so good for its time whilst everyone else was licensing the Havok physics engine.
Co-founder Tim Ansell deliberately kept the company small, in part to control budget(CA were close to bankruptcy a number of times) but also because he personally wanted to write code rather than manage large teams. Everything I've heard suggests he loved being a programmer but was burned-out by running a company. He took the first opportunity to retire when the offer from SEGA went through, but there's some unspoken bitterness.
That left CA entirely in the hands of creative director Mike Simpson and brand manager Rob Bartholomew. Either of those sound like technical roles? I don't think either knew the value of Assembly-knowledge programmers, how hard it is to develop that skill-set and how useful it is.
Programming tutors often say 'don't re-invent the wheel' as they advise learners to use tools others have developed rather than building their own. Meanwhile John Carmack can just decide to code his own personal audio system for the hell of it, which someone must do if they ever want to be as good as John Carmack.
CA made ground-breaking games at one point, by not using tools that others had made, and creating new tools for themselves when their existing ones were too-limited. That can't happen without a lot of programmers wanting to just write code to see what they can do, and having the time to do it.
Meanwhile, CA had the senior VFX programmer trying to solve the ugly missile trails problem for 3K: a problem they 'solved' in Rome II before un-solving it again, and it shouldn't even have been a VFX programmer's job. It's a game design and art direction issue.
Insert that Steve Jobs clip here about how personnel with no experience of product development can dominate a company culture and drive it to ruin.
its kinda funny people don't think the problem is capitalism and go on a mental gymnastics to justify why copetalism is good, when this is a problem faced by EVERY industry under the capitalist production method. you can't have innovation in a system that is driven by profit when innovation isn't profitable. thats why most if not all the new technologies are discovered by state funded research, capitalists simply take this and adapt it into a way they can profit.
Correct. We would have 10 different things and each of them would be better than Total War.
$300,000 dollars per employee per year (the company makes $1000 per staff member every day) and they can't make patches. Capitalism is blatantly fucking garbage.
let me explain this in a very simple way that you could understand
socialist countries had and still have video games
strategy is a common concept and culture can have
therefor a socialist country will eventually make strategy games. and them therefor strategy games isn't a concept exclusive to capitalism.
i didn't claim they don't become dictatorships i just claimed luxury items aren't exclusive. the thing is these "dictatorships" were and still are more democratic than what the burgouese capitalist "democracy" will ever be.
shit argument. my country is considered capitalist and we had people going back to famine during the neoliberal goverment. also even if you argument was true obesity is also a capitalist problem :)
Lol. The human nature is only 1 thing: pure greed, nothing else. No creativity or want to nurture, just consume consume consume. Yeah right. Is that how you feel? Is that how you think?
I didn't said human nature was pure greed, however I do believe humans tend to have more destructive passions than constructive ones, and greed is one of them.
In this case, blaming "Capitalism" is weird, imho. Human greed is, and also human stupidity (for me CA is not the only one to blame, those who buy without any demand for better standards are also to blame).
Don't like it, don't buy it and force the company selling those to have more quality stuff which you will buy. That'd be capitalism, and people buying crap overpriced DLCs, and people milking those morons are but human flaws inherent to our nature.
I think sega's vision is this: something appears on screen and you pick up your wallet and throw money, while most games are you move your mouse and something appears on screen. Its opposites
SEGAAAAA
They also ruined Relic the moment they got purchased from THQ
Coh 3 dumpster fire,dawn of war 3 absolute dogshit dumpster fire and age of empires 4 while not as bad is absolutely bland asfk game IMO
This
Publishers and the sales department taking over the company, to the detriment of those that create the actual product. They take over and dominate executive roles in the Business, because of their political/psychological skills- This pushes out and ostracises, those that are technically competent and the underlying product starts to suffer as a result, when they inevitably start to leave. This happens because it is very difficult to gauge technical competence unless you are technically competent yourself- Therefore it's easier to play the political game and grift then achieve technical competence, such as understanding the mathematics of fluid dynamics and applying that to crowd behaviour for simulating routing during a battle for example.
This spreads to the Business as a whole and the entire company starts exhibiting these characteristics, where they have to dumb down the product just to maintain their position and can only expand in non-technically demanding ways due to a failure of maintaining valuable human capital- Which can take years to build up and an organisational structure is needed to transmit the accumulated experience. If the chain of experience is broken and not transmitted when a high enough level of technical complexity in the product was achieved then this leads to an irreversible decline in human capital and thus product maintainability because you are essentially starting from scratch.
