In 2008 John Ricitello said that the meddling was a problem, so they are giving their studios greater autonomy now a days. The structure of the company also reflects this; they have EA Games (where BioWare is under, along with any company that produces Racing, shooting, adventure, RPG/RTS, and action games), EA Sports, EA Play (Maxis and co. doing casual style games and puzzle games) and EA Interactive, which is stuff from playfish and mobile games
Except they aren't giving internal studios greater autonomy. Look at ME3, Project $10 is there, Online Pass was implemented to prevent used game sales, very obvious the ending was witheld for DLC. They're meddling to a far greater degree than ever. At least previously all they did was tell the Developers to make it cookie-cutter, and make it fast.
Now they demand games contain key content witheld for DLC, and Online Pass in everything even when it doesn't make sense.
LinksOcarina wrote...
That was in 2008, when EA was suffering lower aggregate scores for their titles and general dissinterest because of the Sport brand. Since then, EA has been taking chances as a company, mainly with their partnership programs.
For example, Crysis 2, Brutal Legend, KoA: Reckoning, Bulletstorm, Shadows of the Damned, and titles like Deathspank and Shank, have been released as a published product by EA. Most of these games failed, I agree, but they were also different and some of them, really fun. Brutal Legend and Reckoning come to mind for me personally. And honestly, quality is what you make of it, I doubt anyone would look back at games from the 1990s and say they are quality titles when most of them had horrific control schemes and terrible graphics.
1. Were they all that different? Three shooters, one action-adventure, and one ARPG. That's pretty much industry standard now.
2. You make it obvious you're young. The control schemes were just fine in the 90's, most of them far more elegant than what we get today. Try playing Dead Space 2 on the PC without patching. The graphics were state of the art at the time as well. We had better diversity, better quality in gaming experiences, and we weren't milked for $10 a pop to get the whole game.
For example, Fallout/Fallout 2 had more player investment than any game made in the 13 years since, despite how much more "quality" there is these days. Two games that would run on my cell phone are better at the player investment ME3 claimed it would have.
The problem is your blaming dumbed down games on the company, when the root cause of it is stagnation of the industry. Because the growth of the industry goes hand in hand with three generations of game players now, along with the growing casual market. So EA, Activision, Ubisoft and so forth have been making products more wide-appealing, instead of catering to specific genres. Its why most shooters and action titles have RPG elements too them, it makes the game more invested and attempts to engage the player longer, although most of the time its a cop-out skinner experiment.
Where do you think the stagnation comes from? It comes from companies like EA, who are interested only in blockbusters, and chase after whatever sold well last year. Ubisoft, EA's partner, and Capcom have now declared only Shooters are worth making.
Stagnation exists because Publishers aren't interested in making anything that isn't going to sell only the very highest number of units possible.
This would be in contrast to the development model used by all other entertainment forms, where they budget products according to their potential market, not as if every single offering is going to sell to every single person. They diversify so they don't fatigue the end-users with identical experiences over and over.
Publishers, like EA, are the root problem with the Industry. All EA wants is to sell as many units as COD, not to make great games.
Cost is also up because dev times are up, engines are expensive, and overall everyone is hemmoraging money because of advertisement budgets and other expenses in developing a game. Companies charged 60 bucks for games because it would help them recoup losses for overheard, and I forget the official numbers but most sales in brick and mortar stores still net publishers $25 bucks a game out of $60 for the company, with no returns on used. It is also why DLC and digital distribution are being used heavily, more money for the company so they can survive longer.
Actually, they just reuse the same engine for several games. ME3's engine is the same as ME's with some tweaks.
They're hemmoraging money because they keep releasing the same couple of games over and over, and people are getting bored with it. You can only sell the same product so many times before people get bored. It's gamer fatigue, years of endless shooters have driven people to the point where they're bored with them.
But the publishers don't understand that, they're still chasing CoD, resulting in lower and lower sales because people already have CoD.
Companies charge $60/game because MS and Sony define what a game may sell at, and they set the price of new games at $60. You can google it and get the articles from when the systems were announced.
Also, it's $10 in profit for a new game. Hence, Project $10, and why Online Passes cost $10.
As for DLC, well, don't buy any. That trend is not going to go away because it proves to make money, especially in a terrible economy when game sales on the whole are down, save for two exceptions each year, Madden, and Call of Duty. And agian, going back to what I said above, that is the main impetus for DLC, at least financially. For the developers, its adding that extra content that was always missing or cut, kind of like the weapons and armor in the Mass Effect 1 game code that is only acessabile by console command.
Actually, it will go away. The Industry is steadily crashing. January 2012 was a 37% drop in sales. Febraruary was a 24% drop. This is compared to 2011, which also was negative. All of 2011 was an 8% drop in sales, and if you factor CoD out, 2011 was closer to a 20% drop in sales.
EA sold in their last quarter 10 million BF3's, 2 million ToR, and residual NFL/FIFA, and lost 275 million.
Gamers are tired of content being held hostage (Dead Space 2), or deliberately cut from the game to be sold on Day 1 (DAO, ME3). It's not extra content, it's core content, often right on the disc you already paid for. It's a marketing plan to squeeze extra revenue out of gamers to cover the increasing attrition as people grow tired of shoddy games, and cookie-cutter games, instead of diversity and innovation.
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