EA is going to die - and that will improve gaming

[Ed130 The Vanguard]

EA isn't evil. EA isn't going to die anytime soon. Now, I know many have said this and I may just be repeating it, but it seems it needs to be engraved in your skull with an icepick! The ENTIRE POINT of a Company is to MAKE MONEY. Now you may not believe this, but EA is making money. They will continue to do whatever they can to make more money.

Also, here is another thing: EA doesn't hold every little creative right over the games. It wasn't EA's fault for the changes in the new SimCity: It was designed that way by Maxis itself. Not EA. MAXIS. The servers? Owned by EA, but managed by Maxis. There are many ways you can manage a huge load on a handful of servers. Mind you, none of them are easy and I am still learning myself, but the fact of the matter is that Maxis, NOT EA, was the one mismanaging the servers. They even admitted to it.

Refusing to buy games that you would enjoy just because of the company? Stupid. Very stupid. That lowers the chance of that franchise having future installments. It is even worse if it is a special-type of genre like say Horror or Turn-Based Strategy. Have your petty boycott. I will be over here, playing good games and having fun.

EDIT: Please note, the Sim City rant was just a recent example*

You didn't watch the video provided did you?

Making money is fine and good. Making short term gains at the expense of long term stability and damaging brand recognition isn't a viable strategy.

Sure you will generate revenue, but the damage to your brand and consumer dissatisfaction will make it harder to continue 'making money' later on.

I also find you belief that EA didn't have some part to play in the server debarkle to be naive. Putting up servers, especially a worldwide network of them requires allot of time, effort, and money. To believe that EA was in the dark or that they didn't have some form of oversight is absurd.

 

[Olas]

Personally I'd rather EA just stop sucking and trying to scam it's buyers and become a decent company. But I guess dying works too.

 

[Tom Waits' hat]

The consumers always have the choice not to purchase the game or the in-game DLCs. EA doesn't have control over consumers' credit card. So, I made a bad choice in in my purchase, based on EA advertisement or the "falsified reviews", who is it to blame but myself. Because at the end of the day, I'm the one that press the purchase button, not EA.

That's part of my point, that people keep lapping it all up despite getting screwed. Devaluing the entire industry by making it clear that it doesn't matter what garbage you throw out the window, you'll still get huge bank for it.

Getting screwed, it's really a matter of personal opinion. Believe it or not, this whole EA things to a lot of older gamers with disposable income is really a non-issues. Can't speak for everyone, but for me and a lot of my friends it is not the stuff we lose our mind over it. Personally, I see this always online DRM as a business decision, and I respect that. End of story for me. Like I said before, this EA thing is such a non-issue when compares to other real life things.

 

[IamLEAM1983]

I seriously doubt we're heading towards another crash. We're a generation that's been raised at the proverbial teat of electronic entertainment, as opposed to those who got to see the seventies' and eighties' emergence of electronic amusement. We're not the ones who got to see gaming as a newfangled whirlygig; we've been in it since Day One. We're lacking distance.

Because of that, most of us will keep feeding it, no matter how shitty it gets. If anything, I imagine we *might* see FA slough off its current skin by utterly cannibalizing all of its developers to oblivion. Past that, it becomes its own mega-dev and re-divides itself into new development households for various markets and genres. This could be good as much as it could be utterly awful.

Part of the problem (at least by my reckoning) seems to be the fact that the sacrosanct Graphics matter so much, now. Dev studios crank out more engines and basic tech than they do games or compelling narratives. Look at id, for instance, desperately trying to stay relevant by throwing Hardware Porn after Hardware Porn at us. The industry's forgetting Content and choosing to favour nice and shiny shaders and insane polycounts because, hey, David Cage said it best. Polygons = EMOTIONS.

On the whole, the industry's become extremely complacent and shallow. I'm glad we've got indies around, but one look at Mojang's strategy makes me wonder. I know they've got Scrolls and some other game in development, but it feels like they keep throwing all their eggs into Minecraft's basket. How is that healthy?

Isn't that like EA whoring out Battlefield or ActiBlizz whoring out CoD?

 

[Trippy Turtle]

Everyone's problem here seems to be EA's (Very good) games having problems that they wouldn't care about if another less successful company had, or that they throw out 'unfinished' and 'cash grab' games simply to make a quick profit.
Imagine that, a company making money.
EA cannot and will not completely ruin the gaming industry as everyone seems to think and what seems contrary to popular belief they don't intentionally create server problems.
I am starting to believe half the reason everyone insults EA is because it is successful, with the other half being because everyone else is doing it. When it comes to topics like this, people here have less rational arguments than /v/.

