Electronic Arts - The Rise and Fall of the Videogame...

Ahh... good old Electronic Arts, those early days when they really shaped the world of gaming and released high quality, captivating and technically proficient games, gems like the original Need For Speed as well as many other other titles throughout the 90's.

But has it become a victim of its own success?.... EA has become the focus of much criticism in recent times as the giant now gobbles up development studios like there's no tomorrow and has become this game churning money printer praying on the general publics devotion to things like Nascar which EA seem to have an iron grip on! The drive to produce quality seems to have been lost along the way...

The reason why I started this thread is because EA is once again in the limelight trying to eat Take Two aka Rockstar... Will they also run them into the ground like many other studios or could it be just the thing to broaden the GTA series?

Admittedly the story is not all doom and gloom, Stuff like Crysis and Skate which well and truly hit the Tony Hawks monopoly have rolled off the production line and have been very well received.

Has EA become a 'hit and miss' company? Can they ever remove this 'If its made by EA is going to be rubbish' stigma?...

Or will the company which gave rise to great franchises and made gaming available to the masses eventually lead to the fall of the videogame back into the mundane?

Whats your opinion...

Robin.

It's not EA's fault though. They'd stop making these ****house games if people stopped buying them. Madden 09 will come out with 'adVanced endZone graphX' or something and idiots will buy 6 trillion copies of it.

Why bother spending money developing 'good' games when consumers will buy just as many, if not more than bad ones with nice graphics. (See Pro Evolution Soccer Vs FIFA Games).

One thing that disappointed me to no end was what EA did to Maxis. The SimCity games were awesome, even the EA controlled SimCity 4 was and still is amazing, but SimCity Societies is mediocre at best. They manage to run the series of games that I would wait religiously for into the ground.

Eventually EA will buy up most of the big companies, which I have said will spell disaster for the gaming industry. Sure there will be smaller companies that put out games that are great but only a hand full of people are going to buy them because they are going to virtually unheard of.

People wonder why piracy is so high, the industy is the cause. Why in the world should I spend $50 on a game that will last maybe 6 hours of game play time and was a half assed attempt to make it in the first place. Unless they give games a proper game play to cost ratio we are going to continue to download the games and play them for free. Oblivion despite it's many short coming provided me with over 200 hours of game play, now that is what I consider awesome game play to cost ratio.

So,...

I live about 40 miles from the EA building.. should I bomb it?

Hmm.. well, I'd forgive them if they just made some damn good PSP games! NFSMW was utter **** for the PSP, NFSC was okay, and NFSPS is nothing special..

^Yes, I think I'm close to it as well. We can take them down with one hit. That would be awesome.

Anyway... Garbage in garbage out.

But when EA makes a gem like porsche unleashed no one buys the thing. You cant blame a company for trying to make money, when all its doing is producing what sells in the highest numbers.

man i really lost all faith in EA...I use to be such a big fan of the NBA Live series but after the 05 game, the games started to go downhill...NBA 2K8 was a much better purchase than NBA Live 08...EA didnt even bother updating the ratings of players

If EA wants to make rubbish games to make money okay thats good to me but they should stop buying perfectly good gamecompany's and turning it in rubbish games.

R.I.P. Simcity
R.I.P. Theme Hospital / Bullfrog
Semi-R.I.P. Command and conquer

although i still like it, still feels ea cheapness...

Yeah, EA tends to ruin quite a few games, but they have produced SOME good ones. Porsche unleashed wasnt bad. But it wasnt too great either.

I was going to purchase SimCity Societies but the price and reviews led me not to.

Casio

But when EA makes a gem like porsche unleashed no one buys the thing. You cant blame a company for trying to make money, when all its doing is producing what sells in the highest numbers.

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Yes we can! Well, OK can't blame them for wanting to make money, but they are fast becoming, if not already are, the Starbucks of the gaming world. Seeing as EA recently tried to buy Rockstar, it clearly shows, as if we didn't know already, that they have alot of money to throw around. I don't understand why they can't put at least a fraction of that money into finding and developing original gaming ideas, like Valve did with Portal, rather than churning out 2 Fifas a year.

Even when they do get a really good game out: Skate, they will surely ruin it for the sequel. Take a look at this:
http://uk.ps3.ign.com/articles/874/874978p1.html

adlyco

Yes we can! Well, OK can't blame them for wanting to make money, but they are fast becoming, if not already are, the Starbucks of the gaming world.

Click to expand...

I think they are more like Microsoft, in the way that rather than invest mostly in innovation and development, they buy out their competitors and or purchase exclusive licenses, thus monopolize markets. Considering how well that has worked for Microsoft it's hard to blame them for trying to use the same business strategy, despite the consequences to gamers, and that's mediocre games due to the lack of any significant competition.

The fact that EA and Microsoft have even exchanged top level executives, I think the similarities between the two are stronger than ever.

Yeah, they are very similar, add to that the amount they put into marketing and you have an even more similar business model. I suppose that if you don't like it then the only thing to do is stop buying their games...

I realized EA was going downhill in quality when I purchased NFL 2k5 instead of a Madden game. I was already in the mindset of only buying Madden every couple of years and then when I realized that Take Two was pricing their annual sports games at a decent price I bought that. Little did I realize that the game was going to be much better than Madden. So I was set to buy into the 2K games from then on, and then EA bought exclusive NFL rights.

That made me mad. Then I saw what they started doing to The Sims franchise. I had slowly moved from PC to console gaming more and more and so I decided to get my wife a Sims game for the PS2. It was horrible. All the Sims console ports were just the PC updates redesigned and priced as a full game.

When I got my Wii I gave them one more try with Madden 07 and Tiger Woods 07. Tiger Woods was good, but the controls needed a bit more tweaking. It seemed like they just threw on some quick motion controls without paying attention to detail. Forgivable for a first time outing. Madden was a different story. It was buggy. I ended up opting out of motion controls to go back to 2k5.

Now seeing how they are throwing the Sims name on any old crap I really feel as if they have fallen.

I had hope for Spore, but I doubt my PC will play it and the only console version is for the Wii, which will likely be dumbed down. I don't understand why they won't give us a 360 or PS3 version with keyboard and mouse support that is exactly like the PC version. Console tech has finally gotten there and they ignore it, only taking advantage of the technically lower system because it uses waggle.

But after seeing some preview images and video of the first stage of Spore I wonder if it will be worth it. It looks like flOw, only cute. It's hard to imagine Will Wright had a hand in this graphical design.


Video in the link
http://www.joystiq.com/2008/05/20/spore-cell-phase-flowts-into-view/

I'll have to see more before I make a judgment call on this one.