Marcus Lehto: "I don’t have anything positive to say about EA, my recent departure, and how so many, including my team, are suffering due to the industry sweeping layoffs."
Let's not forget EAs response to the backlash on their pay to win strategy for the Star Wars game.
The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes.
As for cost, we selected initial values based upon data from the Open Beta and other adjustments made to milestone rewards before launch. Among other things, we’re looking at average per-player credit earn rates on a daily basis, and we’ll be making constant adjustments to ensure that players have challenges that are compelling, rewarding, and of course attainable via gameplay.
We appreciate the candid feedback, and the passion the community has put forth around the current topics here on Reddit, our forums and across numerous social media outlets.
Our team will continue to make changes and monitor community feedback and update everyone as soon and as often as we can.
With indie teams of 50 or less people turning out bangers, and AAA studios of 500+ people turning out messy slop, I think one big answer to your question is quite obvious: the size of the team getting bigger has a negative effect on the quality of the game.
Big teams are harder to direct, and harder to keep pointed in a coherent direction. In other words, big ships turn slower than small ships. When you start making a game, usually the game you end up with is pretty different from the one you started on, and smaller teams can handle those changes much quicker than giant teams.
Overhiring is almost always a symptom of someone who doesn't know what they're doing thinking that adding more people will somehow make something faster or better quality, when in reality adding too many people actually will have the opposite effect.