A.Romero
Member
With the recent news regarding Visceral games, the old meme of EA being the source of all evil in the industry has regained strength.
In my social circle there is a guy who always feels the publishers are to blame when studios are disbanded or IP's are shelved. As a fan of the industry itself, I feel this argument is a bit superficial and feel the issue is much deeper than just a company as EA seeking to destroy the industry.
Obviously publishers make bad decisions all the time but I also believe that devs have a lot of the responsibility in how the industry works.
Taking Visceral as an example, I'm pretty sure that EA decided to take a risk when funding the first game. By then, EA already had a reputation of destroying studios and IP's so why Visceral decided to go and work with them? I'd argue that maybe no other publisher could or wanted to take the risk so Visceral decided to work with EA.
Also, why studios decide to sell themselves to publishers like EA? In my opinion it's easy: because they also like to make money and that's very respectable. However, in this sense, I feel studios hold as much of the blame as the publisher.
Maybe without EA Dead Space would have never seen the light and Visceral maybe would have closed long ago. From this perspective, does the publisher participation really represent a negative impact in the industry? I feel not.
In my opinion studios always have the choice to just working as an indie studio, like many have chosen with different degrees of success. In this sense, when consumers feel betrayed by the publisher, wouldn't be appropriate for them to feel betrayed by the studios as well? I mean, EA and other publishers don't steal the IPs, they purchase it. The original holders can decide to not compromise their freedom and just run with the risk themselves like the Cuphead devs did.
On the other hand, there are examples in the industry of devs going solo and just fucking it up themselves as well (Mighty number 9 comes to mind, for example).
What do you think GAF? Are the publishers really the cancer of the industry or is just the way the industry works?
Couldn't studios just decide to work with less funding and assuming the risks of developing games in order to not compromise creative freedom?
In my social circle there is a guy who always feels the publishers are to blame when studios are disbanded or IP's are shelved. As a fan of the industry itself, I feel this argument is a bit superficial and feel the issue is much deeper than just a company as EA seeking to destroy the industry.
Obviously publishers make bad decisions all the time but I also believe that devs have a lot of the responsibility in how the industry works.
Taking Visceral as an example, I'm pretty sure that EA decided to take a risk when funding the first game. By then, EA already had a reputation of destroying studios and IP's so why Visceral decided to go and work with them? I'd argue that maybe no other publisher could or wanted to take the risk so Visceral decided to work with EA.
Also, why studios decide to sell themselves to publishers like EA? In my opinion it's easy: because they also like to make money and that's very respectable. However, in this sense, I feel studios hold as much of the blame as the publisher.
Maybe without EA Dead Space would have never seen the light and Visceral maybe would have closed long ago. From this perspective, does the publisher participation really represent a negative impact in the industry? I feel not.
In my opinion studios always have the choice to just working as an indie studio, like many have chosen with different degrees of success. In this sense, when consumers feel betrayed by the publisher, wouldn't be appropriate for them to feel betrayed by the studios as well? I mean, EA and other publishers don't steal the IPs, they purchase it. The original holders can decide to not compromise their freedom and just run with the risk themselves like the Cuphead devs did.
On the other hand, there are examples in the industry of devs going solo and just fucking it up themselves as well (Mighty number 9 comes to mind, for example).
What do you think GAF? Are the publishers really the cancer of the industry or is just the way the industry works?
Couldn't studios just decide to work with less funding and assuming the risks of developing games in order to not compromise creative freedom?
