As long as the most money comes from idiots that buy FIFA every year, and from idiots that buy microtransactions, this is what we will get.
I haven’t bought an EA title in years. Good luck, you have a few good IPs, but there’s a lot of other competition out there, and even small studios put you to shame these days. Gamers want to be entertained, not roll into a casino.
I bought The Sims 3 a few years ago on Steam.
Had to get a pirated version because the official one didn’t run in Linux whilst the pirate version runs just fine.
That’s the full extent of my EA purchases since about 2006 - I’ve pretty much been boycotting them since they released a Battlefield DLC way back that gave more powerful weapons in multiplayer to anybody with the DLC than the base game had even in base game maps (thus forcing people to buy the DLC to be competitive in Multiplayer).
In fact EA was pretty much the first games publisher in my shit list since they started enshittifying even before the rest of the AAA part of the industry.
I hate EA as much (or more) as the next guy, but let’s not pretend here: guns and football sell.
EA is not a company of gamers. They’re a company of corpos. They follow the money.
Similar things have been happening in the movie industry. Why is every studio pumping out predictable rehashed trash? Because it sells.
Everyone on this largely esoteric forum is probably already voting with their wallets. We aren’t the ones buying these vaccuous games, but the market is clearly there. It’s much harder to fix that issue.
It sells because there’s not any other alternatives. If I go to the movies and the only things are available or some shitty rehashes what’s my alternative?
And then they wonder why not as many people are going to see movies.
It’s not just that they sell, it’s that their audiences aren’t as discerning. The guns and football guys will always buy the next guns and football games even if it sucks, even if it’s full of ads, even if it’s made by child slavery. They just want to shovel shit to the shit-eaters and get paid.
God forbid they would do something with a story.
RIP BioWare, you will be missed.
Stories might have themes, and those themes might hurt a potential customer’s feelings. Much easier (and safer for the stock price) to just not have stories and ideas anymore.
Stories and themes might induce thinking by the consumer which is bad
I’ve heard stories from people that work on Microsoft games, about how they have whole departments/teams that do things like equity and representation reviews to try and ensure that products are not pushing any potentially offensive stereotype.
It’s a ton of added overhead for anything with a narrative, if your company is big enough to get sued by special interest groups.
One reason smaller companies can put out interesting indie games, is because they can focus on the gameplay instead of big social/political issues.
Not where I thought that was going. I would think, based on the rest of your comment, that the reason indie games can be more interesting is that they can worry less about potentially being offensive and therefore focus more on social/political issues.
Yeah, so bear sex and any combo of boobs and dicks for characters is a go, and Larian gets awards, and suddenly the indie studio gets huge. I can’t imagine bear sex getting the green light in something like a microsoft game. It’d almost definitely get removed by the review, out of concern of getting sued for all kinds of reasons. Larian could take that gamble, and even after winning awards, it isn’t such a well known company as to draw the interests of people like predatory lawyers seeking class action settlements for turning kids on to furry futa sex. Even with their win fall, it’s not the sort of honeypot for lawsuits as a big corp like MS or EA.
EA has methodically destroyed pieces of my childhood.
BioWare destroyed themselves.
What corporate business does best.
Canadians need to fight for these studios getting the support our oil or car companies get. We punch way above our weight in this industry. After ripping bioware away from ea of course.
I will never buy from EA again. Not that I can remember the last time I did…
EA hasn’t been worth a shit since NHL '95 for Sega Genesis.
I disagree. Under EA’s banner, we got Burnout, Dead Space, Mass Effect, Titanfall, Apex Legends, Star Wars: Fallen Order and even a decent remaster of Command & Conquer series. Also what about Star Wars: Squadrons, a very unlikely game to happen, but here we are. So it’s not like only shit came out of EA. At least for me. Now if you talk about sports games specifically, I can’t talk about that. Never liked EA sports games anyway.
It’s almost hilarious to see the steam next gongshow, juxtaposed with all these studio closures.
Someone made a comment recently in another thread about the prevalence of shitty bootleg/noname games all over the place back in the 80s, and how nintendo started putting a gold seal of authenticity on their games as a kind of quality assurance for gamers. That’s what game studios are now, to some extent, for me, with the new flood of AI garbage. Killing off studios known for making quality products is a terrible strategy.
Bioware hasn’t made a quality product since Mass Effect 1 or Dragon Age: Origins - whichever came last.
Well, sure, it went to shit once they got gobbled by EA – both ME and DAO were released so close to the acquisition by EA, that they were clearly made primarily under the old, more indie, setup. But it’s still a studio that I remember fondly, generally, and would still check their new releases when they came out (even if I didn’t play them).
To me they’re in the same general boat as a studio like Relic. I played the early Dawn of War games quite a bit. After they got gobbled by… Sega? I think? I sorta lost touch with their games in terms of buying them/playing them, because they just didn’t seem to hit the same. I think they got sold off to a venture capital group now, but it’s still a company that I at least look at their games when they announce stuff. I’d put others like ID software, or even some publishers like Paradox, in this group too.
I mean I thought Doom 2016 and Eternal were great, but I can’t disagree with anything else you’ve said.
It’s not about quality, it is about what makes most money. See their sports titles, they suck, but are making lots of money.
It sucks to lose all these companies, but it’s kind of been coming for a long time, the whole gaming industry is basically resetting. Going back to millions of small companies instead of thousands or hundreds of big companies. The companies got too big and too slow. Things changed, and they couldn’t keep up. Not to mention so much money wasted, or worse handed directly to CEOs or other upper management.
Despite all the big companies dying, gaming as a whole is still great. Besides having to filter out games that put AI in charge, the rest of the games nowadays are actually doing awesome innovative stuff instead of “game we liked +1”. As much as I like when both exist, it’s predicated on not wasting money, and ideally at least some new ideas in the sequel.
Even the “game we liked +1” stuff is pretty good these days, since there are indie studios making spiritual successors to games with niche appeal that traditional publishers wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.
Stuff like Lunacid, Gloomwood, and the entire boomer shooter genre are basically just “what if X was made without the technology limitations of the time” and it’s great.
It was just “bioware” in name only anyways.
Hehe yeah, Bioware just hits closer to home for me, as I know a few employees, and was very close to being one myself at one point. Some part of me is glad I didn’t ride that rollercoaster. But it still probably would have been overall better than not riding it was.
Arabia-shmarabia. EA would burn and shit everything around anyway even without SA.
Here’s hoping Larian steps up again with their next creation.
Did their writing improve with BG3? I played both DOS games and while I really enjoyed the gameplay, the story was just awful.
The writing improved massively.
“Saudis EAt Shit.”
Guns and football are fine, and everything else is under the microscope
So business as usual?
But Mass effect has guns. It was basically a Shooter
“Space guns are unAmarican!”
I don’t really game much anymore bc of life and sadness but I just launched SWKOTOR for the first time since 2012 and forgot it was a BioWare game. Its so good.
This is the opportunity for 2K to revive their hockey franchise and do something amazing with it. The market (and the ea hate) is ripe for it.
2K isn’t a spectacular company either (hello microtransactions). But I’m just saying this is their opportunity if they were smart enough to take it.
As a Canadian, I’d love to see that. NHL is basically our Madden or FIFA, and while I don’t even like sports games all that much, I’d like to see some competition in that market.
