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ELECTRONIC ARTS: THE DONALD TRUMP OF GAMING - by Mr Biffo

30/11/2017

63 Comments

 
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Why was Visceral games closed down, and the Star Wars game it had been working on cancelled? Because apparently nobody wants to play no linear single-player games no more, brah! Except... the story is more complicated than that. Except... maybe it isn't. Maybe the story is very, very simple - but the reality of it is buried beneath half-truths and outright lies. Such is the world in 2017.

Quick recap on some things: a few years back, Disney bought LucasFilm. Almost immediately, Disney closed down LucasFilm's games division, LucasArts, cancelling the hotly-anticipated Star Wars game 1313.

Then EA announced it was taking over the Star Wars gaming brand, later announcing that Amy Hennig - the architect of Naughty Dog's Uncharted series - would be coming aboard to develop a brand new, story-based, Star Wars experience with EA's Visceral Games (the team behind the well-regarded Dead Space series).

In the meantime, EA had a big hit with Star Wars Battlefront.

Fast forward to earlier this year. EA cancels Hennig's Star Wars game, shuts down Visceral, and says that it's going to instead focus on "a broader experience that allows for more variety and player agency, leaning into the capabilities of our Frostbite engine and reimagining central elements of the game to give players a Star Wars adventure of greater depth and breadth to explore."

The Frostbite engine, in case you're unaware, is mostly used for EA's online multiplayer games, such as the Battlefield titles. "Agency" in case you're unaware, is a word that most of us never heard or used until about three years ago, when it became popular with games journo types, and it makes my skin crawl every time I hear it. Like when somebody shortens the word "radiators" to "rads". You know: in the way that somebody awful would do.

Anyway, cue outrage over what appears to be EA wanting to make multiplayer Star Wars games, purely so that it can rinse players dry with microtransactions.

However, according to Kotaku, there was more to the story. Except... then Star Wars Battlefront 2 arrived, loaded with microtransactions which made popular characters difficult to access without spending money. Cue outrage. Cue politicians getting involved. Cue EA removing microtransactions from Battlefront 2, after failing to convince players - via a widely reviled statement on Reddit - that the game was structured in this way to improve their experience. 

The publicity over all of this has been a PR disaster for EA. Battlefront 2 - which should've been a guaranteed smash - has done worse than expected. Therefore, you'd expect EA to have learned its lesson and change course.

Apparently not now that we live in an era where nobody takes any degree of responsibility for their actions.
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HENNIG WHICH WAY BUY LOOSE
The canned Visceral/Hennig title, codenamed Ragtag, was a “much more linear game, that people don’t like as much today as they did five years ago or ten years ago," EA's Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen told an audience of investors earlier this week. 

More honestly, he went on to say that EA is forced to “cut the bridge when you realize can’t really make a lot of money on something".

Jorgensen assured investors that EA isn't giving up on microtransactions, and is continuing to monitor the Battlefront 2 issue, presumably to find ways to encourage players to spend money on top of the money they've already spent to play the game. If the company is forced to remove loot boxes - widely damned as a form of gambling - it would need to find "another economic model to try and make up for some of the economics you lose"

In short, EA continues to argue that the linear single-player experience is dead, as a way to justify its actions.

In one breath it tries to blame that on the changing tastes of the player. In the next, it appears to admit that it will no longer focus on linear games, simply because they don't make as much money. Furthermore, it's telling that these latest comments come from the company's Chief Financial Officer - rather than somebody with a creative background.

Reading between the lines, it all seems to be motivated by nothing less than greed.

Uncharted 4 has sold almost 10 million copies since it was released. Now imagine a game along the lines of Uncharted 4, but with the Star Wars brand attached, and as a multiformat release. You can, at a conservative estimate, at least triple those sales figures. It would, presumably, be wildly profitable - and that should be enough for most.

Unfortunately, it isn't enough for EA. It wants more. More, more, more, more, more, more. Money money money. Always sunny - in the rich boy's world!
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SHELVE IT
Let's put aside the fact that I, entirely personally, would love a proper, full-blown, single-player, story-led, Star Wars game. Let's ignore that, for me, going on an adventure is the reason I love games, that I love the potential of games as a story-telling medium. 

Let's shelve all that, yeah?

