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[OryoN]

It's a shame more and more devs feel forced to take this position. It's understandable, although, none of them seem too concerned about controlling their ridiculously bloated budgets. Many of the best games out there aren't very 'big/popular', sales wise. If this mindset prevails - above other pracital methods of managing finances - we're in for a pretty unexciting gen.

Shooters galore, here we come! Yeeeeah, yaaaay...yaa... ugh.

 

[sajj316]

Vita??

Outside of Need for Speed, Vita games by EA have been a disappointment. Madden and FIFA in particular. I can forgive the first outing of FIFA for the platform but not the second. Madden seemed half-baked with subtle performance improvements. What could have been ... the story of the Vita!

 

[Various Artists]

Though its pretty obvious, the "nonviable systems" comments surprises me. Its crazy that they would just come out and say it. I would expect more along the lines of "At EA we are always looking to the future for great opportunities with all console manufactures..." etc. talk. Seems like a gut punch to Nintendo Wii U and to a lesser extent Vita.

 

[Minions]

If they want Dead Space to sell better, perhaps not shitting it up with microtransactions and bland game play would be a good way to go.

 

[Duxxy3]

So EA doesn't see Wii U or Vita as viable platforms at this point? Actually, do they even have any 3DS titles in planned?

Vita sales aren't big but they have shown a huge amount of growth, percentage-wise.

 

[Fezzan]

It's a shame more and more devs feel forced to take this position. It's understandable, although, none of them seem too concerned about controlling their ridiculously bloated budgets. Many of the best games out there aren't very 'big/popular', sales wise. If this mindset prevails - above other pracital methods of managing finances - we're in for a pretty unexciting gen.

Shooters galore, here we come! Yeeeeah, yaaaay...yaa... ugh.

What else are they gonna do? Everything else just drains the cash they have.
People like big triple AAA games but they cost too much, the only thing that is successful is FPS games.

 

[Etnos]

Get ready for the crash.

I don't believe a crash in the traditional sense is viable, never before there was so much people playing videogames. Videogames already won the cultural battle as a viable entertainment medium.

Now.. the traditional console model, that I believe is in the way of the dodo.

 

[Deleted member 80556]

Well, whatever minute, optimistic chance of Mirror's Edge 2...what am I talking about that never existed.

Oh no, they're probably getting ready to announce it, what this means, is if the second game fares just like the first one, you can say good bye to the IP for a long, long time.

 

[Coolwhip]

3 AAAA games a year confirmed?

 

[KingFire]

I don't blame them. Development is getting more expensive and the "hardcore" consumers are expecting perfection from these companies. No wonder many smaller developers went bankrupt.

I do not think we will have a video game crash. The worst case is that companies will stop focusing on the big "AAA" and we will get games that are not as polished. I am fine with this but I don't think many people here are.

 

[Iacobellis]

It's gonna suck when they run out of things to milk because they couldn't make something new.

I feel like, in 10 or so years, EA will JUST make sports games.

Isn't that what EA did 15 or so years ago?

 

[Nilaul]

What happens if all three consoles bomb at the begging?

 

[Fezzan]

I don't believe a crash in the traditional sense is viable, never before there was so much people playing videogames. Videogames already won the cultural battle as a viable entertainment medium.

Now.. the traditional console model, that I believe is in the way of the dodo.

If they went the way of gaming is jst one part of it, like it seems the nextbox is doing, then they would survive and be quite popular I think.
But it might not work in the future were everyone has a console just like they have a mobile phone etc.

 

[nekomix]

As expected from EA. Every move they're doing since 2011 shows that they're trying to maximize their margins with minimum risk. Basically, back to the PS2 days :-( (Oh wait, at this time, they even had a good GBA support). Let's see if they're even as successful as they were during these days...

 

[Duxxy3]

What happens if all three consoles bomb at the begging?

Unless both systems are $599, at least one of the consoles should be fine in every region.

 

[Zia]

Good. They've spread themselves too thin. Games-as-services are where they should excel. Consolidate and create sustainable platforms for FIFA, Madden and Battlefield.

 

[ari]

Further proof that the AAA game market is collapsing under its own weight.

Its the fucking price of the games. What do these companies don't understand?

Tomb raider, dishonored, dead space 3, and other AAA games would have sold astonishing numbers with a $29.99 price point.

60 dollars don't turn anybody on. Seriously. Only the gaming elites and hardcore gamers pre order and buy these games doing that price. I mean, concert tickets and events don't even go that high anymore.

 

[KingFire]

As expected from EA. Every move they're doing since 2011 shows that they're trying to maximize their margins with minimum risk. Basically, back to the PS2 days :-( (Oh wait, at this time, they even had a good GBA support). Let's see if they're even as successful as they were during these days...

