James W. Rogers
US citizen, California resident

I have 29 years of experience in the computer industry with a focus on interactive entertainment (video games), real-time simulation, digital image processing tools for post-production, film and print, and content creation tools and pipelines forrapid iterative development. Until recently I wasSr. Director of Product Development at Electronic Arts working on new IP development.I am best known for assembling and managing the engineering teams and online development and operations groups for The Sims 4 franchise, which became the top selling franchise in PC video game history.Under my leadership The Sims 4 enjoyed a flawless launch in the fall of 2014 and the live service has been releasing new content and updates to passionate fans on a weekly basis ever since.

Through my career I have combined my training as an Electrical Engineer with my applied software experience and passion for building and leading teams and processes to deliver results for a variety of challenges.

Professional EXPERIENCE

ELECTRONIC ARTS, Redwood Shores, CA1995 to Nov 2015

Sr. Director of Product Development – Maxis Worlds2014-4015

Lead development director of an as-yet to be released original title, which will be available for all major platforms including Apple iOS, Google,Android, Sony PlayStation, Microsoft,Xbox and Microsoft Windows.Led team from concept through green light as theybuilt prototypes using C and C# on Unity 4, Unity 5, Unreal 4, and EA’s own Frostbite engines.

Worked with business affairs, EA Maxis’ CTO and the licensor of Unity Engine, Epic Games to negotiate an option for a fixed cost perpetual licensefor the Unreal 4 engine.

Responsible for budget and staffing plans for California and Shanghai development teams.Actively adapted the teams’ development processes and tools for speed and agility in a start-up like atmosphere.Employed modified scrum methodologies with sprints and managed releases in Jira.Specified and oversaw development of Excel-based custom scope, capacity and drift project management tools leveragingJira data, which allowed us to make near, mid and long term priority and capacity management decisions, optimize project headcount, and support franchise business modeling.

Partnered with marketing on qualitative and quantitative market analysis to verify and fine-tune product positioning and ensure data based design and product priorities.

Member of Quality Execution Panel (Qx),a core group of worldwide senior directors chargedto define and drive Qx directives through EAs teams and products. Ten Qx Practices were defined to drive higher confidence and predictability for both the quality and delivery of EA’s games.

Focusedon capturing and applying best practices in planning, execution, transparency and quality.Measurement and verification of success in the practices was telemetry based with metrics for designquality, execution, quality as measured by players, and quality as measured by QA (embedded quality assurance partnerships) and QE (automated test verification engineering).

Sr. Director of Product Development – The Sims 42011-2014

The Sims 4 Launched in September 2014 and is available on Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac platforms with online sharing features for creating Sims and building blueprints for houses.In the year since launch in Fall 2014, 3.9 million players have played over 179 million sessions averaging 1.4 hours each. Players have created 92,800,000 Sims across 27,900 years of gameplay.The system has sustained 130K simultaneous users in production and 1.2M under end-to-end load and usability testing.The service has delivered dozens of content, gameplay, stability and engagement releases since launch.

The Sims 4 –Member of Sr. Leadership Team

While on The Sims 4, I was a member of the Sr. leadership team and accountable for online operations and core engineering development. I provided organizational, technical, operational and business leadership to ensure successful development, launch, patch and release of the base game and on-going digital revenue offerings to meet 10-year business goals.

Prepared and presentedregular project review and analysisto Sr. leadership for my teams.

  • Reviewed key technology and operational options and decisions and approved or obtained budgets to support them.Communicated these decisions in audience appropriate level of detail.
  • Reviewed and ensured accuracy of load testing test plans and results.
  • Ensured cost of operations was efficient and within budget.
  • Provided mitigation plans and options to overcome challenges.
  • Fostered culture for high performing teams with individual and team accountability.
  • At the completion of each milestone I worked with the other Sr. Leadership to prepare and present results to studio executives.These milestone reviews analyzed results, discussed accomplishments and misses, and concluded with a discussion of adjustments going forward.
  • Participated in daily Sr. leadership meetings and delivered weekly risk, opportunity, and development reports to the studio SVP withSr.leadership team.

The Sims 4 – Sr. Director of Engineering

Responsible for 60+ developers including client and server engineering, online services, creativity game modes,tools engineering, DevOps, LiveOps, and the mobile companion application teams.I led a team of six development directors to deliver on the goals in these areas.Direction included setting group goals, targets and negotiation of resources with production and development direction partners.