Because I am sick of this now. It's not that I feel sick that they're depriving me - and something that millions of other Star Wars-loving gamers - of something we would, potentially, enjoy. I'm sick of them lying about their reasons for doing it. I'm disgusted that they're too lazy to even lie convincingly, and seem unable to hide their true, covetous, motives. It's profoundly insulting, and stokes the same embers of rage in me as when the likes of Trump do it.

I mean, look at the comments beneath any Trump tweet, and you'll see that he doesn't have to convince all of us that he's doing a good job; he just has to convince those who are naive or blinkered or angry enough to believe it. Similarly, EA is no longer making games for everyone; just those weak or wealthy enough to keep spending money after they've already paid for a game. The rest of us can go swing in the breeze.

What I really hate, is how this changes the games industry. When I started playing games... yes, it was still an industry, but it felt motivated by creativity and passion. It was an industry driven by those who could get the most out of the technology, to created wholly original experiences. They did it for the love. Not to get rich.

Now we get annual instalments of guaranteed hit franchises. We get loot crates. We get half the game hidden behind a paywall. We get expensive "season passes" which more often than not feel as if content that should've been included is deliberately being held back, dangled as a carrot to make players spend even more money.

As I'm getting older, I'm really starting to believe Capitalism is ruining the world. I mean, let's face it... without Capitalism there's no way we'd have that racist, idiot, pig in the White House. Without Capitalism video games wouldn't be created in a way that screws us over. It feels to me as if Capitalism is fighting to keep its grip on the world... except it's going to take all of us down with it when it goes.

MARX BROTHER
I mean, don't get me wrong; I'm not Karl Marx. I don't see a viable alternative right now. Communism? Yeah, right. 'Cos that seems always seems to work out great.

But we've been raised to believe - brainwashed, basically - that the Capitalist economic model of society is the one that is right and proper, when it's clear to anybody with any degree of compassion and empathy that it's motivated by selfishness. It's an engine that exists purely to keep itself running. We are but cogs, there to facilitate the Caribbean yacht holidays and branded private jets of the few.

I despair at how our society attempts to lie to us, how it dresses up the pursuit of profit for the privileged few as somehow beneficial to all of us. And I hate that EA is symptomatic of that with its hollow epithets about how the intent behind its paywall was "to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes."

The fact that its statement has become the most hated in Reddit history, the fact that every time it talks about nobody wanting linear games, doesn't make a jot of difference. EA continues to be utterly blinded by its pursuit of making as much money as possible, making games which benefit the privileged elite - those who can afford to spend a small fortune to get a "complete" game.

​I hate how it hides this in plain site, and admits that it's already working on ways to continue exploiting players - albeit, going forward, in a way which doesn't backfire as such a PR disaster.

With this in mind, there's only one way to stop it happening. We have to show them that this model doesn't make money. We have to demonstrate that what we want to buy are the best games. That we do still want single-player experiences. That the multiplayer games we want to play don't require us to buy beyond the initial outlay. And we have to convince as many people as possible to join us.

The only language companies like EA understand is the language of money and profit. And the only way to stop this is by blocking that profit, being strong, and not caving when we're tempted by the promise of a new in-game hat. How's that for "agency", wankers?
SPECIAL MESSAGE
Hello. I'm Mr Biffo. Do you enjoy the stuff I do? Yes? Then perhaps you might like to consider supporting me on Patreon, or with a PayPal donation (which you can send to digitiser2000@gmail.com).

It'd really help. You see, as a freelancer, money doesn't always flow freely, and it would benefit me enormously to have your support. My existing donors provide a financial safety net, and without them I'd have been howling into the abyss this past year. I can't thank them enough.

Furthermore, this site is entirely free to read - but back me on Patreon and you'll not only be awarded with the satisfaction that you'll helping to keep Digitiser2000 (and me) independent and alive, but also supporting my other projects, such as my funn-ee Twitter account Memory Assistant, and occasional YouTube videos.

Furthermore, by backing me on Patreon for as little as $1 - that's about 65p - a month, you get access to blogs, which give a bit more of a personal insight into my life, and what I'm up to, than I'd write about on here. Come on now: you won't even miss it. Though I wouldn't say no if you wanted to give more of course...

​Anyway. Thanks. Love you loads! Bye! Bye now. See you later, yeah? Okay, bye.
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63 Comments
Chris
30/11/2017 10:44:00 am

The irony of Mr Biffo saying "capitalism is bad, mmkay?" and then asking for money has not been missed.

