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In your opinions, what was it that led to Sierra’s downfall? Mismanagement? Lack of funding for it’s projects (by later owners such as Vivendi)? Too much consolidation? Or was it perhaps Sierra’s growth in and of itself that led to the company’s decline. I personally think that Sierra’s growth was a factor in it’s downfall. Sierra made an error when it acquired so many companies. The companies Sierra were not only very different and from very dissimilar backgrounds, but were also were allowed to maintain their corporate identity. Instead of just intergrating them into the main Sierra organization, (IE, buying Impressions, closing it down, and moving it’s employees and copyrights to Oakhurst and Bellevue) the only things these companies shared were funding, distribution, and manufacturing. they didn’t share a common corporate identity. As Sierra acquired more and more companies (In 1995 alone Sierra acquired 8 companies; from 1995-1997 the company acquired 12 other studios), Sierra became more of a publisher and competing against over 10 other studios Sierra’s main organization, which was made of Oakhurst and Bellevue, produced less and less and was squeezed. Personally, I don’t consider products made by Papyrus and Impressions and the like ”in-house titles”. There’s a markedly different style in games produced by Sierra’s studios than by games produced by Oakhurst and Bellevue.
Add to this later management who focused not on product development but on maintaining a rigid corporate structure with a focus on the bottom line, a financially dishonest and troubled parent company who squeezed Sierra’s products into deadlines and the decline of the adventure genre, Sierra’s main line of interest and in my opinion, you have Sierra’s downfall. -
In your opinions, what was it that led to Sierra’s downfall? Mismanagement? Lack of funding for it’s projects (by later owners such as Vivendi)? Too much consolidation? Or was it perhaps Sierra’s growth in and of itself that led to the company’s decline. I personally think that Sierra’s growth was a factor in it’s downfall. Sierra made an error when it acquired so many companies. The companies Sierra acquired were not only very different and from very dissimilar backgrounds, but were also were allowed to maintain their corporate identity. Instead of just intergrating them into the main Sierra organization, (IE, buying Impressions, closing it down, and moving it’s employees and copyrights to Oakhurst and Bellevue) the only things these companies shared were funding, distribution, and manufacturing. they didn’t share a common corporate identity. As Sierra acquired more and more companies (In 1995 alone Sierra acquired 8 companies; from 1995-1997 the company acquired 12 in total), Sierra became more of a publisher and competing against over 10 other studios, the quantity of Oakhurst and Bellevue’s products decreased and the two studios were squeezed. With later management teams, development was focused at Sierra’s subsidiaries rather Sierra itself. Also, I think that another source of Sierra’s decline was it’s later use of and partnerships with third party companies such as Valve and Blizzard. After Vivendi acqured the company, Oakhurst was shut down, and Bellevue was relegated to producing the company’s minor titles. Third party companies, instead of Sierra’s own studios, became responsible for Sierra’s ”development”. Even Sierra’s biggest titles began to be developed only by third party companies rather than Sierra itself. Personally, I don’t consider products made by Valve and other third party companies ”Sierra games”. There’s also a markedly different style in games produced by Sierra’s studios compared with games produced by Oakhurst and Bellevue. That was the object, yes, to create a company which had variety…But even the spirit of those games was different, as if they were made by different companies.
Add to this later management who focused not on product development but on maintaining a rigid corporate structure with a focus on the bottom line, a financially dishonest and troubled parent company who squeezed Sierra’s products into deadlines and the decline of the adventure genre, Sierra’s main line of interest and in my opinion, you have Sierra’s downfall. -
I agree that the growth of Sierra lead to some decline, but for different reasons. From my own perspective, Sierra was leading in technology and that required me to upgrade constantly. I could not financially keep up the pace. At the same time Sierra was creating so many games that I wanted to play at the same time. Buget wise, I had to pick and choose which ones I wanted to play. It tended to be any game from King’s Quest. Sierra was also changing their style as seen in King’s Quest VII.
To me the different companies that Sierra had only made stronger. If one area fell the others would possibly survive and/or grow.
Ultimately, Sierra was a target for some bad individuals that changed the leadership of Ken Williams through lies.
MxCoder
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IMO (since I was there near the end), “Sierra” didn’t really die, it just got folded into a larger entity and dissolved slowly. But, if you are referring to the classic period of Sierra, it died because games had moved beyond adventure games long before Sierra stopped trying to make them. We responded to the superficial technical changes (3D), but tried to bend the adventure genre to the 3D environment rather than bend our game designs to the new possibilities the tech provided. By the time we were trying to ship KQ8, Larry 7, QFG5, etc, the market had largely moved on to Doom and Quake, Warcraft and Diablo. Heck, I was working on the Babylon 5 project while we watched space shooters die all around us. The last great thing Sierra had in its hands was the Lord of the Rings MMO. We practically invented the MMO with The Realm and had Sierra really gotten behind that project 100% (it was massively understaffed), it could have kept the Sierra label afloat.
Sierra (Oakhurst in particular) was really good at making 2D adventure games and unfortunately, while the rest of the industry was getting serious about developing other genres and technologies, we relied on our old tools and old ideas about what games could be.