That is what you try to do when you run a big public business. Nobody likes risks, especially shareholders.

 

[Fezzan]

Unless both systems are $599, at least one of the consoles should be fine in every region.

I dunno how well they would do at $500 either, $400 and they won't bomb I'd say, assuming people have a reason to buy them.

 

[rrs]

Get ready for the crash.

There will be no crash, just lots of the same bland crap we got now.

 

[Little Green Yoda]

I do not think we will have a video game crash. The worst case is that companies will stop focusing on the big "AAA" and we will get games that are not as polished. I am fine with this but I don't think many people here are.

Will the less polished versions of these games sell? That's the $64k question. Expectations are raised every gen (or so we are told) and the fear is always that if you blink first as a publisher and scale back costs, the consumers will go to your competitors' AAAA offerings. So unless everyone slumps/crashes together, doing so is supposedly corporate suicide. It's entirely possible that this narrative is merely perpetuated by a vocal minority and the masses don't care so much about production values.

 

[Baconsammy]

One might think they would have learned something about diversification in the past 6-7 years though. Were they not the ones who admitted to backing the wrong horse last gen?

Not sure about that. Who did they back last gen that was the wrong choice?

What happens if all three consoles bomb at the begging?

They won't. At the very least PS4 will be huge in Europe, and America will buy Xbox. I doubt we'll see either of them bomb in every single region of the world for more than half a year(so far).

 

[BolognaSoup]

If they want Dead Space to sell better, perhaps not shitting it up with microtransactions and bland game play would be a good way to go.

Yep. DS1 and 2 were 2 of my favorite games this gen. I did not buy 3 because of this.

 

[metalslimer]

Not sure about that. Who did they back last gen that was the wrong choice?

Some Nintendo fans think that if companies had decided to focus on Wii instead of PS3/360 everything would be fine, depite the fact that lot of the revenue from this gen came from online setup which the Wii was horrible suited for.

Anyway say goodbye to everything that can't sell at least 2-3 million.

 

[Basil]

Guess EA are going to drop any games for PS4 and X720 because they aren't viable because zero install base lololol

 

[Delusibeta]

So, Dead Space is dead, Crysis publishing deal is dead, Fuse won't get a sequel, if Dragon Age 3 bombs that's dead too, Mirror's Edge is dead, WiiU, Vita, 3DS and probably Android support is dead, and if the Ps4 and Xbox 3 stumbles out of the gate to the degree of the WiiU EA won't support them. What's left?

The death of AAA games is coming, I hope.

 

[Fox Mulder]

Having nothing but a small lineup of currently hot properties to milk has worked great for Activision, not shocked to see EA cut down on their releases.

 

[Little Green Yoda]

Not sure about that. Who did they back last gen that was the wrong choice?

Quick Google search led me to: http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2007/07/ea-we-backed-th/

Some Nintendo fans think that if companies had decided to focus on Wii instead of PS3/360 everything would be fine, depite the fact that lot of the revenue from this gen came from online setup which the Wii was horrible suited for.

Did the DLC/microtransactions cover the higher dev costs? I'm just saying diversification is better than putting all of one's eggs into one basket. Despite how big that one basket may be.

 

[qizah]

Not investing much in the Wii U and Vita makes sense considering the userbase, but what happens if the cards don't fall into place and the PS4 and new Xbox are also slow to move units? It seems more critical for them to take off right away this generation than last, at least for EA.

 

[Mario007]

One really odd thing is that EA is not doing 3DS stuff. I mean not even a kiddie licensed title that would actually sell to the audience. When you think about it, they are leaving money on the table.

Also Android. They are ridiculously stupid treating it as an unwanted bastard child.

 

[Maztorre]

So they are stagnating and waiting and hoping that the market rebounds.

EA is such a reactionary company. They don't drive the industry at all these days. Just look at Activision for comparison. Just 2 years ago they invested in Skylanders and it has paid off immensely. They've also committed 10 years to Bungie. 10 friggen years. That's long term plan that EA would never be able to do.

EA doesn't have a clear vision of what the market is going to do. Heck - they don't even try to figure it out. What they do instead is look at what is currently happening and they attempt to latch on to that. They failed on Facebook. They succeeded on iOS (mostly through licenses - Hasbro, Simpsons, etc). They don't know what to do with Nintendo.

They need people with better ideas at EA. But people with better ideas don't want to go there.