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Jareth Smith
30/11/2017 10:53:13 am

Mr. Biffo isn't using microtransactions and is also creating unique content, as opposed to stale tripe which is simply there force gullible morons into purchasing nonsense.

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Mr Biffo
30/11/2017 11:00:30 am

Unfortunately, I live in a capitalist society, and I can't pay my mortgage on good intentions.

Chris
30/11/2017 03:47:02 pm

Apparently some landlords accept sexual favours... er... so you could move?

combat_honey
30/11/2017 12:41:27 pm

He's also probably wearing *clothes* produced under capitalism too, the vile hypocrite.

Strip, Biffo, strip!

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Mr Biffo
30/11/2017 12:44:23 pm

I don't strip for anything less than 80p.

Iwanttoopenmrbiffo’slootbox
30/11/2017 11:29:04 pm

£0.81p donation coming up!

Jareth Smith
30/11/2017 10:51:18 am

It's like with the majority of massive blockbuster movies - Transformers etc. - AAA games are largely cynical, money-making exercises. In this era of gaming, where the self-proclaimed "true gamers" have convinced themselves graphics are all that matter, it's no surprise the way has been paved for generic titles which look great but are insipid and banal.

To be fair to EA, it did support the excellent indie title Unravel, and the likes of Ubisoft (much maligned by the toxic gaming community) has also delivered gems such as CHILD of LIGHT and Valiant Hearts. It's easy to blame these developers, but they're there to make money and when a horde of impossibly belligerent, spoilt brats ramping across the online community, complaining away, sending volatile death threats, yet still purchasing the very things they're so obnoxiously lambasting... well, the devs are going to keep on churning this crap out.

If, like me, you're sick of the embarrassing world of mainstream gaming, then the indie scene is right there as the answer, along with Nintendo's consistently outstanding creative efforts. However, at the forefront is that vibrant and wonderful indie scene, which has produced so many works of genius in recent years. We just need the rest of the, frankly idiotic, gaming community to catch up and realise it's not all about HD graphics, specs, and comparing screenshots of games across the PS4, PC, Xbox One, and Switch. It's about how good the game is, which isn't going to happen when devs are putting so much effort into crafting beautiful looking games at the detriment of other areas.

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PeskyFletch
30/11/2017 12:38:48 pm

Xbone graphics sux, bro, shuddent compare to awesome ps4

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Jareth Smith
30/11/2017 01:53:50 pm

Woteva, blud, damn noobie scum!!! Gaystation 4 sux balls!!!! LOL! ROFLMAO!

Bilstar
30/11/2017 10:57:27 am

Yup. Yup that, sir. All of that. Yup.

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Psy-Q link
30/11/2017 11:16:39 am

Very timely, only this week I've been reading a lot of Jeff Vogel's blog posts (from Spiderweb Software) and here is one husband-and-wife team that still does this thing we call "game development" with love and passion. You don't have to like his games because of it, but you might.

I've largely written off the big publishers. They are deeply toxic. Indie and smaller studios is where it's at, all you have to do is sift through all the shite to find the gems.

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DEAN
30/11/2017 11:40:43 am

EA - have a market rife with piracy, preowned, sales, enormous overheads etc. to go along with your share holders and partners - your boss, their boss.... imagine the pressure on these games to perform - the cost of failure.

Gamers don't want to pay £80 for a game - not by and large - and certainly not upfront but with the raise in dev costs, wages, marketing... hell, every overhead only goes up, what are you to do?

EA got their fingers burned on this but their problem is real - how do you make money out of this industry when games have never cost more to make and, all things considered, never been so cheap?

Perhaps you'd rather spend £80 on a game than play a game with in game purchases?

Good for you, you're earning! But what if you didn't want to pay it and just waited for the preowned stuff, sales etc.... that's not paying the bills at EA.

Apple talked about making their products sticky - once you're firmly under their wing then it's difficult to escape - all your passwords, iTunes songs, games and so on are made so easy for you so long as you use their products - it's too much hassle to ever leave right?

Any game where you've invested heavily in upgrades for multi-player has a similar effect - you've spent time and money and got yourself in a clan or whatever and there's no way you're trading this one in... until the new one.

