Mike Wang Back With 2K Sports
Posted by MPDamon in Featured Posts, NBA 2K, NBA Live, Recent News Tuesday, 2 February 2010 10:10 2 Comments
With the news yesterday from EA that NBA Live Producer Mike Wang was leaving EA Canada today new news comes via a ESPN Interview with Mike Wang that he is heading back to 2K sports. PastaPadre has been following along closely with what’s happening with the situation. While I do think Mike Wang was valuable to the NBA Live franchise I don’t know if it’s as big of blow as some think. From what I have seen it’s the producers as a group and a whole that make things tick and one guy can’t make a game great by himself. I would use the comparison that if you took Kobe from the Lakers and put him on another team he would instantly make them better but if the rest of the team didn’t mesh with Kobe they may make the playoffs on Kobe’s back but they aren’t going to win that championship. Only time will tell but with both games being pretty good this year I’m optimistic that the upcoming releases will also be good on both sides.
Update: Another Mike Wang interview has been done by Gamespot.
“When I went over there (to EA), a lot of it was for personal reasons. I wanted to try something new, try a new challenge. But after being there and spending some time over at EA, it was clear that they do things a different way, and in a way it’s just inefficient and just not the place to be to make the best games,” said Wang in a recent conference call with ESPN to announce his return. “When I went there, I immediately missed VC (Visual Concepts), and it’s just one of those things where I tried to stick it out as long as I could, but I wanted to come back. With some of the creative decisions over at EA, it just made it difficult to stay there. They just want to make a different game than I had a vision for. So I reached out to (2K’s senior vice president of sports development) Greg Thomas and he was gracious enough to have me back.
Privately, you'd have to think this will light a fire under the Live team, as if people think Wang did all the work in Live 10.
I'm leery of heaping credit (or blame) on one singular dev and that seems to be what is happening in the hardcore community, similarly to Ben Brinkman re: baseball in 2006. Wang is a great dev, but he's still part of a team. People need not forget that in the last two years, Live made huge strides – but they did a have a hole to get out from. Wang was not there for the majority of the 09 cycle and that's when the swing started.
I'd hope Wang tried to help change the culture he criticizes in these numerous interviews. Going from 2K with a couple hundred employees to EA with thousands of employees, he should have known there'd be more levels and red tape when it came to the dev process. That shouldn't surprise anybody.
Yeah I am sure there is more structure at EA. Like you said there has to be. Maybe he didn't like the fact that changes had to go through more of a process. I agree though it's got to be the team that does well/bad and not just one person.