EA getting too big?

[CrimsonGhost]

There has been numerous reports lately of EA aggressively manouveing in the games industry, with hostile take overs etc. Is EA becoming too big? Kinda like MS.

Certainly I dont' like the way they keep buying up smaller outfits. I feel that it often results in much watered down content.

What are other peoples thoughs on the issue.

See www.eurogame.net and www.theregister.co.uk for a few of the more recent stories about EA.

smiaras

This post has been deleted.

koneko

It's worrying in a way, because they will just end up releasing titles they know sell well, like Madden and The Sims. Good/great games are ones that usually end up selling "alright" but don't sell as well as the Sims or sportsy games do.

We're only going to end up with the Reality TV and Hollywood Blockbuster equivalents of games, and original content and gaming is going to become less and less, and that's definitely a bad thing. Nintendo are still around, but for how long? EA will absorb all the smaller companies and we'll be stuck with the same re-hashed stuff we get every year.

elvis2002

EA are the devil, bad game after bad game, rehash after rehash, they make the worst games, its such a pity that have licences for everything.

ShiverinEskimo

aye, they are taking over the ones doing crap/ok. but i doubt they will ever get their grubby hands on rockstar, bungie, valve or square inix. these places have become self sufficient (yes i know bungie are owned by MS but MS have been known to produce good games from time to time). I mean name an EA game thats outselling the likes of GTA, Halo 2, Half-Life, or any of the FF? Not many i would have thought, but i am open to correction from anyone who knows better than me.

regeneration

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/charts.php

Need for Speed 2 is at number one; outselling GTA:SA at number 2.

There's no point complaining given that 70% of gamers couldn't give a toss what drivel their playing so long as Thierry Henry looks a little more/less human in FIFA2020, or if EA promise them new shiny bits to play with. Most gamers are more fickle and braindead than the average moviegoer/music-buyer.

koneko

ShiverinEskimo wrote:

I mean name an EA game thats outselling the likes of GTA, Halo 2, Half-Life, or any of the FF?

Don't forget the Sims, and it's many expansion packs. One of (if not the) best selling games on PC ever.

BrookieD

Rumor has it the EA are trying to buy KCET the machine behind Pro Evo soccer, Gotta sad lads if this happend that would make a dam fine game! Engine from Pro Evo and the glitz from EA.

Mostly EA are crap and are getting way to big, what was there last truly original game?

ShiverinEskimo

I forgot about the sims..god i hate EA. I actually don't think i own one of their games (i own about 27 on the xbox)
I mean don't they give a **** that the true heart of their target audience hate them? have i gone mad just to be asking that question...you think that the people who make the games are hardcore gamers and therefore give a damn that their peers in the world hate them.

TheDuke

big business is big business guys!

I tinhk EA have brought quite a hand full of great games - problem in the gaming world is that you can no longer sit in a garage with a few mates and develop a game as the demands have just soarded so high re gameplay, graphics, internet/lan play, modding, etc. and it needs a big investment.

ShiverinEskimo

I know, but it seems most of EA's investment goes on marketing rather than development. I think in EA's case its just a big garage with different sex toilets while they aare blowing all their cash on ad campaigns and magazine ads and paying off reviewers...I wonder how many review sites they have bought out that we don't know about.

sprinkles

take burnout 3 for a prime example of how EA can take a good game and F**k it up with all its flash ideas and promtions. Stupid EA DJ telling you how goo EA is, advertising in game and all the carp EA polishing. I hate them with a vengance!

Oh wait........ whats that I see.......... another FIFA would you believe!

ShiverinEskimo

was burnout 3 EA?? ****..i heard that game was excellent.

Cake Fiend

ShiverinEskimo wrote:

the true heart of their target audience hate them?

EA's target audience is purely the casual gamer. They don't give a crap about real gamers, they market directly toward the type of person who doesn't know anything about games.

ShiverinEskimo

Sico wrote:

EA's target audience is purely the casual gamer. They don't give a crap about real gamers, they market directly toward the type of person who doesn't know anything about games.

Fair point. But what about the developer's themselves..I'm on the assumption that you have to love games to want to develop them? Imagine one of us sitting their coding, how do they sleep at night?

Peteee

Burnout 3 is an excellent game, but it was developed by criterion (the developer, thses are the people who actaully code the games) and published by EA (put into boxes, and marketed) Although EA do actually make a lot of games in house

In Fact they are one of the few publishers who do (AFAIK, correct me if i'm wrong)

EA dont make (or publish) that many bad games tbh, its just that they are all so generic. Although a lot of them are sports games, and there is only so far you can go with them (Lets make Tiger Woods fly in the next one!!11)

Dempsey

Yea EA are in a dominant position. Especially in Sports Games because of the licences they have. If PES4 had full licencing, FIFA wouldnt be selling good at all.

Doodee

Meh, the games industry is like any other.
You are always going to have companies out for pure profit, and others that actually want to be noticed for talent.
If you place it on par with the music industry, how many good old artists with original ideas are there now as opposed to love sick puppy rock wannabes that you see?