I think accusing EA of being greedy is unfair - their games are among the most successful, year-on-year, and that means that people like what they do. They need to explore more ways of making money and how they grow their business - same as any other - and in-game stuff, loot boxes are one way they can do it.

Next Christmas, if FIFA cost £80 and PES cost £50 then it'd be a record year for Konami's beta brand.

Cut costs? Cos nobody cares about the graphics anyway yeah?
Don't stick Ronaldo on the cover, cut the amount of car manufacturers back - tell Disney to shove Star Wars up Activision?

I mean, what are they to do? Tell their investors that it's been another poor year.... don't worry, though, because we're offering better value than ever and the gamers love us!

FIFA, Need for Speed are, ironically, fairly unique products - blockbuster games like that are special because they bring in the money as regular as clockwork. Mario, Zelda, Halo, Uncharted... they make a lot but not as regularly.

Okay so how do you make more money out of them? Toys.... T-shirts.... nah, not enough.... erm.... people are used to in app purchases now from their iPads and phones - look at what some of these FREE IOS games are doing... JESUS CHRIST! Yep, do that.

The problem here is that, like the young bull, they ran down to shag one of the cows - not like the old bull that walked down to shag them all - RIP Steve Jobs.

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Col. Asdasd
30/11/2017 11:49:48 am

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qq6HcKj59Q

The argument that games have become too expensive to make without MTs is coming under increasing scrutiny. This video uses data from the big 3 publishers some interesting points as to why that might be more a convenient excuse than a reflection of the economic realities for these companies.

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DEAN
30/11/2017 10:58:06 pm

I dunno, man - I know that turning a profit is not enough. If a business makes the same amount of net that it did the previous year that means that it's down. The only way is up and that can't be easy to pull off every year.

Psy-Q link
30/11/2017 01:00:55 pm

No one is forcing them to increase production values to ridiculous levels so that they need teams of hundreds working for years on a game. Instead they could focus on making games with good gameplay, those still sell by the truckload as the Nintendo Switch demonstrates.

I am seriously biased against these monstrously large megacorporations creating the same game over and over again with better graphics, so of course I'd say that and I don't think I can be convinced of the necessity of a many-headed creativity-destroying monster like EA.

And when they have a truly enjoyable game on their hands like Titanfall 2 they mess up the marketing for it so hard that you have to worry about the team behind it.

I'd hope all these really talented people just left those megacorporations and tried something of smaller scale, smaller risk but with real love and passion. And no shareholders to please.

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Spiney O’Sullivan
30/11/2017 03:52:05 pm

Passion is great, and EA does suck, but we shouldn’t act like it’s easy for talented people to just leave and go full-time indie. A lot of those people like eating regular meals and not living out of their cars, which is fair enough, really.

Switchophancy
30/11/2017 04:58:24 pm

The games on Nintendo Switch are made by massive teams with astronomical budgets

Unbiased commenter
30/11/2017 06:47:02 pm

Nonsense, all Nintendo products are made out of pure love and have no commercial considerations at all. Nintendo is not a company so much as a charity that gives fun to all. It is definitely not a big corporation that has parlayed a period of being utterly battered for years and forced into a massive strategic turnaround into some kind of cult of personality.

But that’s just my unbiased opinion.

DEAN
30/11/2017 11:07:34 pm

Sure but Mario and Call of Duty are very different products.

Production values are expected and the demand for them is real - The Pro and X are not a best guess at what drives the industry.

I mean, I love graphics.... just played Uncharted 4 and loved every minute of it - would have less so if it didn't look so gorgeous.

Psy-Q link
1/12/2017 08:28:04 am

I never claimed Nintendo does it all just for the love of gaming, but they have never let greed, microtransactions, loot crates or anything like that corrupt the vision of their games.

Their games come as full packages. You buy the game once for a flat price and even get entire characters and new weapons for free long after the game's hype has ended (Splatoon 2, ARMS, BotW are examples). MK8 on Wii U was one of the few titles (or the only one?) where they've even created pay-for DLC, and it's already included in the Deluxe version for Switch.

Also look at the team sizes, Nintendo's teams are much smaller than the amorphous mass of bodies that creates games for EA and such.

Not saying they're a charity, but their mindest in creating games is completely different from the one shown by the big boys with the big balls, and they managed to stay afloat just fine even when they were the underdogs without having to resort to player-milking.

DEAN
1/12/2017 09:55:18 am

Nintendo make money on everything - even games they have nothing to do with. EA have no such luxury.

