Electronic Arts says the old way of releasing games doesn't work anymore - Sensationalist Headlines

I've backed Star Citizen for a few hundred bucks, but I don't think their development model is a good idea for any other project. Imagine how rabid fans would get if EA had as many delays as SC? The only reason SC's community doesn't blow a gasket is because they're personally invested in the project, but gamers at large tend to be much less forgiving.

FIFA itself has been a blight for years and years and years. It's a lost cause. Other games however, people CAN see the difference. They can see when they're being pulled a fast one, and complain about it. Which is what I don't understand. You could easily see the bulshit in Anthem, and the fact that its EA behind it and Bioware should have been enough to make people think "yeah lets not get into it", yet, here we are, people with fucking stockolm syndrome for the fucking garbage that it is.

Fifa is an exceptional case, it is a game built off the success of the most popular sport in the world.

Actually it looks like a decent amount of people did judging by the E3 trailer reception, but that's not why I am scratching my head. This article really is a bunch of corporate nothings. "The old way of releasing games doesn't work" … What the fuck? You mean selling games in a big box at brick and mortar stores? Obviously not, because that hasn't worked for a decade. You mean simply releasing a game and being done with it? Okay... but as far as I am aware, Anthem was intended to be a games as a service. Intended to be. It'll be dropped because of missed sales projections. "So the old way of selling games like Anthem does not work. Buy our next game!" EA would be doing so much better if they stopped acting like a faceless greedy "Tri-pul-ayy" corporation.

I also clarified that I don't think it would be wise to adopt SC's model of letting backers have playable builds from the earliest days of a single rough, minimal-gameplay map and slowly releasing builds over a span of years prior to stabilizing even the core engine tech. That's a decision that doesn't carry well. But the idea of having late, mostly-stable alpha be open to the interested community to playtest and give feedback that the devs listen to? I think that could go well. Minecraft is another flawed example that could be replicated in a more planned and stable way. But in order for a plan like this to work with a big monolith like EA, it needs to be paired with extremely precise and constant messaging that prepares and educates the consumer base for the reality of game development. And that's ultimately the paradigm change I'm advocating for when I talk about how SC published alpha builds: The collective consumer base has a wildly distorted concept of how much work and time goes into making a game and how unreliable the creation process is in software development, and it's been specifically cultivated by the industry on the notion of, in my opinion, making it look easy to look good. This consumer culture of expecting games to fall out of Todd Howard's nostrils like a mythological demigod being born drives unhealthy industry practices designed to meet unrealistic consumer expectations of a sequel close after the first. Combine with the greedy profit-first nature of the big players' leadership and (shareholder) ownership and the result is developers being treated like disposable garbage while being made to crank out low-quality buggy betas on unrealistic deadlines. And it's the devs who then take the brunt of the predictable consumer backlash at another AAA bugfest launching in need of six weeks to six months of patches to fix it up to what should've been launch quality. Corporate attitudes need to change, of course, but that'll never happen until consumer attitudes change, and those aren't going to change painlessly.

It's not a bunch of corporate nothings, it's them shifting the blame on why Anthem failed to proclaiming that releasing a full game with only trailers to drip-feed and hype it up "wasn't working", so they want to copy the Korean and Chinese mobile industry and literally release unfinished or early versions of games for "feedback" (aka using players as Q&A paying them like what Anthem basically did but expanded as a focus of marketing and design) before working up towards full releases. Reading between the lines pretty much highlights that EA isn't even attempting to hide their corruption, they just lace it with PR speak to pretend it's not a bad thing.

Suddenly everything is early access and you'll never be able to buy a finished product day 1.

I wish all videogame Giants would go out of business because this shit is disgusting. Bring it back to the time when it was a group of devs building a passion project.

Reminder that "AAA" publishers like EA spend 3-5 times more on advertising than they do on the actual game development.

The problem isn't squarely on the CEOs, though Bobby Kotick and Andrew Wilson certainly are a shining definition of corrupt corporate suits; it's also the investors and the rapidly-increasing demand for profit. Devs building passion projects had created a new hobby that was underplayed and overlooked back in the day, but once games started selling hundreds of thousands or even millions, investors and corporate types smelled fresh new profit in the air. And here we are with an industry that's creating more profit and content than Hollywood, and still lingering in a No Man's Land of regulations where developer's workers rights are the bare basics of the country rather than adjusted, voice actors are often treated like crap compared to movie and cartoons, and more direct money can be made off of the consumers than any other form of entertainment. And even if you discount the suits or the investors, plenty of developers have basically "sold their souls", so to speak, for more profit. The ability for major profit to be made, and knowing it can be made, is an irreversible change. Even if you burned down every major publisher HQ at the same time or they all went bankrupt, that would just leave a major void which many will suicidally dive into to capitalize on the opportunity to attain that profit, like another gold rush.

The sad part is that EA itself isn't rushing out anything, Anthem and ME:A got over half a decade of development time but the teams are just abysmal and dysfunctional. They need to really work on getting their studios managed better.

Trying to jumble "submissive" mobile market with "loudmouth" AAA market is a recipe for disaster, my CEO buddy. You deliver the expectation you've built, not the promise of it. Want to sell an unfinished game? Admit it upfront. You continue to lie and eventually even the stupid will catch on.

