[AlbertCory]

I organized a softball game between my startup and EA in 1984 or so, as described in [1]. Trip Hawkins hit a monstrous home run. Our president hit into a double play.

The fact that they've even lasted this long is some kind of tribute. Trip's idea at the start was to build games like a movie studio: have outside companies take all the risk of building the thing, and just assign an in-house "producer" to help them.

If an EA employee said, "Hey, I want to build games myself!" he'd say, "OK, you can give up your stock options and your job security, and in exchange you can get all the royalties that a game developer gets." Most of them thought better of the idea.

So now, it's... what? They work employees like game developers but don't pay them like that? Why would you do that?

[1] https://www.albertcory.io/the-big-bucks

[ido]

The game industry changed a lot since 1984 (almost 40 years ago!) and EA went through multiple changes in leadership in the meanwhile.

There’s probably not a single person you know from that time still working there.

All the big studios/publishers (including those with very deep pockets from parent companies like Microsoft Studios) bought a lot of dev studios for vertical integration. Almost all of EA’s studios were companies they bought rather than founded themselves.