 

[Sansha]

Getting screwed, it's really a matter of personal opinion. Believe it or not, this whole EA things to a lot of older gamers with disposable income is really a non-issues. Can't speak for everyone, but for me and a lot of my friends it is not the stuff we lose our mind over it. Personally, I see this always online DRM as a business decision, and I respect that. End of story for me. Like I said before, this EA thing is such a non-issue when compares to other real life things.

I agree and respect always-on DRM as a business decision - I utterly despise piracy and it actually curtails it effectively, but the reality is people find themselves with an unplayable game because of their unreliable connections - read: the best they can afford or are able to get in their location, and EA flat-out refusing to refund them, despite that, a poor quality game and unacceptable server issues.

I'd say that constitutes 'getting screwed', and no - I don't understand why people with unreliable connections buy it knowing it's going to be always-on in the first place either.

And yes, it's a non-issue compared to real-life issues, which I assure you I'm no stranger to, but like I said - I love gaming far too much to stand for this shit any longer. I'm appalled that, in my opinion, gaming in general is worse than it's ever been in the twenty years I've been playing. I'm fed up with it and choose to take a stand, not just by refusing to do business with EA but by also voicing my opinion about their unacceptable business model.

 

[ksn0va]

Much as I hate them, I kinda hope they don't go under. Shitty as Origin is, I kinda still want to be able to play ME3 (I liked the damn game, okay!)

I hate the too, but people seem to have forgotten that there are a lot of good people working there and most of them are just guilty by association.

 

[F-I-D-O]

Improving the IP, even over time, is much better than letting it stagnate forever. At least they took the effort to make it work by moving it between developers (and finding it a home at Criterion). And I was under the impression that the original few NFS games were fairly well regarded. Oh, and they also slowed down the release schedule, instead of killing it in Guitar Hero style. But again, opinions.

Slowed down the release schedule from every year to every other year? My god, the restraint.

With Alice, there was a risk it would sell terribly.

A risk involved in publishing any game, ever. EA don't get brownie points for doing their job as a fucking games publisher.

Specifically with Madness Returns. Yeah, platformers were popular. Last I checked those old platformers didn't have a disembodied cat head following you around.

Because surreal platformers weren't a thing before Alice, right? I mean, Mario and Sonic weren't exactly dowsed in surreal imagery or anything...

Yep, praise be to EA for single-handedly inventing trippy platformers...

And no, they didn't throw their company under the bus for one game. They took money from the bigger franchises and USED it for experimental projects.

Experimental? Please. The original Alice was a cool game, but it was hardly some piece of digital experimentation. It was a pretty standard third-person game with a cool twist on a familiar story.

Onwards to Dragon's Age. Yeah, none of those you mention sell Call of Duty or Battlefield levels of copies. And Skyrim, the big RPG seller of this gen, was a bit behind DA:O. Fallout took the shooter path, and while I love the game, it's hardly a Dragon's Age level RPG. Oh, and just to add fuel to the fire, I LIKED Dragon's Age 2. Granted, I liked the story more than the gameplay, but I had fun running through Kirkwall. If only game taste was subjective.

Skyrim behind DA:O? Skyrim sold twice what the first Dragon Age did. And DA itself sold nowhere near as much as COD or Battlefield, so I don't exactly understand what you're trying to argue.

If you like DA2, then more power to you, but while tastes are subjective, game mechanics are not. And DA2 had some objectively wonky design.

And there's something to be said for the masses of employees under EA's brand. Good luck getting the tester's together to formulate a new EA sized company. Best case the head designers get together and everyone else gets shed like dead weight. Weak argument - save the company for the people, but still a point.

Yeah, it's not like new videogame companies have ever been created from the ashes of old ones. Oh, wait, silly me.

Yep. Marketing. Something a publisher does for it's brands. And that EA usually does well (and failed miserably at with A:MR)

Funny how EA seem to spend more on marketing than they do on actually developing games now. What was Battlefield 3's marketing budget? Something like $100 million?

You ask me, that's just absurd. No game needs $100 million to be marketed. And it says everything about EA that they'd prefer to spend more on selling a game than they would making one.

They didn't drag their feet to make it playable, they made the hard call to actually disable parts to get it playable, to give the customer something. And last I checked, those features were coming back on relativly soon, if they weren't already. Should the problem have happened? No, but they reacted to it quickly.

Taking the best part of a week to get a game playable is not quick by any fucking definition I care to use. Not when there shouldn't have been a problem in the first place.

Right now, you sound like you're defending EA as they're kicking you in the crotch. It doesn't matter how lightly they kicked you, they shouldn't be kicking you there in the first place!

