"Electronic Arts closes SimCity studio Maxis Emeryville"
Heard about this news first via rabbitucker over on Facebook.
I'd have probably heard it sooner, but I've pretty much stopped following to-the-minute video game news altogether, at least for the time being, now that I've removed everything but Slashdot and Learn to Counter from my feedly thing (well, andexcept for Did You Know Gaming and Zero Punctuation, neither of which I actually pay much attention to at all anymore, so I wouldn't really miss anything if I removed those as well). After I removed Rock, Paper, Shotgun a few weeks ago, I also removed PC Gamer the other day because I was pretty much sick of seeing almost nothing from them but articles about League of Legends or whatever. Pretty much all of my current video game "news" merely comes from the Steam and GOG "latest release" notifications and whatnot, or from word-of-mouth via mostly owsf2000. *shrug*
Anyway, given that it's EA we're talking about here, what with their usual modus operandi concerning companies they've sucked up in the past being exactly this very same thing (for that matter, I'm actually a little surprised that it hasn't happened to BioWare yet, though I'm still certain that their days are similarly numbered as well), and given that this isn't even the first time Maxis has been affected by something similar (EA put them on a "hiatus" back in 2010), I'm not really surprised by this news at all. Maxis hasn't existed in any real, meaningful sense for several years now, probably since at least 2009 when Will Wright jumped ship.
I'd have probably heard it sooner, but I've pretty much stopped following to-the-minute video game news altogether, at least for the time being, now that I've removed everything but Slashdot and Learn to Counter from my feedly thing (well, andexcept for Did You Know Gaming and Zero Punctuation, neither of which I actually pay much attention to at all anymore, so I wouldn't really miss anything if I removed those as well). After I removed Rock, Paper, Shotgun a few weeks ago, I also removed PC Gamer the other day because I was pretty much sick of seeing almost nothing from them but articles about League of Legends or whatever. Pretty much all of my current video game "news" merely comes from the Steam and GOG "latest release" notifications and whatnot, or from word-of-mouth via mostly owsf2000. *shrug*
Anyway, given that it's EA we're talking about here, what with their usual modus operandi concerning companies they've sucked up in the past being exactly this very same thing (for that matter, I'm actually a little surprised that it hasn't happened to BioWare yet, though I'm still certain that their days are similarly numbered as well), and given that this isn't even the first time Maxis has been affected by something similar (EA put them on a "hiatus" back in 2010), I'm not really surprised by this news at all. Maxis hasn't existed in any real, meaningful sense for several years now, probably since at least 2009 when Will Wright jumped ship.