  • Worked with and mentored reporting directors regarding team assembly, hiring, performance management, and the creation and execution of staff and development plans. Ran regular milestone and schedule reviews. Responsible for selection, negotiation and vetting of on- and off-site contracting talent via EA’s standardized vendor process. Worked with legal and business affairs stakeholders to create and update vender agreements.
  • Responsible for staff and development plans.
  • Responsible for vendor capability vetting, contract negotiation and deliverable sign-off.Worked with legal and business affairs to create and update vender agreements for contract partners.
  • Creativity game modes for The Sims 4: Create A Sim and Build mode.Create A Sim allowed the player to create virtually anyone.Build mode provided powerful tools to imagine and build a home, business or venue.I was responsible for capacity balancing across these features to best meet the design goals or the product.

The Sims 4- Sr. Director,Online Services

The Sims 4 was built from the ground up to be a live service with rapid metrics-driven development of updates and rapid release of patches and new content.Responsible for delivery of the technology, infrastructure and organization to support the franchise transformation from a packaged goods business to a live service business and to ensure a flawless launch of The Sims 4.

I directly managed The Sims 4 server team through Alpha, and then recruited a reporting development director to final and launch.During this time I led team through a series of high profile simulations, tests, and player betas to fully validate the backend prior to launch.Drove evaluations and reports on 100% end-to-end testing from player to each service.Efforts rewarded with the first flawless launch of an EA Maxis title as measured by 99.8% uptime through the first 3 months of operations.

Accomplishments of the online services teams under my direction:

  • Business technology: Intelligent in game ecommerce feature set built around a social gallery of user generated and shared content.
  • Telemetry driven targeted offers and upgrades along with a recommendation engine to surface content of interest.
  • Software update and patching technology integrated directly into the game to drive upgrade adoption.
  • 99.8% online service up time. Self-healing back-end services combined with intelligent client logic to allow for any range of play from offline mode to partially connected to full featured seamlessly.
  • Highly scalable architecture tested to 1.2 million concurrent users.Service can be virtualized to run on a single physical machine or scaled up to meet increased loadallowing for continual cost per player optimization.
  • Optimized Online Cost of Service per Player
  • Specificationand overseeing creation and operation of the Irish data center.
  • Creation and maintenance of Online Cost Of Revenue (OCOR)modeling.This includes forecasting and tracking of server and storage infrastructure and bandwidth.
  • Day-to-day operation of the server development and DevOps during development and LiveOps for patch and release management post launch.
  • Ran cost / performance evaluation of Oracle 10 RAC, which was then in use, versus Cassandra 2.3. The evaluation resulted in a switch to Cassandra in 2014, thereby saving over $6 million in licensing costs per year.

The Sims 4 – Lead Development Director, Launch Readiness Process

Launch Readiness was a rigorous process to audit, review and support a teams ability to launch online games and services.Beginning 4 – 6 months prior to launch, the Launch Readiness process assembled cross-functional stakeholders from across the company to actively plan, predict and mitigate risk around online services including launch, monitoring, patching, promotions, forums, marketing, community web site launches and support.

Developed a gap analysis of our ability to end-to-end test The Sims 4 service and every connected EA or vendor stack and service.This resulted in either an augmentation of system testing capabilities, such as with a friends load test environment being established, or in the establishment of mitigation strategies for potential issues that couldn’t be tested fully.For example, even though we couldn’t test Auth at scale in the load test environment, we could test a portion of the traffic and then measure the ratio of capacity used per increasing load. We then worked with the Origin and system test groups to increase capacity in the production environment to meet the expected load.

I oversaw the process from a project risk management perspective and audited partner plans, then ensured any discovered issues were addressed.This involved review and influence over partner group schedules, deliverables, test plans, milestones and support needs.

The Sims 4 - Additional Examples of Technical Management and Leadership

  • Worked with senior engineeringstaff and franchise technical directors to evaluate a native port of Sims 4 to Apple Mac OS X.In the past, the franchise had always licensed a 3rd party shim,Cider, developed by TransGaming to run on Mac OS X.This was costly and reduced the performance of our games by up to 30%.I drove a cost/benefit ROI analysis as well as predictive analysis of the technical and performance debt and lack of business flexibility associated with shim layer solution.My efforts led to the decisionto create the first native Mac port of a Sims game to date.Support for Mac OS X 10.7.5 (Lion) and up was launched to players of the Sims 4 in February 2015.Mac OSX graphics support was provided via OpenGL. This technology choice simplified and reduced the cost of future ports of components to iOS mobile apps as well.
  • My team was responsible for development of a post launch mobile companion app for The Sims 4 Gallery feature.Partnered with external developer, Globant, to create an Apple iOS and Google Android version of the online Gallery feature working with a distributed team of 10+ developers based in Uruguay.
  • As base game development completed in fall of 2014, I led an assessment of technical debt across the franchise, and built a post-launch prioritized plan to address key debt in parallel with and without risk to planned digital commerce offerings.
  • Responsible for groups that designed and implemented downloadable content delivery,patching technology, and delivery infrastructure. These groups also developed our ban and user generated content (UGC) management technologies and tools.
  • Provided requirements and functionality feedback for evaluation and selection of company-wide license of CMS solution.Evaluation included Drupal, Alfresco, Adobe CMS and others.
  • My role in Launch Readiness was to oversee the process from a project risk management perspective and to Audit the plans of partner groups and ensure any discovered issues are addressed.This involved review and influence over partner group schedules, deliverables, test plans, milestones and support needs.

