Is CA a mismanaged company?

[JackDionne]

I feel CA is being mismanaged in the upper management level. I say this because of today's announcement.


Hear me out please:


3K was announced in January of 2018,initially the release date was Fall of the same year. The date was then pushed to 7 March 2019 I was OK with that. Today we find out that it is being pushed again to May.


We can all agree we want a good game that's a given.


Here is my issue. Being so close to the second release date CA comes out with this announcement today. My experience in the work force tells me there is no communication between the people doing the work on the game and the upper management staff. Plain and simple. I don't think it's too much to ask that they pick a date and confirm the date with the people that are actually doing the work. You don't hope it will be ready, you have to know it will be ready. I have a million other points I could write to prove it's an upper management issue but there is no point.


As a manager you have to be able to forecast problems and that means talking to the people doing the job before you even consider an announcement for a release date. I was told on the official forum CA owes me nothing not even an apology. I did not agree with that. I have also been formerly warned by CA moderator via email. I through Donald Trumps name in my thread and asked if he was running the company. They didn't like that.


Is too much to ask to have qualified people in positions of authority who actually know what they are doing? The impression I have is they don't have qualified people in positions of authority after the announcement today. In my world of management this is a total lack of communication between workers and management if I use layman's terms.


I have heard the argument “ya but developers run into snags” I get it. This all has to be incorporated into the decision making process.


The only question I have left is are the senior management people there now had anything to do with RomeII. If the answer is yes then that pretty well explains it.

[Daruwind]

OR there could different explanation for such conspiracy.

Last year. They were releasing content for the first time on multiple fronts - Rome2, ToB, Wh2 plus preparing 3K. And just during summer they pushed back 3K for the first time, then if you remember Wh2 had major issue with launch about Wh1 DLC/Wh2 pre-order Norcsa. It basically postpone all content and THEN in time of Tomb Kings/HE-DE Lord pack release we learned that the content for Wh2 will be at slower pace. To me it seems like little overextension.

At the same time CA tried to save ToB with quite large free of charge patches. Which greatly improved ToB but it is similar situation to Rome2. Public opinion during launch was that it is meh game and how many gamers will revisit it after initial hype? Eventhough it is quite good right now?

Lastly. Looks like CA learned from Rome/Wh2/ToB pre-release time period to actually use early access feedback. They learned...Rome2 promised a dream, that never came and ToB showed that it is nothing special and drove players away #Attila2.0 (but with fixed performance at least). Go check forums, reddit....people are talking about 3K animations and some other stugg frequently.

My conclusion is. First push back was due to CA having too many concurrent projects and this second delay is probably safe break to prevent possible Rome2/ToB/Wh2 launch problems. CA was lucky with Rome2 and Wh2 (sold a lot R2 before people realized the problems... and WH2 they got away with honest approach....adn ToB got caught in middle of crime and lost)

[Steph]

Or they simply get caught in Hofstadter's law. Or have a QA service that it at last doing its job. The dev team think they can keep their deadline, then QA tests, detects enough issues to postpone the release.

[PikeStance]

If CA is taken at the word; then the number of projects is irrelevant. By their own announcement, they gave a different team for Warhammer, one for historical titles and one for saga (plus arena, etc..).
Marketing would not "dictate" release dates. They would be pressure based on investors. Pushing the release date back is not taken lightly. It is a balance between getting a return on your investment and risking negative feedback which would affect the bottom line. If CA feels that the negative reviews would have a greater adverse effect than it would be on investors patience then they will push it back.

Any discussion on the mismanagement of the company is purely speculative. As I had stated in another thread, I believe they took some of the criticism made by early access players and the general consistent negative comments on the game and decided to address those issues. My guess is that the time they determine it would take to resolves the issues was greater than the current release date. (Obviously).

[Anna_Gein]

Hard to say from the outside. In my humble opinion it looks like CA is mismanaged indeed.

Multiple delays, major features lacking on release (Mortal Empire), failed projects like Total War Arena, etc .

I do not believe CA when their marketing team claims they have totally different teams working on each main titles and independent teams working on DLCs.