You know how, as a premium paying customer, that when you buy Mario Run for your iPhone that you can't play it on a plane, for example. And have you seen their subscription model? Unlike Sony and MS, they don't even let you keep the games!
And how many times have you bought those games? Wii, Wii U virtual console stuff - DS shop..... All gone and you start again. I can redownload stuff I bought on my 360 years ago with no trouble at all - Nintendo are dirty too!

Troupe86
1/12/2017 03:51:21 pm

EA, amongst other big house publishers, are actually spending less on game development now than they did in 2007. In addition, they are utilising a 'lootbox'/microtransaction style meta-economy to maximise profit for shareholders to the detriment of their game-buying audience. Oh, and they are also taking advantage of tax loopholes and government funding to also rake in more profit than ever, despite spending less on game development [source: https://youtu.be/SFKnv1YzI3k].

EA's excuses are fallacious. They are poorly masking their greed and desire for more money; they foolishly thought that they could get away with the predatory financial model they are employing and it has backfired.

Fuck them, and fuck the other big publishing houses that try this slimy shite.

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DEAN
1/12/2017 04:22:10 pm

You sound on the fence....

But seriously, we all get that they have to make money and see continual growth - there's no argument about that, right?

It's good that this approach has backfired for them but one way or another they'll get their pound of flesh - they have no choice.

Random Ex-Reviewer
4/12/2017 06:55:06 pm

I agree that EA exist to make money and expand their market share. They are in continual competition with other businesses, so they need to tip towards growth. How they choose to do that, however, is partially within their control. You don't need microtransactions to cover the budget, not with a sure thing like Fifa or Star Wars. You don't have to buy up and ruin smaller studios.in your expansion drive. You don't need to let your execs steer you away from single player games and towards multiplayer-only releases.

This is pure greed and stupidity, an example of a company putting short term expansion before its long term health. Good management will do more than just meet the shareholders needs for increased returns - it will temper those needs by explaining clearly and concisely why doing stupid (albeit initially lucrative) shit is bad for the company in the long run. EA doesn't appear to have have good management, so we are where we are.

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Col. Asdasd
30/11/2017 11:43:21 am

It's getting a little hard to keep track of who's Donald Trump in these videogame industry analogies! I could have sworn only a few months ago it was the ravening hordes of entitled whining gamers, not the sinister corpos ripping them off.

Hard to disagree with anything you've written though. I think the turning point was Mass Effect 3, where EA realised (and made the rest of the industry aware) the opportunity adopting revenue-squeezing tricks from the f2p markets in mobile and MMO gaming represented. In a few short years they rearranged their whole philosophy of business from making money in order to create games to creating games in order to make money.

The result is that games are now a service, not a medium. Depressing, but in an inevitable sort of way that speaks to the behaviour of markets as you touched on in your article. Expect other forms of consumer entertainment such as film, TV and music to take notice in the coming years.

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MENTALIST
30/11/2017 11:47:50 am

I think a significant part of the failure of Visceral's singleplayer Star Wars game was the fact that Amy Hennig refused to make an open world game in the GTA, Assassin's Creed, or Zelda mould (which is what Visceral were prototyping before her involvement) and instead insisted on making a story-heavy setpiece-filled cover shooter like Uncharted (and like also-cancelled Star Wars 1313 was).

These sorts of games can generally be adulterated by extra payment systems, either by an entirely separate online mode (GTA) or by selling cosmetic items (AC, and actually Zelda by manner of Amibos), without doing much harm to the core game.

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MENTALIST
30/11/2017 11:56:08 am

Also, the bit in the Kotaku story that stuck with me was

"Visceral employees recalled getting constant questions from EA executives like Jade Raymond about what Ragtag’s big innovation was. The thought was that in order to compete with the likes of Uncharted 4, Visceral’s game needed to have a strong hook."

And that's a very sensible question to be asking. Would people genuinely want a weak cover version of another game, just with Star Wars art plastered all over it?

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Brancotoflord
30/11/2017 04:59:01 pm

Yes. Yes they would.

Psy-Q
1/12/2017 08:30:07 am

Isn't Battlefield just a Star Wars reskin of Battlefront? Never played either, so genuinely don't know.

PeskyFletch
30/11/2017 12:43:17 pm

You could count the last 2 battlefront games as being weaker cover versions of another game, just with star wars art plastered over it.