That's because the old way had to make sure that it was as bug free as possible as day 1 patches didn't exist and in the case of consoles, no patches existed. It's you guys who have decided to make your developers crunch near impossible hours and then hit a deadline no matter what, and then rely on post launch support and the paying customers to find the bugs and hope that you fix them. And you do a PISS POOR job at fixing them, and I suspect, it's because you already have the money, why devote resources? The way YOU develop games doesn't work anymore

voting with your wallet doesn't matter when someone else's vote is worth 30 of yours

Considering a full price AAA title like Battlefield V is early access in everything but name I'd say they've already realised their 'new way'. It released with a pittance of content and now more than half a year down the line we've just got little more than a battle royale mode nobody asked for to show for it (which I hear is already dead or dying in some parts of the world). The core game felt like it was rushed out the door a year or more too early. It goes to show how low the bar has been set for what constitutes an 'AAA' game these days.

We had that thought, that was Steam Early Access in a nutshell. Its a fucking grave yard dude.

Well I do agree. EA’s old way of releasing games isn’t working at all. Maybe it’s time for them to change strategies. Like I don’t know....actually releasing finished products and completed games?

Am I out of touch? No, it is the consumers who are wrong

I don't know why devs would do early access unless they have a short and achievable roadmap to a full release. I've seen plenty of games where they completely run out of steam by the time the game's gets to 1.0 and there's no point to even completing the damn game.

oh swell, so they'll be releasing more "Not-beta" betas. It actually kinda pisses me off how "Beta" has turned into a marketing thing because you arn't playing a "beta" - you're playing a few maps of a feature complete version for marketing. Suppose "Limited time demo" doesn't have the same ring to it... They're absolutely right, the old way of acting like a faceless corporation that cares little about customer relations isn't working. Maybe they could try... acting human? GotG will never be on EA's board of directors, not in this reality or the next.

Big corporation making a public statement justifying new ways to make more money. Yep, seems about right.

Pretty much, voting with your wallet works when you buy something not when you don't. The Doom 2016 singleplayer didn't get a sequel because people didn't buy multiplayer games, but because the 2016 release was a huge success. This also means that if noone invests into a particular wanted niche, people cant buy the product and show what they want by doing so.

You're wrong. It does matter because these corporations want every last cent out of every potential customer. These people are greedy, they care more about the profits they didn't make over the ones they did (as Activision showed it a few months back). Vote with your wallet. Even if 90% of the people buy their game, they'll be mad about the 10% and say that 90% wasn't enough. That's in their nature.

they make more with that 90% than to adjust for the 10%, then they'll try to bleed the 90% dry until part of them start resisting, the cycle continues until new product, new blood. Take your money elsewhere and put them into products that you want succeed instead. If your wallet abstains then nothing will matter.

No they don't really care about the 10% because they'll never see it that way. The concept of voting with your wallet isn't faulty because they don't care about the 10% though, it's because you'll never be able to get enough people to vote with their wallet to even cause a 10% loss of sales. If you want to abstain from buying a product on principle, do that, absolutely, but it's not a viable protest strategy at large. In this regard consumers as individuals are powerless.

But what's the point in saying "don't vote with your wallet" if the only way it makes a difference is if that message spreads enough? Besides they do see it that way, but "10% of a consumer base not buying" is not the same as "10% loss of sales".

I'm not saying that you shouldn't vote with a wallet, but I can not think of a single example where people went out of their way to boycott a game in order to make an impact. Fair enough that 10% loss of sales is not the same as 10% of the consumer base, but what is your point there? Is everybody who previously purchased titles from the company or everybody on the platform of the game released the consumer base or all gamers in general or what? Your second point is exactly what I'm trying to say, if you vote with your wallet that doesn't send a message to the company because they'll just see it as a circumstancial loss of consumers because it is such a small number of people. I can only imagine that the amount of people who decide not to buy a game in order to protest a publishers business practice is hugely outweighed by the financial gain they see in that business practice. EA is in financial trouble not because people hate them, not because people aren't buying their games and they're losing sales, it is because they've grown so incredibly large so fast and that profit expectations are growing even faster. You could call it unsustainable growth but that would remain to be seen. They don't lose sales because of brand recognition, that makes no sense.

It was just an illustration, it's irrelevant 90% of what or why 90%. Outweighed? Yes. But is it pointless? No. Even if they want to ignore the losses, they will know about them, and you can be sure those shareholders are gonna have nightmares about them. But it's all related. Look at how EA won "Worst Company of the Year" twice, the amount of people that actively hate EA for that to happen, and somehow they don't lose sales because they're EA? There's definitely an impact. I don't see how it makes sense that they've grown "incredibly so large so fast", they were bigger 10 years ago, they had more people and were making more games. They're in financial trouble because one after the other, their large and varied catalogue stopped making as much money as expected. Their recent policy has been to focus on making fewer and fewer games, and putting the best (remaining) studios they had to work on them. And despite their Sports division, their other titles are all struggling, except when it's made by the one studio that has made the best recent titles for EA (Respawn). Is it a coincidence that only the game made by the only remaining, widely appreciated studio is the one that almost saved EA? Does the public opinion really matter none at all, after over 15 years of hate?

So are you implying that EA are making less sales and make less money than they were 10 years ago? I find that hard to believe, but I could be wrong, I'm not sure where to look for the stats of this, if somebody could butt in with some knowledge in this regard that'd be appreciated.

What about the fact that they are in financial trouble for the first time in as long as I can remember? But to be honest, here, I found this graph and it clearly proves me wrong. However, from the same source, I also have this page. It would need to be adjusted for inflation, but I can say for certain that I have no idea what I'm talking about here.