Things that went right:

1. Although I’m not sure about the sequel, we were told that CF “covered costs” and hence didn’t make a loss. The fact that only 4% of games make a profit (http://www.kotaku.com.au/games/2008/11/only_4_of_games_make_a_profit__eedar-2.html), I’d actually count CF as a success albeit a small one. Many games don’t even get published.

2. The LMA engine was ported for use in CF. It was used for all the menus (as LMA is very UI intensive). This worked well. Also the graphics were provided by an upgraded Core Engine (the standard codemasters graphics engine at the time), which gave pretty good results. The gameplay engine was written from scratch.

3. Our approach to build tools and tool-side architecture was generally good.

Things that went badly

1. Our lead programmer, studio head, producer and many other programmers, designers and artists left during development. Morale became bad and we lost too much talent and experience. This lead to problem #2.

2. Too little experience amongst the developers. Generally you need a minimum of 50% ratio of experienced to inexperienced programmer. I’d class an experienced programmer as one who had worked on two games before (preferably different genres). After losing our lead programmer, we never managed to hire a replacement. This lead to problem #3.

3. The game never played very well. Some argued there was a lack of flexibility in the engine and the system was too dependent on animations. This was despite many months of hard work from the gameplay team. In retrospect, we might have had more success writing the gameplay engine in a higher level language then optimising the slow parts.

Bruce mentioned the SKU situation. I’d say it was a necessary evil. Note that EA had the licensing for FIFA, so the SKU approach was our only way into the genre. Although this was difficult to manage, both the dev side and the marketing seemed to handle this reasonably well. Arguably it would have been better to cover fewer clubs or combine them.

I doubt the hardcore fans of the clubs involved would make up for this either.

This decision came from the top and even if the game was better than FIFA it was doomed to failure.

Anywhere, where did I put that bone?

(As an aside, the CF engine was then ported to later versions of LMA, with some success for the franchise).

Also, the loss of Mark Waldon was a turning point for the development too; he was very popular with the team.

The chance of anyone making the same mistake again in the future must be slim. Idiocy of this level is quite rare.

I was not referring to the marketing department but marketing in the more general sense.

When the USP of a game involves creating 17 uniquely branded versions of the same game aimed at 17 different audiences then yes, I would indeed say that the development of that game was ‘marketing driven’.

I can’t even begin to imagine how many SKUs in total the development team had to create, considering the different console versions, languages and territories… Ouch!!

Anyway, surely the most important thing is that we as an industry can learn from stories like this and avoid making similar mistakes in future.

Bullet points on a box do not a great game make.