[PointOfViewGun]

I feel CA is being mismanaged in the upper management level. I say this because of today's announcement.
Hear me out please:
3K was announced in January of 2018,initially the release date was Fall of the same year. The date was then pushed to 7 March 2019 I was OK with that. Today we find out that it is being pushed again to May.
We can all agree we want a good game that's a given.
Here is my issue. Being so close to the second release date CA comes out with this announcement today. My experience in the work force tells me there is no communication between the people doing the work on the game and the upper management staff. Plain and simple. I don't think it's too much to ask that they pick a date and confirm the date with the people that are actually doing the work. You don't hope it will be ready, you have to know it will be ready. I have a million other points I could write to prove it's an upper management issue but there is no point.
As a manager you have to be able to forecast problems and that means talking to the people doing the job before you even consider an announcement for a release date. I was told on the official forum CA owes me nothing not even an apology. I did not agree with that. I have also been formerly warned by CA moderator via email. I through Donald Trumps name in my thread and asked if he was running the company. They didn't like that.
Is too much to ask to have qualified people in positions of authority who actually know what they are doing? The impression I have is they don't have qualified people in positions of authority after the announcement today. In my world of management this is a total lack of communication between workers and management if I use layman's terms.
I have heard the argument “ya but developers run into snags” I get it. This all has to be incorporated into the decision making process.
The only question I have left is are the senior management people there now had anything to do with RomeII. If the answer is yes then that pretty well explains it.

If you guys ever worked with a large scale company that represents a brand then you would know how normal this is. Your experience in the work force would tell you how flexible launch dates are, especially when you're dealing with a software. Hardware is relatively easier. Even then almost any product I've ever been introduced to have had a different launch date than what was claimed before. It always takes longer. There are always issues with the product. You can have daily meetings with your developers but that will merely give you a date that will be kept changing back and forth which is no good at all. So, companies stick to dates for a number of months before making postponement decisions. None of that gives the impression that they don't have qualified people in positions of authority.

[AnthoniusII]

I feel CA is being mismanaged in the upper management level. I say this because of today's announcement.


Hear me out please:


3K was announced in January of 2018,initially the release date was Fall of the same year. The date was then pushed to 7 March 2019 I was OK with that. Today we find out that it is being pushed again to May.


We can all agree we want a good game that's a given.


Here is my issue. Being so close to the second release date CA comes out with this announcement today. My experience in the work force tells me there is no communication between the people doing the work on the game and the upper management staff. Plain and simple. I don't think it's too much to ask that they pick a date and confirm the date with the people that are actually doing the work. You don't hope it will be ready, you have to know it will be ready. I have a million other points I could write to prove it's an upper management issue but there is no point.


As a manager you have to be able to forecast problems and that means talking to the people doing the job before you even consider an announcement for a release date. I was told on the official forum CA owes me nothing not even an apology. I did not agree with that. I have also been formerly warned by CA moderator via email. I through Donald Trumps name in my thread and asked if he was running the company. They didn't like that.


Is too much to ask to have qualified people in positions of authority who actually know what they are doing? The impression I have is they don't have qualified people in positions of authority after the announcement today. In my world of management this is a total lack of communication between workers and management if I use layman's terms.


I have heard the argument “ya but developers run into snags” I get it. This all has to be incorporated into the decision making process.


The only question I have left is are the senior management people there now had anything to do with RomeII. If the answer is yes then that pretty well explains it.

It never was espesialy after RTW/BI , even in M2TW the developing team simply left the company talking with them all the expirience and the "keys" of development!
Lets clarify a thing. CA/SEGA wants profit and wants it fast. That "fast" factor though lead to broken games and fall of sales ! Now the "fast" meaning has to do with less posibillities to another financial disaster.
The problem in the upper /senior management people know NOTHING about games just seeinng products to sell. That prospective lead to hire "cheap" but unable new developers that failed atleast twice in creating a descent TW game. I still remember the incident with DARTH VADER that was not hired in favor of an other TWC modder that proved him self unable to guide the unexpirient new TW games developers and failed PERSONALY when he failed to import his modding expirience in to the newest TW games!
So in the high levels they ask quality without spending money to capable developers that have proven themselvs but they are expensive.In the other hand unexpirient developers lead to failed games and fall of sales. Somewhere in withing that mess is the delay of the new TW game release.

[SturmChurro]

I just have to say, if it's pushed back to May now. It better actually be damn good. The battles look like , and this tells me they are still in their current build, and the negative feedback drove them to push it back. I don't follow 3k too much though. I wasn't going to preorder it after seeing the awful battles, I don't have ToB either.

[zoner16]

The original delay was probably due to major schedule changes for new features. Some people speculated it was Records mode, but it doesn't really matter.