And as I said, that's a hell of a lot better than releasing a game with multiplayer STILL IN BETA which Paradox did with Impire.

So because they're not Paradox, that makes them a-ok? Well, 99% of the industry isn't Paradox. In fact, by definition, every single other gaming development studio isn't Paradox. Does that make every other developer and publisher in the world alright? Even Zynga?

Plus, they don't legally have to fix it. They sold the customer a product that technically worked on launch day. The EULA you agree to lets them turn off the servers, and prevents people from suing if the servers are off.

Firstly, EULA's aren't legally binding, no matter how hard publishers may try and convince you otherwise. Secondly, the product did not technically work on launch day. For the majority of their customers, it didn't work at all. If EA had refused to fix that, then I don't know about in the US, but here in the European Union, EA would have been dragged up before a commission and done for fraudulently taking people's money. Because believe it or not, but consumer rights are actually a thing, and people can get recompensed for being given a shitty product. Amazing, I know.

Since Mirror's Edge?
DeathSpank
Warp
Gatling Gears
BulletStorm
Risk Factions (licensed, but still)
Dragon's Age: Origins
Brutal Legend
Dante's Inferno
Shank
Shadows of the Damned
Kingdoms of Amular: Reckoning

How old are those titles? Amular is a game that EA didn't finance at all. The great State of Jersey did. And how old are most of those other games? Three, four, five years old now? What's EA done since then? More Battlefield? More MoH? My goodness, they're a veritable font of creativity.

Not really sure of your complaint with this next bit. I don't like always-online. Never have. I don't buy games with it. But it seems that people always say x publisher should die because of y developer's game due to the DRM used. And that annoys me on a personal level.

Except in this case, EA and Maxis are one and the same. So Y developer's game and Y publisher's DRM are also the same.

And that's the key point with the whole publisher thing -> they don't make the games. DEVELOPERS make the games. Publishers have a say, but so do developers. The writer for Dead Space was saying the action push was necessary for the story to evolve.

That's called spin, dahling. That's what happens when a developer is given a mandate by a publisher, but can't say they've been given a mandate. And it happens way more often than you think. Just talk to any developer who's made it out of the triple-A industry. Or just watch some of Brian Fargo's videos. He'll happily rant about the likes of EA for hours.

If you have a complaint about the core gameplay, rage about Maxis or Visceral. Don't ***** about EA.

My, you are a naive one. When a publisher finances a game and owns the IP rights, they have the power to mandate gameplay changes and additions, and they use that power on a regular basis.

I'm not defending their bad calls. I'm simply saying, in this most likely anti-EA thread, that maybe they should be burned at the stake.

Oh, you're one of us after all. Welcome to the cause. You hold the torch, I'll fetch the burning pitch. We gonna have us a barbecuEA tonight.

No, Alice was not the first "surreal" platformer, but it sure as hell wasn't a Mario or Spyro. It's dark tone in a kid-targeted genre was, in fact, a gamble. Yeah, every game has a risk of selling terribly. But some games have more than others, which is how any publisher decides what to fund.

Yep, Skyrim proved fantasy RPGs could sell. Too bad it came out AFTER DA:O, which is what I was trying to say in the previous post. I know it sold more than DA:O, but at the time of DA:O development, no one knew that.

The Paradox comparison was brought up as a recent example of a publisher rushing a game out the door that everyone ignored. And then they did nothing to fix it. EA pushes out a project and gets crushed by a MASSIVE amount of users, -better "get the torch". And this isn't an argument about Zynga or anyone else. It's about EA.

Everyone one of those games I listed were posts Mirror's Edge, so 2009-2013.

 

[King Aragorn]

The problem with EA is their a publisher who have good things in their hands but do bad to them. Dead Space is one of my favorite IP's, and it got run to the ground with 3. Crysis is another example. To be honest, if EA dies, maybe i'll see better from some franchises that they unfortunately have.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

And yes, it's a non-issue compared to real-life issues, which I assure you I'm no stranger to, but like I said - I love gaming far too much to stand for this shit any longer. I'm appalled that, in my opinion, gaming in general is worse than it's ever been in the twenty years I've been playing.

That's a long time to be gaming, 20 years. I'm curious to know how you'd substantiate that, other that draping it in shrouds of opinion. What exactly is it about gaming today that you find demonstrably worse than gaming in the early 90's?

