Electronic Arts is closing the Maxis office in Emeryville, California. While other Maxis studios around the world will remain open, the Emeryville location was the studio's headquarters, and was home to the principals behind the poorly-received and poorly-conceived 2013 reboot of the legendary SimCity franchise.
News of the closure was initially made public by the now former staff on Twitter. Lead gameplay scripter and designer on SimCity, Guillaume Pierre, tweeted that everybody at the site had lost their jobs.
EA subsequently confirmed the closure in a statement saying that development effort is now being "consolidated" to the other Maxis offices in Redwood Shores, Salt Lake City, Helsinki, and Melbourne. It has subsequently been reported by Polygon that there have been some job losses at the Redwood Shores location.
Development of The Sims franchise, including the latest The Sims 4, largely took place in Redwood Shores and Salt Lake City, and EA says that the closure will have no impact on that game or its imminent and near-endless pipeline of DLC.
The closure is sure to make SimCity's legion of long-time fans sad. SimCity is more than 26 years old, and has a veritable army of admirers. But a combination of both technical issues and design issues meant that the 2013 release squandered the goodwill that had been built over a generation. Many, including myself, believed that SimCity was as good as defunct anyway. Disbanding the team that built it feels like an inevitable response.
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