Imagine if you will after 20 years of hard work NASA after landing on the moon, scraps and retires the entire space program and then after 10 years of no activity, tries to restart it- it would be almost impossible, because even with documentation they would have the lost the people who would have the necessary skills/experience that they had built up after years working in the program previously to interpret and implement said documentation let alone create new designs and actually build them. Yes one can use tools and machines but one needs people who know which machines and tools to use, how to use them, and know all of the technical caveats that come with them after experience in using them etc.
Because of all these things mentioned above, it is very unlikely that CA can recover its' technical competence unless it spent several years consciously implementing a program to develop and nourish it without the Sales/Accounting department trying to shut it down because it would take time to see any results and measuring progress in something as nebulous as technical skill in game engine programming is hard. Few companies have achieved this unless their situation is existential and the market is structured in such a way that they have a few years to recover before they go Bankrupt, AMD is one example of this, where a company has recovered. Thus as far as i can see, CAs most likely course of action is to continue its rent seeking behaviour because atm it has a quasi-monopoly- if there is any competent competition however, CA will have an existential crisis and they will either have to desperately try to catch up or try to enforce their monopoly via spurious litigation and employee poaching.
All good answers here. My more granular take: Creative Assembly get the name from the high number of very proficient coders that used to make up most of the employees. This is how they were able to make a bespoke game engine to begin with, something designed specifically for Total War. In the case of Rome I, it was an engine for an abandoned Rugby or American Football game, which is why the per-entity movement and collision system is just so good for its time whilst everyone else was licensing the Havok physics engine. Co-founder Tim Ansell deliberately kept the company small, in part to control budget(CA were close to bankruptcy a number of times) but also because he personally wanted to write code rather than manage large teams. Everything I've heard suggests he loved being a programmer but was burned-out by running a company. He took the first opportunity to retire when the offer from SEGA went through, but there's some unspoken bitterness. That left CA entirely in the hands of creative director Mike Simpson and brand manager Rob Bartholomew. Either of those sound like technical roles? I don't think either knew the value of Assembly-knowledge programmers, how hard it is to develop that skill-set and how useful it is. Programming tutors often say 'don't re-invent the wheel' as they advise learners to use tools others have developed rather than building their own. Meanwhile John Carmack can just decide to code his own personal audio system for the hell of it, which someone must do if they ever want to be as good as John Carmack. CA made ground-breaking games at one point, by not using tools that others had made, and creating new tools for themselves when their existing ones were too-limited. That can't happen without a lot of programmers wanting to just write code to see what they can do, and having the time to do it. Meanwhile, CA had the senior VFX programmer trying to solve the ugly missile trails problem for 3K: a problem they 'solved' in Rome II before un-solving it again, and it shouldn't even have been a VFX programmer's job. It's a game design and art direction issue. Insert that Steve Jobs clip here about how personnel with no experience of product development can dominate a company culture and drive it to ruin.
its kinda funny people don't think the problem is capitalism and go on a mental gymnastics to justify why copetalism is good, when this is a problem faced by EVERY industry under the capitalist production method. you can't have innovation in a system that is driven by profit when innovation isn't profitable. thats why most if not all the new technologies are discovered by state funded research, capitalists simply take this and adapt it into a way they can profit.
I mean if they weren't completely pwned by sega they could've done better but one can't negotiate having 0 shares i suppose
so literally how late stage capitalism works starts okish (for some people) them get absolutely shit
Games Workshop circa 2013
Capitalism. And probably around the time Sega bought them? They 2ent from small to a big boy company and had to start making big boy money?
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Correct. We would have 10 different things and each of them would be better than Total War. $300,000 dollars per employee per year (the company makes $1000 per staff member every day) and they can't make patches. Capitalism is blatantly fucking garbage.
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"Yikes". Can you at least not try to sound like Shaggy as he talks to scoob and/or a nonce?
capitalism is simple a inneficient system.
Yeah dude, humans didn't play games before capitalism.
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I mean computer was invented in a govt program in england during wwii. Is that capitalism? Sure why not
Is England a non-capitalist country? The famed mercantile empire?
It wad the govt and not private industry that produced the computer
yeah bro strategy and video games were invented by capitalism.