I'm not trying to be argumentative...I've been gaming since the early 80's, and my experience is pretty much the opposite of yours, so I'm curious. I've never had access to such a wide variety of games for such a small amount of money before. In the early 90's I was in University, and my gaming budget would only allow me a few purchases a year, at $60-70 prices. If one of those was a dud, god help me. I remember buying the execrable Theme Park and it just flat out did-not-work with my hardware. Fortunately for me, one of the disks was faulty, and the store I bought it at RELUCTANTLY took it back, and let me trade it in for XCOM. I remember buying Daggerfall at release...how hyped I was for that game...and it had so many bugs it makes a modern Bethesda product look like a model of stability. Not to mention crushingly generic game play and "100's of miles" of copy-paste.

What is it exactly about today you find so intolerable? Is it the DD sales where you can get games...sometimes only a few months old...for pennies on the dollar? The indie revolution? The kickstarter phenomenon? GOG unearthing old classics and cleaning them up for re-distribution? The booming e-sports scene? The fact you can download an obscure game directly to your hard drive instead of bumming all over town looking for a store that is actually selling it?

Or is it that the occasional AAA game doesn't live up to expectations? Or the fact we have a baker's dozen of bad launches each year? Is that it?

I'm honestly curious. I know you said "in my opinion" and that's fine...at the end of the day your opinion is your opinion, and if you hate gaming now that's your prerogative, I cannot gainsay you. But I hear people saying things like "argh blargh gaming today is a nightmare" and "oh woe, X number of years ago it was sooooo much better", and usually it's like...some 16 year old kid, and that gives it some perspective. And sometimes it some older guy whose tastes just stopped evolving in like, 1997, and so he won't play anything that isn't isometric 2D and he looks with sneering disdain upon all the new fangled toys, and he will SMITE your ass with his cane if you disparage a golden oldie. But it's fucking confusing, this "We're living in a gaming apocalypse" talk. I bought a bunch of toss off games in the last Steam Sale. Stuff I wasn't even particularly interested in at release. Some of it for no better reason than it had good word of mouth. And played for hundreds of hours through various titles, and had a great time. And then I come online and everyone is hot in their pants to tell me that gaming is shit, and all I can think is "okay then".

Reminds me of MMO forums, really. I'll play the game for 30 hours, love it, log into the forums, and have people lined up around the block to tell me that it's all shit and misery. Spend enough time there, and you'll start believing it.

TLDR - I'm sorry you think gaming "in general" has never been worse. I think that's crazy talk, and quite literally cannot comprehend how anyone who has been gaming more than a few months can say that and actually believe it. But, of course, this is all in our opinion, right? Naught to be done about it.

 

[Ziame]

Bioware ended up completely rejigging the ending of ME3 simply because of how vocal their fanbase were.

You lost me at this point. Surprised noone picked up on this.

What, you mean they didn't rejig the ending after fans made a complete stink?

*Goes to stare at the Extended Cut DLC in utter confusion*

Jeffers: Are you real? Did I imagine you? Is this all a dream...?

They didn't _completely_ rejig. damn those rejiggers

 

[Little Gray]

TLDR - I'm sorry you think gaming "in general" has never been worse. I think that's crazy talk, and quite literally cannot comprehend how anyone who has been gaming more than a few months can say that and actually believe it. But, of course, this is all in our opinion, right? Naught to be done about it.

Oh dear god that you for saying that. I will never understand the gaming has only gotten worse and worse since X decade. Not only have games been getting better and better for me but there is so much more information about then readily available that it makes buying a dud far less likely.

Almost every time I go back and try and play a game that I remember loving while growing up it just ends up sucking. There has been so many minor advances that we dont even pay attention to or realize that have greatly improved gaming. I love the fact that games these days dont require to you read a freaking textbook anymore just to understand the basic controls. Everything is so much more intuitive and use friendly that it makes gaming so much better and more enjoyable.

People just need to realised, it just a video game guys.

The majority already have, a long time ago. What you have left is the extremely vocal minority who will never change their ways.

 

[Sansha]

That's a long time to be gaming, 20 years. I'm curious to know how you'd substantiate that, other that draping it in shrouds of opinion. What exactly is it about gaming today that you find demonstrably worse than gaming in the early 90's?

I first started gaming when I was five years old, and my first title was Jazz Jackrabbit.

I'm now 25, and the reason I say it's the worst it's been is just because of all the garbage flooding the market, mostly the shit games being churned out one after the other just so the developers can stay afloat. It makes me weary of spending any decent amount of money on a game, because they still put full price on games they half-ass while super quality games like Skyrim insultingly share the price tag.

Case in point, the godawful state of the Call of Duty franchise. I played the first MW and I was bloody done. Soon as they tried to jab a story into a war, I just lost interest. What got to me about the WW2 CoD games was that there wasn't a story, just 'look at how horrible this war was' and 'there are some Germans, here is a rifle. Don't have too much fun'. I personally think World at War is a masterpiece of storytelling because it simply has basic characters and no real story arc, simply the horror of the worst theaters of the war, especially making me question who out of the Germans or Russians was more terrible.