If you go on whats being said on the net then there are big problems within EA as reguards how they treat developers. And in my humble opinion its only a matter of time before the publisher becomes second string to the developer.
You can bang all the bells and whistles onto a title as you want but once people become unhappy with a company, they remain that way.

I also heard a rumour that companies like EA will no longer be able to whack out a crappy title of a Blockbuster movie, instead it has to recieve a particular rating off a private board of reviwers or some such.

Oh Well, aslong as some people continue to produce good games I'll still play em.

ShiverinEskimo

Doodee wrote:

I also heard a rumour that companies like EA will no longer be able to whack out a crappy title of a Blockbuster movie, instead it has to recieve a particular rating off a private board of reviwers or some such.

best news i've heard in a while.

DooDee wrote:

Oh Well, aslong as some people continue to produce good games I'll still play em.

Amen Brother, Amen.

Retr0gamer

EA will probably be the end of criterion. The same thing happened with bullfrog. The working environment changed and most of the original guys left. It has now been absorbed by EA.

the saddest thing is that the previous burnout games sold next to nothing but burnout 3 sold through the roof when on the EA label.

As for EA buying out KCET. Well Konami are the second biggest games company in Japan next to Nintendo. Don't think they will be selling out soon especially since the KCET team works on almost all of konamis big releases.

irldavem

Retr0gamer wrote:

As for EA buying out KCET. ......Don't think they will be selling out soon especially since the KCET team works on almost all of konamis big releases.

I agree.

As long as we have the likes of Konami, Capcom, Square Enix, Rockstar, ID, and any other great game developers, we have nothing to worry about in terms of getting good, solid games that aren't rehashed rubbish. I really don't see any of these companies selling out any time soon, especially to EA!

STaN

ShiverinEskimo wrote:

was burnout 3 EA?? ****..i heard that game was excellent.

It is!

ObeyGiant

Sico wrote:

EA's target audience is purely the casual gamer. They don't give a crap about real gamers, they market directly toward the type of person who doesn't know anything about games.

If EA relied on "real gamers" for their bread and butter, they'd be bankrupt within a month.

sprinkles

STaN wrote:

It is!

Don't get me wrong, burnout 3 is a good game but if you compare it to burnout 2 its just too flashy for its own good. They took a great game and tried their best to f*ck it up. Thankfully it was such a good game in the beginning that you can look past all the EA gloss and enjoy it. Not true with the majority of EA's substandard tripe

sprinkles

Retr0gamer wrote:

EA will probably be the end of criterion. The same thing happened with bullfrog. The working environment changed and most of the original guys left. It has now been absorbed by EA.

the saddest thing is that the previous burnout games sold next to nothing but burnout 3 sold through the roof when on the EA label.

As for EA buying out KCET. Well Konami are the second biggest games company in Japan next to Nintendo. Don't think they will be selling out soon especially since the KCET team works on almost all of konamis big releases.

Touche, their influene is obvious in burnout 3. Criterion would never have been inclined to flash up burnout 3 if it wasn't for EA pushing them to do it, waving money in front of their faces.

I know EA don't actualy make many games but the don't exactly let hte developers make them their own way, they like to stick their hands in where they don't belong. Kinda like a bad chairman of a football club, who doesn't let their manager manage the team.

steviec

People are looking for something to complain about Burnout 3 specifically because its from EA. IMO it was the best X-Box game this year, and one of the best on PS2(PS2 version was let down by load times, obviously EA's fault). It's far better than Burnout 1 or Burnout 2. The dj guy is annoying and can be turned off within 30 seconds of first loading the game up, other than that it's hard to find any fault with the game.

Most of EA's in house games are of the highest quality. Madden is as close to perfection as a sports game can get, Fight Night is the best boxing game ever made by a long way(due to clever controls and gameplay, not due to licensing), FIFA plays a great game of football and improves every year in bigger leaps than Pro Evo does. Tiger Woods manages to make golf fun. NBA and NHL are both well polished games, although I don't like the sports they're based on so wouldn't play them much. The only bad one I can think of is Total Club Manager, and that doesn't sell.

They're villified for The Sims, probably the single most original game created in the last decade. Because they've the audacity to keep releasing new content for it which the legions of fans the game has are happy to lap up. I don't see how releasing expansion packs that people want to buy is worse than not releasing expansion packs that people want to buy. They're no more guilty of rehashing old ideas than any other company.
The only games in the all format top ten right now that aren't sequels are the Incredibles and EA's own Rogue Agent, and they're probably the worst of the bunch.

That beacon of originality, the Gamecube, has one other game in it's top ten that's not a sequel, Donkey Konga, which I've played and while it's fun it's little more than a novelty.

Sequels are not a bad thing in the games industry. A game that's been worked on and worked on and polished through 3 or 4 sequels will almost always be better than a game that's been built from the ground up in a year. When a company does come up with an original idea(eg. the Sims) why should they throw all their work in the bin and start on something new and possibly worse as soon as they're finished?