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MENTALIST
30/11/2017 01:06:25 pm

Indeed you could, but since that other game is EA's own Battlefield, they can run with the "from the makers of..." angle.

Also, it's notable that the original faced criticism with regard to not having a good quality hook of its own, when initially reviewed. The sequel, at least, has the space combat bits.

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Nikki
30/11/2017 01:03:27 pm

The new mobile Animal Crossing was awful

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Spiney O’Sullivan
30/11/2017 03:31:35 pm

Can you get in real-life debt to Tom Nook?

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Clive Peppard
30/11/2017 01:47:56 pm

I hate EA and haven't bought a game from them in a long time, all the points about economics and profit/loss are reasonable - if you aren't earning you aren't working, but its how you do it that matters.

Take Frontier Studios, Elite was £20, the Horizons update was also £20 but added a lot to the game so ok we'll accept that when considering dev time and all the rest. But where do they go from there? The Elite store is rammed with vanity objects like paint jobs and body kits and whatever - they make no difference whatsoever to the game play but they're there if you want them.

I reckon I've spent another £20 since purchase on stuff like this, not because I felt compelled or thought I would gain an advantage, but because I love the game and don't mind throwing David Braben a couple of quid here or there if it helps him further develop the best game of my childhood into the best game of my adulthood.

Then there CD Projekt Red, Wither 3 DLC was often free and when it wasn't it was a whole new games worth of mission and stories for a fiver!!

There are ways, Its just EA has allowed its contempt and desire for a profit margin to overrule its basic human decency.

#BoycottEA

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MENTALIST
30/11/2017 02:52:35 pm

CD Projekt have the competitive advantage of being able to easily staff up with Poles ;)

I'm being glib, but a point repeatedly raised in stories about the fall of Visceral was how much more expensive, in the likes of wages necessary to cover local property rental prices, it was to run a studio in Silicon Valley than it was in Montreal.

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CPRDER
30/11/2017 05:00:17 pm

Witcher 3's DLC was stuff removed from the main game and released as DLC mere days after the game's release to generate goodwill.

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John Harvey-Jones
30/11/2017 05:10:17 pm

Well if you talk about capitalism and gaming, the people in charge are not EA.


It's you, and everyone else buying these games.


The economic term is "consumer sovereignty".

It is a highly competitive market for relatively low cost, non-essential goods with fairly low barriers to entry and an excess of supply.


A buyers market. Consumers choose what succeeds, what fails, what business models are profitable, what business models are not.


Battlefront 2 and COD will be big hits and sell a bucket load despite the negative PR.


COD WW2 has been absolutely flying off the shelves and sold double the number of copies of Infinite Warfare.


Watchdogs sold 4 million in the launch week.

Destiny's pre-orders alone were nearly 1.5 million.

Meanwhile Hellblade Sensua's Sacrifice turned a nice profit but shifted a relatively meagre 500k copies in 3 months despite being a much better game, half the price and having no shady business practises.


"Who is the Donald Trump in the video game industry?" I saw someone ask.


ALL OF YOU ARE.

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Pablo Watsoni
30/11/2017 05:30:10 pm

No, YOU are!

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DEAN
1/12/2017 09:44:16 am

That's only broadly true, though.

Let me give you an example - okay so you want to buy a shooting game because you like shooting stuff - Chances are, whatever you buy, you're dropping coins down one of the big boys holes.

Oh, you like racing cars? Football....

They've got it stitched up and we don't get 'real' options on everything; the buyer doesn't have the kind of control that you're suggesting.

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Sir John Harvey-Jones
1/12/2017 04:56:05 pm

You do not have to buy the game. It is a luxury item.

It isn't food and water. You can go down the pub, buy a board game, rent a movie, get five months of Netflix, watch regular TV, download some pr0n, anything you like for £45.

Besides with such a glut of products on the market, there are always alternatives. If people actually rewarded those producing alternatives by actually buying their products, there would be even more of them as developers/publishers would be incentivised to produce more.

If you would rather buy the microtransaction riddled AAA product like Shadow of War over the cheaper AA, no microtransaction game like Hellblade: Senuas Sacrifice, then you are simply weighing up the options and buying what you consider to be the superior choice.

You, like everyone else, have voted in favour of that model and rewarded those who employ it. Your purchase is a vote that carries far more weight than hundreds of negative forum posts.