What happened to cause the second delay is fairly obvious. The game got publicized heavily in its current form and a lot of consternation was thrown around the community due to the battles. Both Teiba and Reddit (and thereby both sides of the Pacific) had lengthy threads pointing out flaws with what they saw. Youtubers made widely watched videos which turned into widely shared gifs of things being less than ideal. It's clearly not a coincidence that the second delay happened just a couple weeks after the dust had settled, just enough time for a lot of meetings and number crunching to go up and down the hierarchy. Three Kingdoms isn't just a major tentpole release. It's the series's breakout into the Chinese market. Bad press over the state of the game just a month before launch would negatively impact the perception of the game at release and by extension, Total War's reputation among the new audience.

Here is my issue. Being so close to the second release date CA comes out with this announcement today. My experience in the work force tells me there is no communication between the people doing the work on the game and the upper management staff. Plain and simple. I don't think it's too much to ask that they pick a date and confirm the date with the people that are actually doing the work. You don't hope it will be ready, you have to know it will be ready. I have a million other points I could write to prove it's an upper management issue but there is no point.

Then, quite frankly, you don't have enough experience. This date was "confirmed" several months ago. Things change, at all levels. I'm not sure where you got your idea of how game production works, but you seem to think that management is bad because they can't perfectly predict the future.

No manager ever knows what problems are going to arise in production and how much of a setback they're going to be, they just have good guesses. The disconnect here is probably not between developers and managers. If anything, the second delay shows that the managers and the developers are on the same page. Development is usually the one asking for delays to do more things, and they are doing this constantly, because development is never fully finished. Meanwhile management is telling them that they can't have it because they have to ship. The disconnect was between all of production (devs and managers alike) and the target audience. Production either didn't think that the issues that they were running into weren't going to be seen as big a deal as they were, or they just didn't know what the target audience's opinion of the issues would be. In fact, the January Youtuber conference might've been a deliberate test case to gauge reaction.

No game is ever truly "finished" at launch, as there are always things that the developers didn't have time to do, but how the audience sees the product's quality relative to what they expect to receive will determine how "finished" they think it is. Developers are a poor judge of what the audience thinks a product will be like at launch, because developers see issues in terms of how much of a problem they are from a technical standpoint and focus on the things they want to develop rather than what the audience wants to play. What the delay buys CA is benefit of the doubt from customers and real time to focus on the issues the audience is focused on and therefore give a better first impression. For this game, that impression is more important than it usually is for CA's long term strategy.

As a manager you have to be able to forecast problems and that means talking to the people doing the job before you even consider an announcement for a release date. I was told on the official forum CA owes me nothing not even an apology. I did not agree with that. I have also been formerly warned by CA moderator via email. I through Donald Trumps name in my thread and asked if he was running the company. They didn't like that.

If there's one thing that isn't going to do you or anyone else any good, it's insulting the developers and trying to imply that you know how to do their jobs based on absolutely nothing. It'll just make them more likely to discount any further feedback.

[JackDionne]

I am old school and I am not a politician. That's how I see it. We can disagree in a respectful maner.

[Darios]

I have about 40 hours played in ToB and sometime shortly after the release of that game I decided that it's time to take an extended 'break' from getting excited about anything new/upcoming with the TW series. The recent selection of releases haven't exactly touched upon themes that interest me and the more CA tries to reinvent the series, the worse off their games tend to be. Can't say that I'm surprised that 3KTW is being delayed...I honestly wouldn't be shocked if CA has severely overstretched its resources over the past couple of years trying to balance multiple content releases.

[Daruwind]

What happened to cause the second delay is fairly obvious. The game got publicized heavily in its current form and a lot of consternation was thrown around the community due to the battles. Both Teiba and Reddit (and thereby both sides of the Pacific) had lengthy threads pointing out flaws with what they saw. Youtubers made widely watched videos which turned into widely shared gifs of things being less than ideal. It's clearly not a coincidence that the second delay happened just a couple weeks after the dust had settled, just enough time for a lot of meetings and number crunching to go up and down the hierarchy. Three Kingdoms isn't just a major tentpole release. It's the series's breakout into the Chinese market. Bad press over the state of the game just a month before launch would negatively impact the perception of the game at release and by extension, Total War's reputation among the new audience.