Sr. Director of Product Development – The Sims Medieval 2010 to 2011

The Sims Medieval was a re-imagining of The Sims mechanics as a light RPG for Microsoft Windows.The core challenge of this production was to provide players a Sims game with a satisfying castle building experience within and RPG on a non-accommodating tech base without experts on the engine, and to complete the project in only 9 months.I mitigated potential issues by providing access toexpert consultants, fostering group learning and knowledge sharing, and ensuring that the design could be accomplished using existing strengths of the engine.Castle construction tools werebuilt via a novel approach of allowing players to assemble and customize pre-built components of castles thru a unique shell-fitting technology and to tie the unlocking of castle components to the story progression.This meant that users indirectly accomplished their goal of building by playing the game.

I was responsible for team assembly and hiring, as well as staff and development plans. I was also responsible for vendor capability vetting, contract negotiation and deliverable sign-off.Worked with legal and business affairs stakeholders to create and update vendor agreements.

Prior to this I was Director of Engineering for The Sims Medieval base game then on the Pirates and Nobles expansion pack I was theLead Development Director with 3 Art and Engineering Directors reporting to me.Managed spending carefully andlaunched the project on time and $1 million dollars under budget.

Sr. Director of Product Development – My Sims Franchise 2007-2009

Game / Release Date
MySims Agents / Sep 29, 2009
MySims Kingdom / Oct28, 2008
MySims / Sep28, 2007

I was responsible for development direction and project management of 3 different releases of the MySims IP from Electronic Arts.MySims was a market opportunity franchise designed and targeted to break into the Japanese video game market as well as expand the Maxis/Sims customer base to include more kids.

MySims combined creativity tools, iconic characters and storytelling.It was built from the ground up to leverage the innovative Wiimote controller of the Nintendo WII platform. Code was written in C++ and Lua.Asset conditioning pipelines were written in Python 2.3.

Innovations included a unique and intuitive construction system that allowed players to fully customize their world while simulation continued.Regions of continuous physics and build ability were defined to support this goal.We also ported the base game to windows for a co-operative multiplayer experience.

Sr. Director of Product Development – Central Technology Group2003-2006

Served as an ambassador of change and collaboration across EA.Building on the success of the tools group I created for the James Bond –Everything Or Nothing production, I was asked to form and run the Central Technology Group (CTG) to provide common infrastructure, tools, and workflows across the EA Redwood Shores studio.

Responsible for directing a team of 30-50 engineers and technical artists to develop a shared set of tools, pipelines and engine runtimecomponents for all games in development at the Redwood Shores studio.Responsible for organization design, team hiring, budgets and financial planning. Provided leadership and mentoring to three reporting directors, a senior architect, a group technical art director and an administrative assistant.I created financial models that calculated the worth of technology we provided.I created an embedded model in which CTG staff rotates onto client teams for some or all of a project.Thisensures that the technology is appropriate for the problem and that we have trained a local experttosupport the team going forward. This financial model was a valuable tool to communicate value to the studio and team leadership and to gain support for further spending against studio shared technology and the CTG group.

Served as a founder and advisor to a group of worldwide central technology development directors charged with driving technology sharing and convergence across Electronic Arts.This group consisted of theWW CTO andthe lead directors from each EA studio’s central technology group.Participated in quarterly summits at host EA studios to compare portfolios, needs, wins, challenges, and opportunities.The output was an assessment of technology convergence and sharing across the company with tuned up strategic and tactical plans to further savings and convergence.

My CTG team built technology that evolved and remained in use for five years at Redwood Shores and later the Visceral game studio.Games leveraging this technologyincluded James Bond –Casino Royal, The Godfather, The Godfather II, the Dead Space series, and the Dante’s Inferno series.Key technology created by these teams included:

  • AModel View Controller asset authoring and metadata markup platform called NEO, whichsupported hub-to-asset authoring.NEO provided a launch point for all content creation and combined a meta-database with authoring package content files and integrated with Perforce source control.
  • Trinity tools enabled cinematic authoring, connecting NEO and Maya assets together with virtual world data.
  • Character Control enabled gameplay-driven character animation state machines and dynamic content generation.
  • Proprietary lip-sync technology used for cinematics.
  • Deep and robust rigging and animation tools as well as a comprehensive workflow for animation authoring, integration and tuning.
  • Lighting and Visual FX tools and pipelines.

Sr. Director of Product Development – Auditor of EALA Goldeneye team.2004