Talk is cheap, money slammed down on the counter is what matters.

If no one bought Battlefront 2 it would be a catastrophic financial disaster for EA. Gamers only have to refuse to purchase it once and I guarantee they will never use that model again.

Alas video gamers seem to have the mentality and consumer discernment levels of 10 year old children.

They have zero impulse control.


How many reading this post own or owned Shadow of War, No Mans Sky, Watchdogs, Destiny 1 or 2, Battlefront 1 or 2, or any COD game from the past 5 years.

Ok, now how many of you own Hellblade: Sensuas Sacrife?


Those numbers are damning testimony.


Game over boys and girls. Guilty as charged. You might as well get some custom made baseball caps with "Make Gaming Great Again" on them and start retweeting Peter Molyneux.

DEAN
1/12/2017 08:22:51 pm

I admire your passion!

I dunno where you're going with the luxury item remark - I mean, sure, you can live without them but, fuck man, no one here wants to!

And you're right, if people didn't buy it then EA would have to have a drastic rethink. Except that people will buy it... millions of them.
So that's just unrealistic and where can go with that?

I read that EA u-turned after a phone call from big boss man at Disney.
Interesting right? I mean Disney don't muck about and you can bet they knew all about this way before any of us did - but they let it fly. Then, when the shit hit the fan, they come out like the good guys to save the day (brand reputation).

I've only owned No Man's Sky from your list. Only played it for about 30mins then thought F&^K THIS!

You know what the problem with Senua is? Name aside. It doesn't look very cool. I'm not saying it's not - I have no idea - but it fails almost immediately to make me want in. I mean the marketing for it is a load of dark images and some young lady with blue all over her face. It's hardly engaging... well, not for me it isn't.

But you know something, on the strength of your convictions, if I ever get the chance to play it - demo or a mate - I'll check it out.

Johnc
30/11/2017 05:42:53 pm

I take comfort that no matter how much the videogame industry changes there is, and always has been, one constant - EA are a nasty bunch of money grabbing gits.

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Dunc
30/11/2017 06:34:56 pm

This line that players don't want linear games reminds me of a few years ago when all the big publishers started bleating about how no one wants single player despite loads of hugely successful single player only games being out and how capcom decided that survival horror was dead when it turned resi evil into and action game. In all these cases the execs just looked at some charts and saw COD was making more money than their games so dropped everything to chase that market. Sadly with shareholders calling the shots this is always the decisions you'll see being made in these big companies as it's not enough to turn a profit, you have to make more profit than the year before.
Luckily we have a resurgent indie market full of people taking risks and it just takes one of those to be a massive success to shake up the formula every now and then.

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Spiney O’Sullivan
30/11/2017 10:26:16 pm

Let’s not deify the indie scene too much. Every so often we get an absolute gem, but the Steam shovelware catalogue (or whatever Greenlight is called now) drowns out a lot of quality titles with either cynical asset flips or generic “look at this 8-bit style copy of an old game I made” stuff. And then there’s the terrifying cynicism of the amount of smaller pay-to-win titles on the App Store.

These markets need far better curation, or a lot of decent indies will drown under a tide of dreck.

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Ben Kuchera
1/12/2017 05:11:00 pm

If only there was someone who could weed through all those indie titles for us.

Someone who could test them out and then tell us which ones are gems and which ones are asset-flipping trash.

They could like put their findings in a magazine or on a website and then we could go there and immediately know which ones to spend our money on.

No longer would really good titles from up-and-coming talent be overlooked and lost in a sea of dross.


We used to have such people. Back in my day any Tom, Richard or Harry could make a game and get it on the shelves of WH Smith for £2.99.

Fortunately we had people scouring through them all and writing up reports in magazines.


They were called "games journalists".


Now granted they were so busy testing and rating the products that they didn't have time for the far more important tasks like writing political commentary on the US President or telling me how gamers are racist because Dizzy is always white where as most eggs in real life are brown.

We've clearly made a lot of progress since the dark days of the 80's.

James Walker
30/11/2017 11:57:24 pm

Right On!!!!111!!!!!!

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Adam
1/12/2017 03:01:38 am

I'll tell you what annoys me - it's when people say 'slaw' instead of coleslaw. That irritates the hell out of me for some reason.