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Good question. At the time, the FPS was the big thing , we probably should have been working that angle, perhaps looking at a another crack at strategy (we deserved a second chance on Outpost).
Ken can answer this but there was always this rumor that John Carmack came around looking for either a buyer or for a publishier or something and Ken said no. Around that time productivity was coming to a stand-still because of Wolfenstein addiction. In my estimation, investing in iD would have been a great idea. Sierra di finally get it right in investing in Valve, but in either case, grabing another developer wasn’t going to change anything in Oakhurst.
I do have a confession, in that I was developing a Myst-like title at one point (who wasn’t) and Ken asked me if it could be converted to a FPS. I told him no way, and the project was canceled. If only I had said “sure!, you bet!”.
I wish we had put more capital into the Realm so it could become something more than a 2d combat/chat game. We had a ton of new ideas at the time (many of which are now incorporated in most fantasy MMOs). Unfortunattely that project was funded by outside capital once INN was bought up and couldn’t be sustained beyond bing much more than a tech demo.
Sierra Oakhurst did make efforts to move into these areas (FPS, MMO, RTS), but we never really had any success in anything other than adventure games. Partly because we were built to make adventure games. We had a handful of systems programmers and a boatload of application programmers, most of whom weren’t ready to make the major leap that modern game engineering required. The whole company was built around SCI and developing outside of that very specific API wasn’t likely to happen. The kind of technology expertise we needed to really go after 3d didn’t exist until the last year of the studio’s existence. We did have a fair amount of 3d experience on the art side. In my last 4-5 years with the company, nearly all the artists were using 3d in one way or another, but we were a long way from making a real 3d game. We had something on the order of 4 years or more of tech catch-up to play by the time we made the effort. Then again, I moved on to Firaxis and we still weren’t doing 3D for my first 2 years there, but I digress.
To be honest, we should have recognized that the market was changing and we should have been moving on to making the kinds of games we were all playing. Few of us were playing adventure games at that point. Mostly it was RTS, RPGs and FPS. The only adventure games I was playing up to near the end were Lucas Arts titles. While we were investing God knows how much money in a state-of-the-art FMV studio (to make 2 games), iD and Blizzard were poising to dominate the industry.
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Question for Ken: Why wasn’t there ever a move to acquire Valve? If there was, what happend?
Question for Marc: You said you were around during the last days…Do you have any idea what prompted Sierra’s move to using only external, third party developers?
Question for both of you: Why did Sierra make so many investments in the productivity area (Arion, Green Thumb, Pixellite..)?
Also…Marc, you said that grabbing another developer probably wouldn’t have changed the situation at Oakhurst..What if, let’s say, Sierra acquired iD, closed down the iD studios, and moved the iD employees into the Oakhurst headquarters, setting them up as another team at Oakhurst which used the iD label…How would that have worked? -
There wasn’t any sharing of tech between studios. The only thing that happened all to commonly was that other studios poached our systems guys all the time to get games done. B5 was delayed 6 months because the entire team (minus a few artists) were hijacked to get the multi-player portion of Red Baron II working.
But yeah, as a whole the company was diversified, but studios tended to be pretty calcified in terms of content. Dynamix is a good example of a studio that actually was really diversified, and for whatever reason, got the axe too.
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Question
for Marc: You said you were around during the last days…Do you have
any idea what prompted Sierra’s move to using only external, third
party developers?I can’t say exactly why, but a reasonable guess is that it’s sort of the difference between dating and marriage. With a third party dev, the publisher agrees to give the dev a set amount of money in exchange for a specified product, delivered at a specific date. If the dev is late, they don’t get any more money (valve worked fro free for a year before shipping HL). Generally speaking deals are set for a limited number of SKUs or titles. If it works out, you can do it again, or maybe get acquired or whatever. It’s fairly low-risk. The publisher isn’t paying overhead or salaries, they are just paying aflat fee for the product. the only risks are does the game get delivered, and does it sell well. The opposite is true of internal development where if you go over schedule and budget, you keep burning cash b/c i you don’t cancel the project, you have to keep feeding it. The burn rate on a project like QfG 5 was enormous, but you get to a point where it gets really hard to kill a project in crisis. So to answer the question, publishing is a lot better deal than developing most of the time.
Question for both of you: Why did Sierra make so many investments in the productivity area (Arion, Green Thumb, Pixellite..)?
good question. Ken?…..
Also…Marc,
you said that grabbing another developer probably wouldn’t have changed
the situation at Oakhurst..What if, let’s say, Sierra acquired iD,
closed down the iD studios, and moved the iD employees into the
Oakhurst headquarters, setting them up as another team at Oakhurst
which used the iD label…How would that have worked?That is an interesting ,but highly unlikely scenario. For one, you end up loosing a lot of people when you try to relocate a studio, that and all the costs etc. When they moved the B5 and LoTR On-Line teams to Seattle they lost at least half the devs and spent god knows how much money moving us, paying off our housing , building new office space, etc. it was a huge investment (and they laid us all off 6 months later anyway! hahahaha). More than likely if they had been bought, they would have just been another of our far-flung dev studios.
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