I've been saying this for a while, all they ever do is react (hastily and/or poorly) to perceived trends rather than attempt to build products around a gap in the market they could fill. That's why they end up assigning multiple studios to multiple modern military shooters (Medal of Honor/Battlefield), neither of which sell anywhere near CoD and of course results in one studio being shuttered, or spending untold millions on a subscription based WoW-clone half a decade after WoW.

The real danger for EA in the coming years is that they can no longer aggressively acquire smaller studios (and their IP) as they would have in the past. Most talented independent studios outside of the publisher system have multiple large and healthy markets to work within (Steam, PSN, XBLA, iOS, eShop, Android), and many of these studios are headed up by staff with previous industry experience who will never work for a company like EA again. EA keep burning bridges within their own IP and the people that could save them won't go there.

Over the next few years there will be 2nd or 3rd "generation" releases from indies that will begin closing the production value gap with EA's products while playing better, and at that point all EA can do to compete is drive production values even higher and their margins lower.

 

[qizah]

One really odd thing is that EA is not doing 3DS stuff. I mean not even a kiddie licensed title that would actually sell to the audience. When you think about it, they are leaving money on the table.

Also Android. They are ridiculously stupid treating it as an unwanted bastard child.

They've had success on iOS haven't they? I guess that fills their void of developing on a dedicated handheld. The Android market is pretty big, don't know why they'd want to avoid that.

 

[Mario007]

They've had success on iOS haven't they? I guess that fills their void of developing on a dedicated handheld. The Android market is pretty big, don't know why they'd want to avoid that.

Well it just doesn't make sense. I mean surely they could easily outsource some lincese work for the 3DS. That's money on the table ready for the taking.

I agree that Android seems to the elephant in the room as well.

Re iOS, someone posted a screenshot here recently about EA's ranking on the top grossing developers and EA was somewhere around 6th place. That obviously looked good, but then the other side of the story was that they had around 900 apps out there, far surparsing anyone else in the top 10.

 

[Jibbajabbawockky]

And probably biyearly editions of Mass Effect, although I expect that it will increasingly become more of a multiplayer-focused shooter than a single-player action RPG. They seem to be making serious money off the multiplayer of ME3, after all.

I'm guessing Dragon Age will end after the disappointing performance of DA3.

Yeah, especially with how it seems like BioWare is being given a good amount of time on DA3, I have to imagine the longer that stays in development the higher the sales expectations are going to be for that game. To the point where I'm guessing EA is expecting it to deliver Skyrim sales numbers or else Dragon Age is dead. I have to imagine with the Star Wars license as their safety net, if any of BioWare or EA's new IPs stumble, they'll just shove that team on to some Star Wars game.

 

[QaaQer]

Ahhh, I remember Peter Mooore's outrage over that site that reported that Dead Space was no more:

forgott about that, gotta love righteous indignation.

 

[Dysun]

Dead Space 1 and 2 were great, it's too bad we wont get more of that but in a way it seems it has run its course. Haven't even picked up 3 due to a lack of interest

 

[diffusionx]

Why WOULDN'T they do this?

"hey guys lets fund games that lose money and will eventually put our future solvency at stake, that's the way to run a business."

 

[QaaQer]

I think it would be better if they actively tried to find ways to monetize their niche franchises instead of putting all their bets on a few franchises and platforms. Test new ideas, concepts and franchises at a smaller budget and maybe use those titles to for various other purposes (e.g. give employees occasionally the chance to work on something smaller/new). I'm honestly not sure how anyone can be happy about "We're only gonna make the big titles anymore", especially because this also implies they won't experiment much.

EA's current modus operandi is to let other companies do the experimenting and whatnot, then buy the successful ones out. It would be nice if they were more like Sony, and funded some niche stuff etc., but they aren't. EA is all about maximum profit in the short term.

 

[Lambtron]

Sure, if you want to willfully ignore the fact that EA isn't the entire industry or the fact that Sony is making their next gen console incredibly indie-friendly.

Do you really think that outside of the indie space (I have a PC which can play these games) we're going to see a big rise in the variety of "gaming experiences" we get next gen? This is just EA for now but it's not like we're seeing huge sales in games that don't tick a handful of boxes which do not interest me in the least. I don't think it's just late generation fatigue. And I don't think increasing development costs next gen is going to make it any better. I hope I'm wrong, but I'm too jaded to think it's going to start improving.

 

[Glass Rebel]

One really odd thing is that EA is not doing 3DS stuff. I mean not even a kiddie licensed title that would actually sell to the audience. When you think about it, they are leaving money on the table.

Also Android. They are ridiculously stupid treating it as an unwanted bastard child.

Looking at EA's output on Nintendo handhelds it isn't surprising at all. Henry Hatsworth might be their biggest effort to date.