Trust me, I know what MMO forums are like, but my theory behind that is people are only motivated to pipe-up when things go wrong. People love to complain about bad work, but won't praise good work, because frankly that's what they paid for in the first place. If you've not read my little story a couple of pages back about the literal riot EVE Online fans kicked up over shit content, check it out.

Valve, Bethesda and Rockstar are pretty much the only things keeping me sane as far as new titles go, and our own Yahtzee is the only critic I trust to have any kind of unbias and integrity anymore.

What I utterly despise is the shocking lack of demos in today's games. I'll simply not spend money on a game unless I can try it for myself first, and the lack of demos only demonstrates that a developer knows their title is shit, and doesn't want us to know until it's too late.

Duke Nukem Forever destroyed my trust in the industry. It's my first game that was so poisonously bad, so rancid and putrid, that I couldn't even get halfway through it, and now I'll not buy a game until I've been able to thoroughly test it myself.

I still miss my ninety dollars.

 

[Atmos Duality]

People just need to realised, it just a video game guys.

I'm sorry, I forgot "It's just a video game" rendered bad business immune to criticism.
I wonder what else could be justified with that line of thinking...

 

[Windcaler]

All developers are still struggling after the Recession of 2008, but EA is the one who's hurting the very most, looking at their still falling stock prices and growing hatred from gamers.

This needs to continue.

Personally, I despise EA and will absolutely not associate with them. I will never again be one of their customers; the last EA-published title I purchased was the last Sims2 expansion.

I grew up with the SimCity franchise. I absolutely adore it, right up until SC4. I really do want to play this new one - it looks like the game I remember and love, and that I'd have a barrel of fun playing it. This goes the same for The Sims 3 and Battlefield 3.

But I will not do business with EA. I am boycotting EA until they have filed for bankruptcy and have sold off their assets to better companies. I'm willing to give up games I love because I cannot morally justify doing business with such a horrible corporate entity.

I don't understand why people are surprised by the unacceptable server issues, crippling DRM and compromises in the gameplay from EA. I don't understand why people are still giving them dollars in exchange for the garbage they're firing out, their borderline sociopathic customer service and ridiculous PR, seen in interviews, press releases, putting the blame on piracy and excuses for their shitty behavior.

Why does any of this still surprise you?

Why do you still purchase EA-published titles? To support their real developers, or because you don't care and don't mind allowing this to happen?

I believe the second gaming crash is coming, and while the titanic names from history will barely survive, Valve will come out still on top, for their exemplary business practices, customer service, quality games and, of course, Steam.

But the only way this situation will actually improve is if you, like the gamers of the 80's, stand up for quality and breathing life into the industry you love. Not rolling over and accepting shitty releases and being given broken promises by customer service.

EA is trying desperately, clawing at the cracks in the well, trying to keep from drowning, but really they deserve to die, and I'm proud to be one of few contributing to its demise by refusing to add my string to its lifeline.

I love gaming far too much to stand for this shit any longer.

The industry constantly goes through booms and lulls its been that way since the industry became an industry.

That said, as much as I despise EA's business practices I do not believe them crashing would be a good thing for the industry. The biggest problem would be the loss of thousands perhaps millions of jobs. The second problem is less competition in the market. Competition breeds innovation and can only help the industry and the consumer. So no, even though I despise EA I dont think them crashing would be good overall.

That said, the best thing that could happen is for them to becomes a respectable company again but thats probably a pipe dream.

 

[Sansha]

That said, as much as I despise EA's business practices I do not believe them crashing would be a good thing for the industry. The biggest problem would be the loss of thousands perhaps millions of jobs. The second problem is less competition in the market. Competition breeds innovation and can only help the industry and the consumer. So no, even though I despise EA I dont think them crashing would be good overall.

That said, the best thing that could happen is for them to becomes a respectable company again but thats probably a pipe dream.

I very much doubt EA employs millions of people. I think the last I saw was 10,000+/-. I also doubt they'd lose their jobs; EA's assets would be split up and sold off to other publishers/developers. And frankly those hacks in management don't deserve their jobs anyway. Don't you usually get fired for performing badly in any industry?

I've not seen a great deal of innovation... well, any from EA in a while. Seems not many companies are willing to take too great a risk in new ideas either, focusing on a 'guaranteed to sell' model. It's a pity Dead Space 3 was so disappointing. And it's a shame we've not seen anything from Valve in a while, but they're making way too much money off TF2 anyway.