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Nick
1/12/2017 09:22:51 am

Damn straight. If it has cabbage in it it's coleslaw.

I would lock up anyone who has ever uttered the words spag bol.

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DEAN
1/12/2017 10:13:18 am

Nothing like that bothers me and I just attach it to my mental dossier about the character of the 'offending' person.

I hate it when people get stuff wrong because I'm not sure if it's rude or not for me to tell them - it's like this stressful little thing...

EXAMPLE - a friend of mine refers to coleslaw as coldslaw - an easy mistake and one that he probably should have been corrected on years ago but it must have slipped through the net or whatever.

So what am I to do? I can't reprimand him there and then, surely? In all likelihood we're about to eat something and nobody wants to ruin a meal with awkwardness. BUT, even weirder to just bring it up out of the blue, right?

Manners Mikelson
1/12/2017 11:06:03 am

Nerxt time he brings it up you have to deftly and genially pretend it's the first time you noticed the error and have a gentle chuckle about it, then offer a similar (possibly fictitious) example from your life - maybe you used to say 'penultimate' instead of 'ultimate' or something. Then he can have a little chuckle. No awkwardness, just a couple of great pals having a chat and a burger

DEAN
1/12/2017 04:25:11 pm

Thankin' you, Manners! I know I should probably say something but...

Chris
1/12/2017 05:33:25 pm

Isn't it "coleslaw" ?

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Adam
1/12/2017 09:19:30 pm

One of my friends persists in pronouncing 'trilogy' as 'triology'. Every time I happens I think of saying something, but never have...

Tinker's Cuss
1/12/2017 09:06:18 am

Some very interesting thoughts there Mr B; my main takeaway:

"Plain site"? Good God man, does my £5 Patreon not cover the cost of a proof reader?

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MrDrinks
1/12/2017 04:29:46 pm

The fact that the developers who made Titanfall 2 are now owned by EA makes me sad. Releasing such an amazing game that wasn't stuffed with micro-transactions and paid DLC at the same time as Battlefield (to inevitably "fail") now feels like a very calculated move.

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Jack Cooper
1/12/2017 05:24:29 pm

No one put a gun to the head of consumers and made them buy utter derivative shady sh*te like Battlefield 1 instead of the fantastic and fair Titanfall 2.


Check out Metacritic.

Titanfall 2 has a higher average score than Battlefield 1 from both Critics and User reviews!!!!!!!


It is all right there in plain sight out in the open! Consumers had all the information they needed right there in their hands. Everyone was telling them that Titanfall 2 was the superior product. No excuses.


Yet gamers still went out and bought Battlefield.


You can't blame EA. If I were EA, I too would cancel Titanfall 3 and say to Respawn "get to work and make me some sh*te, the kids are lapping it up".

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DEAN
2/12/2017 12:09:07 am

But, Jack, that's not the whole story!

Tell you what my problem with Titanfall is - and I only mention this because I'm probably not alone on this - mechs.

Not cool. To me anyway.

Jack Cooper
2/12/2017 05:54:29 pm

The bit in Battlefield 1 where you run around in that massive armour suit and take millions of bullets is basically the same only less believable!!!!!

Dangerous_Dave
1/12/2017 06:22:13 pm

If games cost too much to make these days, why not just cut those costs? Why do games need to be so expensive? There's a whole market just below the so-called AAA development cycle that are more affordable and (dare I say it) of a higher quality.

I've long stopped throwing my money at EA, Activision and Ubisoft for this very reason. I still buy first party Nintendo games and the occassional Sony exclusive, but most of my gaming budget is spent on much smaller games that I find to be more enjoyable, more rewarding and generally quite unique. Spelunky, Fez, Rocket League, Geometry Wars and Bit Trip Runner are among the best games of the past two decades, far exceeding anything the big three have churned out in that time.

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DEAN
2/12/2017 12:37:53 am

I think the amount of money needed to make them look pretty is substantial - worth every penny, mind!

We're all glad that Odyssey and BOTW don't look like 64 and Ocarina, right?

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Mark
3/12/2017 12:20:08 pm

All this corporate greed makes me think we’re heading to video game crash 2.0.

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Balaska
31/12/2017 07:32:23 pm

The original ideal of capitalism, that one party provides goods or services to another at a fair price, so that both parties prosper, has long been forgotten, You are right, this isn't capitalism, it is greed.

Reply



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