Not a huge loss tbh.

 

[grumble]

From a business perspective, it makes more sense for most studios to create ten mid-budget titles than three huge budget titles.

1. The ROI has a great chance of doing well with any one mid budget title if it catches the market's imagination,
2. it avoids issues with the market being unable to support the sales figures required to make a 100M title profitable (like Tomb Raider),
3. it establishes a wider platform as a feeder for new 'hit' franchises, and
4. the number of titles substantially reduces the risk for the publisher.

I'm not sure what dev costs are all-in right now, but assuming that a big title is 80M and a tightly budgeted title is 30M, I see a lot of value in dropping the large titles entirely aside from established franchises and investing in your business by creating more 30M titles. As we've seen from the original Uncharted and the original Dead Space, the compromises required to save a shitload of money aren't that severe.

 

[Crawl]

It pretty much boils down to: Only the biggest / surefire hits are getting Console releases: Sports Games, Battlefield, Racing & the bi-annual bioware game (until that flops)

All of EA's new / experimental stuff and ip will be taking place on mobile platforms and free-to-play pc games. That's pretty much all there is to it.

If these next gen consoles flop: EA will continue will the 360/PS3 gen surefire hits and slowly transition into a PC Games/Mobile Games as a service company.

 

[Father_Brain]

I thought that was written into the Madden contract as well and that's skipping the Wii U and 3DS.

Then again maybe it's not. It doesn't seem to be in the NHL contract.

Well, FIFA is their only upcoming game listed as getting a handheld version, and last year's was released on nine platforms (plus iOS) versus Madden's five and NHL's two, so I assume that their deal with FIFA is just stricter in that regard.

 

[Opiate]

Why WOULDN'T they do this?

"hey guys lets fund games that lose money and will eventually put our future solvency at stake, that's the way to run a business."

Because that's where the next generation of new, breakout genres come from. Out of the ashes of scores of bombs and misfires rises one or two unexpected, gigantic hits.

This is where GTA came from. This is where Wii Sports came from. This is where Farmville came from. This is where Resident Evil came from. None of these were games in highly lucrative, well established genres until these games became huge hits.

This process of genre discovery is becoming prohibitively expensive, which is the logical foundation for why some suspect a contraction may occur in the home console industry. Growth is built on trying new things and failing, yet the market is becoming increasingly intolerant of it because of the financial stakes.

 

[Andrew.]

Too bad. Mismanage teams and thus create wholly inefficient budgets, whereby necessitating ridiculous and unrealistic sales expectations and ending up failing to meet those expectations which in turn gets shit canned.

Visceral cycle.

fixed

 

[Maztorre]

If these next gen consoles flop: EA will continue will the 360/PS3 gen surefire hits and slowly transition into a PC Games/Mobile Games as a service company.

...which would work, except that they have repeatedly mistreated the PC market. The mobile market has very little correlation between production value and success, and production value is all EA can use to compete there.

EA needs a healthy console market but failing to stimulate a market on platforms like WiiU and Vita, whilst doubling down on sequels, sports and licensed games on the consoles they do support is going to bore consumers, who will go to publishers (or other platforms) that will provide for them.

 

[DarkLordMalik]

Crysis was the best FPS ever made.

I disagree. The title of "Best FPS Ever" belongs to Bioshock 1. Even as a IP, at least it didn't degrade in quality much with sequels and actually managed to deliver a solid title in the shape of Infinite.

 

[QaaQer]

Because that's where the next generation of new, breakout genres come from. Out of the ashes of scores of bombs and misfires rises one or two unexpected, gigantic hits.

This is where GTA came from. This is where Wii Sports came from. This is where Farmville came from. This is where Resident Evil came from. None of these were games in highly lucrative, well established genres until these games became huge hits.

This process of genre discovery is becoming prohibitively expensive, which is the logical foundation for why some suspect a contraction may occur in the home console industry. Growth is built on trying new things and failing, yet the market is becoming increasingly intolerant of it because of the financial stakes.

And if you look at the film business for comparison sake, supporting a wide breadth of material also cultivates a variety of audiences. People of all age categories buy movie tickets, and all kinds of demographics are served by the film industry. Sure you get The Avengers, but there is also The King's Speech, Wreck it Ralph, and Lincoln. If the film industry started only caring about making movies that will gross over 200 million USD, the industry would contract like a motherfucker. And the medium would become culturally marginalized.

It would be very sad if there were only 50 million dollar games and games made by 3 dudes in a garage with nothing in between.

 

[krypt0nian]

Get ready for the crash.

There is no crash. Jesus.

 

[illadelph]

re-skin Dead Space as a Star Wars game confirmed