Supposing Nintendo decided they'd done the platforming thing, lets move onto something different, after the first Mario game on Nes. Or Konami decided the Metal Gear Series had run it's course on the gameboy. Sequels to sports games that you happen to not like are no worse to sequels to other games that you do like, they'll each appeal to their own audience.

User45701

The only bad thing EA did is destroy WW and ****ed up CnC in the process

Peteee

steviec wrote:

People are looking for something to complain about Burnout 3 specifically because its from EA. IMO it was the best X-Box game this year, and one of the best on PS2(PS2 version was let down by load times, obviously EA's fault). It's far better than Burnout 1 or Burnout 2. The dj guy is annoying and can be turned off within 30 seconds of first loading the game up, other than that it's hard to find any fault with the game.

Most of EA's in house games are of the highest quality. Madden is as close to perfection as a sports game can get, Fight Night is the best boxing game ever made by a long way(due to clever controls and gameplay, not due to licensing), FIFA plays a great game of football and improves every year in bigger leaps than Pro Evo does. Tiger Woods manages to make golf fun. NBA and NHL are both well polished games, although I don't like the sports they're based on so wouldn't play them much. The only bad one I can think of is Total Club Manager, and that doesn't sell.

They're villified for The Sims, probably the single most original game created in the last decade. Because they've the audacity to keep releasing new content for it which the legions of fans the game has are happy to lap up. I don't see how releasing expansion packs that people want to buy is worse than not releasing expansion packs that people want to buy. They're no more guilty of rehashing old ideas than any other company.
The only games in the all format top ten right now that aren't sequels are the Incredibles and EA's own Rogue Agent, and they're probably the worst of the bunch.

That beacon of originality, the Gamecube, has one other game in it's top ten that's not a sequel, Donkey Konga, which I've played and while it's fun it's little more than a novelty.

Sequels are not a bad thing in the games industry. A game that's been worked on and worked on and polished through 3 or 4 sequels will almost always be better than a game that's been built from the ground up in a year. When a company does come up with an original idea(eg. the Sims) why should they throw all their work in the bin and start on something new and possibly worse as soon as they're finished?

Supposing Nintendo decided they'd done the platforming thing, lets move onto something different, after the first Mario game on Nes. Or Konami decided the Metal Gear Series had run it's course on the gameboy. Sequels to sports games that you happen to not like are no worse to sequels to other games that you do like, they'll each appeal to their own audience.

Excellent post, i'd give you rep if i could

You make some great points.

The point with the sims tough, while it is original, i hate the way they've milked it so much

Or the way they use the GoldenEye brand to sell a crappy game.

The 80+ hr work weeks (even though it may be rampant throughout the games industry)

Instead of assimilating Criterion into EA, why not just continue to leave criterion well alone, publish their games, and lap up the profits anyway, instead of (what will happen) take all the talented prgrammers and artists out and get them to work on some sims expansion pack

steviec

Peteee wrote:

Excellent post, i'd give you rep if i could

You make some great points.

The point with the sims tough, while it is original, i hate the way they've milked it so much

Or the way they use the GoldenEye brand to sell a crappy game.

The 80+ hr work weeks (even though it may be rampant throughout the games industry)

Instead of assimilating Criterion into EA, why not just continue to leave criterion well alone, publish their games, and lap up the profits anyway, instead of (what will happen) take all the talented prgrammers and artists out and get them to work on some sims expansion pack

I agree on the Goldeneye thing(in my previous post I chose to call the game Rogue Agent cos it shouldn't be associated with Goldeneye), and the same goes for the 80+ hour weeks but I'd be suspicious as to how different EA are to any other big games companies when it comes to that.

I don't think they'll destroy Criterion though, they may eventually lose the name Criterion and get shuffled about, but at worst I see Burnout getting amalgamated into the Need For Speed series, taking the best bits from NFS and the best bits from Burnout. Burnout is too good and sold to well for them to mess about with it too much. And there seems to be far too much talent at Criterion(doesn't their renderware power everything from Suikoden to GTA?) for them to not be major players, and even if they do get moved around it'll only strengthen whatever EA game they're put to work on. Instead of releasing one great game per year they may contribute to ten great games per year.

Retr0gamer

If EA relied on "real gamers" for their bread and butter, they'd be bankrupt within a month.

Very true. Look at Capcom probably along with konami the last bastion of traditional hard as nails fun action games. Capcom are giving their developers free rein to produce games that are both original and excellent. but look at their sales figures. They are very low and definitely not worthy of the quality that capcom is churning out.

They're villified for The Sims, probably the single most original game created in the last decade

EA was not responsible for the Sims only the publisher. Maxis made the game. EA are churning out the expansion packs.

And there seems to be far too much talent at Criterion(doesn't their renderware power everything from Suikoden to GTA?) for them to not be major players

Have to agree that criterion are extremely talented and the renderware engine is fantastic. But then look at what happened to Bullfrog. Another group of probably the most talented developers ever that made some of the best game engines ever that was assimilated and destroyed by EA.

I don't like what EA are doing but unfortunately its the way that the industry is heading in the future.

Deadwing

This is all i have to say on the matter:




My photoshop skillz are teh l33t!