EA getting too big?

Retr0gamer

nice one deadwing

Dempsey

FIFA for a long time was utter ****e and the only reason it sold well was because of the licence it holds. They have got better in the last 3 years. PES has been better than it all that time and still is but it doesnt have a full licence which is why FIFA sales are always good.

FIFA made leaps and bounds but that was because it was absolute crap. (e.g. FIFA 97, FIFA 2000/2001)

monument

Don’t get me wrong here, EA are what they are, a public company, and they have no obligation to make good games, only games that sell.

Peteee wrote:

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

You're wrong.

steviec wrote:

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

That's about the amount of time it tuck to the the bloody game to be approved. Well years anyway.

steviec wrote:

They're no more guilty of rehashing old ideas than any other company.

Nonsense.

steviec wrote:

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.

More nonsense. Rogue Agent is EA’s latest Bond game, it’s a sequel (or expansion) by all means. And the Incredibles is ‘borrowed IP’, not really original…

KILLZONE is actually the only ‘original IP’, not a sequel, or as EA says part of a “franchise”, well, it may be the start of one.

steviec wrote:

Sequels are not a bad thing in the games industry.

No, sequels in them self are not. However, such a heavy reliance on sequels/franchises, and borrowed IP, is certainly a bad thing.

Big Ears

'FIFA plays a great game of football and improves every year in bigger leaps than Pro Evo does.'

I feel sorry for you................very very sorry .

steviec

Big Ears wrote:

'FIFA plays a great game of football and improves every year in bigger leaps than Pro Evo does.'

I feel sorry for you................very very sorry .

There have been more additions to FIFA in recent years than there's been to Pro Evo, most magazine reviews I've read made that point. I frequently play FIFA with friends and its always fun. I have both and happen to prefer FIFA, and I know a number of other people that do too. I also know a lot of people who prefer Pro Evo. You can't say FIFA is a bad game, it's very comfortably the second best football game on the market at least. Also, it's not like Konami are losing money on Pro Evo, the game does just fine. Both games deserve to be high in the charts and both games are high.

I notice people being very choosy, when EA produce a good game, it's thanks to the developers. When EA produce a bad game, it's EA's fault. You can't say Maxis are responbsible for the Sims and EA are responsible for the expansions. Maxis are a part of EA, Maxis made the sims and all its expansions. The company that made the Sims originally is the same company that made all the expansions. You can choose to say Maxis or you can choose to say EA, but you can't pick out the good things and call them Maxis and pick out the bad things and call them EA.

As far as I can tell being purchased by EA didn't have a major effect on Maxis, they were one trick ponies releasing various Sim games and expansions to Sim City 200 before EA bought them.

To be honest I don't know what the situation about Bullfrog was so you may be right on that one. I thought that most of the people in Bullfrog are now Lionhead and EA published Black & White so relationships can't be that bad, although I could be completely wrong on that matter.

steviec

While googling for information about Bullfrog I came across this article:

http://news.spong.com/detail/news.asp?prid=6217

That's dated 19th Feb, but I couldn't find any more info. Anything know any more about this project? I hope its still being worked on, Syndicate was my favourite Megadrive game(never got used to the mouse controls when playing on computer)

It does seem most of Bullfrog's staff are still floating around EA then.

Retr0gamer

There were only a handful of people working for bullfrog when they were with EA. This quickly bloated to hundreds. Most if not all the original staff and the most talented designers have left EA. The Bullfrog team is probably what was left of the team and probably consists of the additional staff EA added on and even this group has probably gone through a huge turn over of staff.

Do you really think Maxis would have released as many expansions if they weren't working for EA. The Maxis team used to make some fabulous 'sim' franchise games that all differed in gameplay. I feel sorry for the team now because they are being forced to produce nothing but Sims add-on packs.

steviec

The fact that Maxis produced the Sims at all shows they have freedom under EA. On paper that game didn't sound like a big seller at all, it was more like an experimental artificial life simulator.

Sim Earth, Sim Ant, Sim Farm etc. were never really very good games. In fact they mention on the timeline on their own website that they were under pressure from execs to release four games in 1996 and with limited resources they threw out a bunch of SimBlah games and a pinball game. That was in the days before EA.

Since being bought they pretty much haven't produced a bad game, Sims & Sims 2 are both good games, and the expansion packs do what they say on the tin. They've also released new additions to their other favourite franchise, Sim City(and it hasn't lost the humour of the old days), and they've also made Sim Golf, which certainly wasn't a result of pressure from marketing people, and is another very fun little game but it never particularly sold. I saw an interview with Will Wright recently and he doesn't seem to be someone who isn't doing what he wants to be doing.

Dempsey

steviec wrote:

There have been more additions to FIFA in recent years than there's been to Pro Evo, most magazine reviews I've read made that point.

Why do ya think that is? FIFA had to make huge changes to keep into PES's gameplay. FIFA latest is good but I still prefer PES's gameplay.

monument

steviec wrote:

I notice people being very choosy, when EA produce a good game, it's thanks to the developers. When EA produce a bad game, it's EA's fault. You can't say Maxis are responbsible for the Sims and EA are responsible for the expansions. Maxis are a part of EA, Maxis made the sims and all its expansions. The company that made the Sims originally is the same company that made all the expansions. You can choose to say Maxis or you can choose to say EA, but you can't pick out the good things and call them Maxis and pick out the bad things and call them EA.

As far as I can tell being purchased by EA didn't have a major effect on Maxis, they were one trick ponies releasing various Sim games and expansions to Sim City 200 before EA bought them.

Can I stress to you how long and how hard the top people in Maxis fought convincing the company to make the Sims in the first place? Then how hard it was to stop EA's attempts to can the work in progress?

steviec

monument wrote:

Can I stress to you how long and how hard the top people in Maxis fought convincing the company to make the Sims in the first place? Then how hard it was to stop EA's attempts to can the work in progress?

That's quite interesting and I didn't know about that. As I said it just didn't sound like a money maker on paper.

Good to see that Maxis had the convictions to stick with it and showed that if a developer really believes in the idea they can convince the publisher to go along with it.