What really happened to Codemasters, and why EA cannot be…
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What really happened to Codemasters, and why EA cannot be blamed exclusively for it.
I have been playing Codemasters' games since TOCA in the early 2000s. I'm not trying to defend EA, they are still the most insufferable gaming publisher ever, but the cracks in Codemasters started to appear years before the EA Acquisition.
1. The choice to move Dirt Rally 3.0 which became EA Sports WRC, from their in house EGO Game engine to Unreal Engine was the biggest blunder. They started developing back in 2019, and they aim to hire contractual designers for stage design in the rally game. This is because rally games requires a lot of labour when it comes to world building. Switching to UE allowed them to consign world building to overseas talents saving them money and as a bonus, they get to use an engine that can handle up to 30 KMs of world stages, which was simply not possible with the EGO engine they have in house at the time. The problem is, their core engine engineers have no experience in UE, and when they released the game the optimization is so horrendous it's borderline unplayable. Then the game wasn't fixed because by the time the game launched most of the core engine devs had left because of the EA Acquisition and mass layoffs to the studio's rally games development team by march 2024.
2. The Project Cars decline - this is caused again by Codemasters shifting the focus of the series to a more arcade style in PC3. The reason for this is unclear but information from Ian Bell indicates a power struggle in Codemaster' management back in 2019. PC3 being an arcade racer turned away the core audience of the series and resulted in Ian Bell, the then creative head of Slightly Mad Studios, leaving the studio altogether.
3. The DiRT series decline in DiRT 5. Codemasters hired ex Evolution Studios developers back in 2016. Then, they formed Codemasters EVO (aka the Cheshire team) to create Onrush. Then they tasked them to create the new DiRT 5 game, but again, instead of using the tried and tested performant EGO game engine, they used the Onrush game engine, which is made for arcade physics handling, making the game look like a cheap Forza Horizon festival clone instead of the more serious, grounded approach of DiRT 4, again, turning off their target players.
By this time in 2020 Codemasters now have 3 arcade racing series: Project Cars 3, DiRT 5, and Grid.
4. Grid 2019 - the unfinished release. The barebones career mode and the lack of polish with Grid 2019 just showed how desperate they are to generate income, to the point that the management has decided to release Grid 2019, which is basically an unfinished version of Grid Legends 2021, and lacks the creative single player story and career that Legends have. All to make some money to keep the studio alive.
This is the time where the management has decided to put up the studio for sale, then EA came and outbid every other buyer, all for that shiny, money making series that is the F1. It's a shame really, because Grid Legends was a really great game.
In conclusion: EA came in when the studio is already strapped for cash and is being up for sale as the last ditch effort to avoid bankruptcy. Basically , it's a sinking ship by that time. Then EA came in, and EA is willing to terminate every other project to save money and man power, because all they need from the acquisition, is the F1 series. That's why every single team that worked on other projects that aren't F1 have either been dissolved, laid off, or moved to other EA studios. F1 is that profitable EA was willing to sacrifice everything just to get it making money.
And milk the F1 series EA did. By 2024 and early 2025, Codemasters is no more. It's just now EA Sports F1.
#games
I have been playing Codemasters' games since TOCA in the early 2000s. I'm not trying to defend EA, they are still the most insufferable gaming publisher ever, but the cracks in Codemasters started to appear years before the EA Acquisition.
1. The choice to move Dirt Rally 3.0 which became EA Sports WRC, from their in house EGO Game engine to Unreal Engine was the biggest blunder. They started developing back in 2019, and they aim to hire contractual designers for stage design in the rally game. This is because rally games requires a lot of labour when it comes to world building. Switching to UE allowed them to consign world building to overseas talents saving them money and as a bonus, they get to use an engine that can handle up to 30 KMs of world stages, which was simply not possible with the EGO engine they have in house at the time. The problem is, their core engine engineers have no experience in UE, and when they released the game the optimization is so horrendous it's borderline unplayable. Then the game wasn't fixed because by the time the game launched most of the core engine devs had left because of the EA Acquisition and mass layoffs to the studio's rally games development team by march 2024.
2. The Project Cars decline - this is caused again by Codemasters shifting the focus of the series to a more arcade style in PC3. The reason for this is unclear but information from Ian Bell indicates a power struggle in Codemaster' management back in 2019. PC3 being an arcade racer turned away the core audience of the series and resulted in Ian Bell, the then creative head of Slightly Mad Studios, leaving the studio altogether.
3. The DiRT series decline in DiRT 5. Codemasters hired ex Evolution Studios developers back in 2016. Then, they formed Codemasters EVO (aka the Cheshire team) to create Onrush. Then they tasked them to create the new DiRT 5 game, but again, instead of using the tried and tested performant EGO game engine, they used the Onrush game engine, which is made for arcade physics handling, making the game look like a cheap Forza Horizon festival clone instead of the more serious, grounded approach of DiRT 4, again, turning off their target players.
By this time in 2020 Codemasters now have 3 arcade racing series: Project Cars 3, DiRT 5, and Grid.
4. Grid 2019 - the unfinished release. The barebones career mode and the lack of polish with Grid 2019 just showed how desperate they are to generate income, to the point that the management has decided to release Grid 2019, which is basically an unfinished version of Grid Legends 2021, and lacks the creative single player story and career that Legends have. All to make some money to keep the studio alive.
This is the time where the management has decided to put up the studio for sale, then EA came and outbid every other buyer, all for that shiny, money making series that is the F1. It's a shame really, because Grid Legends was a really great game.
In conclusion: EA came in when the studio is already strapped for cash and is being up for sale as the last ditch effort to avoid bankruptcy. Basically , it's a sinking ship by that time. Then EA came in, and EA is willing to terminate every other project to save money and man power, because all they need from the acquisition, is the F1 series. That's why every single team that worked on other projects that aren't F1 have either been dissolved, laid off, or moved to other EA studios. F1 is that profitable EA was willing to sacrifice everything just to get it making money.
And milk the F1 series EA did. By 2024 and early 2025, Codemasters is no more. It's just now EA Sports F1.
#games
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