This is very much the issue. If you are watching lately Youtube for example, majority of gaming videos tend to be negative. Because negativity,problems,major flaws sells. Endless speculation. Current complex games are trully almost never 100% ready at start, because with 100-1000 testers you are unable to catch the same amount of bugs like with 1 million players. Adding to that the problems of latest games (lot of those really suck) Like Fallout76, Battlefield 5, Battlefront 2, Mass Effect Andromeda, Destiny 2, Anthem....Look at current Metro drama with new Epic store...And then look what have done Apex. They opted to keep silent about the game because in current climate "new" battle royale game from EA? That would be DOA. They instead kept silence and now with just 2 weeks after release they reach 25 millions players.

Current situation is like with ToB but instead of smaller Saga game , we are speaking about major tent-pole release here. CA opted to really try to prevent such situation. because ToB after patches is quite okaybut reputation is damaged as in case of Attila...

[Kyffhäuser]

Delays are better than releasing a broken mess on time. Maybe they should just not announce a game until two months before release, then drown the fans in press.

[Mayer]

Negativity in gaming reviews are the result of mediocre games. It's not the fault of the player, the fan, the costumer to have a negative opinion about the final product. The developers of long-standing series like TW got lazy and release half-baked unfinished stuff and hope to turn a profit with brand following and DLC scam.

[Daruwind]

Negativity in gaming reviews are the result of mediocre games. It's not the fault of the player, the fan, the costumer to have a negative opinion about the final product. The developers of long-standing series like TW got lazy and release half-baked unfinished stuff and hope to turn a profit with brand following and DLC scam.

Fully agree. I just fear that this might influence more companies in future to run things like Apex did, or which shooter added monetization/microtransactions month after release when all reviews were already done and highly positive? Rainbow Six :Siege? Or something from Activision? I´m not sure. However there was this one game that added whole monetization just after month window when they had enough sales and population and especially reviews especially as there were no such thing upon release.

Just to be sure. What DLC scam? I have no problem if you don´t like current DLC system or even pre-order DLC. However quality and value per buck is probably the best in history for TW (Tomb Kings, Pirate Coast, Norsca DLCs..compare with Empire/Napoleon DLCs) a even as non paying player you got enough FLCs and all DLCs are still inserted into your game. You are meeting new faction even if you cannot play for them...

[SturmChurro]

Delays are better than releasing a broken mess on time. Maybe they should just not announce a game until two months before release, then drown the fans in press.

The game better actually not be broken. If I remember correctly, this is what the second delay? If it is still broken on release, it's game over. Honestly, I'm surprised that they even showed it off in that state claiming the build was "a couple months old". I think they are known for blacklisting influencers for negative coverage. Game is more about the heroes like some anime than an actual authentic Total War experience.

[Kyffhäuser]

Yeah I'm no graphics ho, but that footage looked like a spin off mobile game. My advice to anybody about any game is just wait. There's nothing out there worth fifty dollars, and everything being digital there's no point in pre orders.

[tgoodenow]

I think with the release of Rome Total War 2 it became obvious that CA is a mismanaged company. What surprises me the most is their gaming structure has barely changed in however many years they’ve been doing it, but they have issues. If they didn’t up Norsca so bad, warhammer I and II would’ve been fine.

But yes pushing an announced release date back 8+ months just shows an inability to set and accomplish goals in a timely manner.

[JackDionne]

I think with the release of Rome Total War 2 it became obvious that CA is a mismanaged company. What surprises me the most is their gaming structure has barely changed in however many years they’ve been doing it, but they have issues. If they didn’t up Norsca so bad, warhammer I and II would’ve been fine.

But yes pushing an announced release date back 8+ months just shows an inability to set and accomplish goals in a timely manner.

Thank you!

[PikeStance]

... Three Kingdoms isn't just a major tentpole release. It's the series's breakout into the Chinese market. Bad press over the state of the game just a month before launch would negatively impact the perception of the game at release and by extension, Total War's reputation among the new audience.

I wish people stop writing this. Total war is already played in China. The funny thing is my students knew about the Total War series, but I had to tell them about the Three Kingdoms.

I think with the release of Rome Total War 2 it became obvious that CA is a mismanaged company. What surprises me the most is their gaming structure has barely changed in however many years they’ve been doing it, but they have issues. If they didn’t up Norsca so bad, warhammer I and II would’ve been fine.
But yes pushing an announced release date back 8+ months just shows an inability to set and accomplish goals in a timely manner.

OK, the delay affects investors much more than consumers. Delays may frustrate the consumer, but delays mean investors have to wait longer for their returns. The only thing they did that was "cynical" was to delay the announcement until after the Lunar sales. From a business sense, that was the right call.