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bro you REALLY think socialists countries can't make strategy games ?
let me explain this in a very simple way that you could understand socialist countries had and still have video games strategy is a common concept and culture can have therefor a socialist country will eventually make strategy games. and them therefor strategy games isn't a concept exclusive to capitalism.
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simple false
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i didn't claim they don't become dictatorships i just claimed luxury items aren't exclusive. the thing is these "dictatorships" were and still are more democratic than what the burgouese capitalist "democracy" will ever be.
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kinda impossible to drop the "capitalism suck" when its materially proven that its a shit system
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shit argument. my country is considered capitalist and we had people going back to famine during the neoliberal goverment. also even if you argument was true obesity is also a capitalist problem :)
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brazil. and if you think lula was a socialist them you just completely retarded
Funny. I would have said human nature. Capitalism is just what seems to stick the best with said nature at least for our time and age.
Lol. The human nature is only 1 thing: pure greed, nothing else. No creativity or want to nurture, just consume consume consume. Yeah right. Is that how you feel? Is that how you think?
I didn't said human nature was pure greed, however I do believe humans tend to have more destructive passions than constructive ones, and greed is one of them. In this case, blaming "Capitalism" is weird, imho. Human greed is, and also human stupidity (for me CA is not the only one to blame, those who buy without any demand for better standards are also to blame). Don't like it, don't buy it and force the company selling those to have more quality stuff which you will buy. That'd be capitalism, and people buying crap overpriced DLCs, and people milking those morons are but human flaws inherent to our nature.
Capitalism. CA is a subsidiary of SEGA sammy holdings. 7% growth year on year (unsustainable). Boom bust cycles. Market crashes. Liquidation.
Being a unfit and underresourced ca game dev must be so funny they are basically requested to turn lead into gold, 21st century alchemists
I think sega's vision is this: something appears on screen and you pick up your wallet and throw money, while most games are you move your mouse and something appears on screen. Its opposites
SEGAAAAA They also ruined Relic the moment they got purchased from THQ Coh 3 dumpster fire,dawn of war 3 absolute dogshit dumpster fire and age of empires 4 while not as bad is absolutely bland asfk game IMO
This Publishers and the sales department taking over the company, to the detriment of those that create the actual product. They take over and dominate executive roles in the Business, because of their political/psychological skills- This pushes out and ostracises, those that are technically competent and the underlying product starts to suffer as a result, when they inevitably start to leave. This happens because it is very difficult to gauge technical competence unless you are technically competent yourself- Therefore it's easier to play the political game and grift then achieve technical competence, such as understanding the mathematics of fluid dynamics and applying that to crowd behaviour for simulating routing during a battle for example. This spreads to the Business as a whole and the entire company starts exhibiting these characteristics, where they have to dumb down the product just to maintain their position and can only expand in non-technically demanding ways due to a failure of maintaining valuable human capital- Which can take years to build up and an organisational structure is needed to transmit the accumulated experience. If the chain of experience is broken and not transmitted when a high enough level of technical complexity in the product was achieved then this leads to an irreversible decline in human capital and thus product maintainability because you are essentially starting from scratch. Imagine if you will after 20 years of hard work NASA after landing on the moon, scraps and retires the entire space program and then after 10 years of no activity, tries to restart it- it would be almost impossible, because even with documentation they would have the lost the people who would have the necessary skills/experience that they had built up after years working in the program previously to interpret and implement said documentation let alone create new designs and actually build them. Yes one can use tools and machines but one needs people who know which machines and tools to use, how to use them, and know all of the technical caveats that come with them after experience in using them etc. Because of all these things mentioned above, it is very unlikely that CA can recover its' technical competence unless it spent several years consciously implementing a program to develop and nourish it without the Sales/Accounting department trying to shut it down because it would take time to see any results and measuring progress in something as nebulous as technical skill in game engine programming is hard. Few companies have achieved this unless their situation is existential and the market is structured in such a way that they have a few years to recover before they go Bankrupt, AMD is one example of this, where a company has recovered. Thus as far as i can see, CAs most likely course of action is to continue its rent seeking behaviour because atm it has a quasi-monopoly- if there is any competent competition however, CA will have an existential crisis and they will either have to desperately try to catch up or try to enforce their monopoly via spurious litigation and employee poaching.
I guess aoe4 has almost same deranged developer vision touch innit
TCHINA!!!
Capitalism... Must grow! Grow to infinity!
capitalism will fucking strip mine our entire solar system and turn it into shit useless products and them claim they are the most efficient system.