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EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners

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Re: EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners

#301

Post by mkipper »

parineum wrote: post #282
thegrim33 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the reason modern AAA games hold your hand is because they have to. Their target consumer now is as high a percentage of the population as possible; they aim for the lowest common denominator being able to play and thrive in the game. Hence, needing insane levels of handholding and guidance in the game. In the past, it was mostly just geeks/nerds playing video games, and so things didn't need to be dumbed down to t…

This reeks of a superiority complex. Plenty of my friends who were less than geniuses enjoyed these same games I did. Games now just focus more on lower engagement players. It's easier than ever to get into a game but, easy come, easy go. Frustration just serves to get someone to move on rather than buckle down and persist. Previously, when gaming was less easy to get into, the population of gamers self selected to p…

I think this is more relevant. Like everything, most games today are optimized to maximize engagement and keep people with low attention spans hooked. There are plenty of intelligent people who could invest a bunch of time into solving a puzzle but just don't care to.

I remember playing Myst as a not-particularly-bright grade schooler and banging my head against puzzles for weeks without making any progress. It wasn't some great intellectual challenge -- I was just bored and didn't have any other games to play. I can't imagine I would have stuck with it if I could have watched YouTube or played Fortnite instead.

Re: EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners

#302

Post by falcor84 »

mlindner wrote: post #261
falcor84 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind saying more about this? Why does promoting games as if they were movies is an issue? Is this just about the rising development costs of AAA games, or is there something else here that you're alluding to?

A movie is something you watch, a game is something you play. It's not there to tell you a grand story. It's there to wrap some good gameplay in some storytelling packaging. A game is closer to a novel than it is to a hollywood movie. The most loved games (high replayability is a key component) often have quite lacking "story" if any story at all. What makes them shine is how they feel to play, even better if they en…

Thanks for clarifying. I understand your perspective now, but just want to say that this is really different from mine, which might be influenced by my having a relatively strong Need for Closure[0]. I've been a life-long gamer, and have almost never had any interest in replaying a game (at least not until it's been perhaps a decade). When I finish a good game and get to the credits, I have a very strong sense of catharsis, which leads me then to enjoy clicking on that Delete button and starting on the next game. And just to be clear - it's not that I am trying to rush things and be done with the games; I take my time with most games, and I do think a lot about the good ones after, but it's pleasant memories of my time with them, rather than any desire to go back into the fray.

As you can imagine, I mostly enjoy single-player narrative games with exploration and some RPG elements, rather than multi-player ones, or open-ended ones with infinite-replayability mechanics. For reference, some of my favorite game franchises include: LBA, Zelda, The Last of Us, Mass Effect, The Witcher, Portal, Talos Principle, GTA, Kotor, Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_(psychology)

Re: EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners

#303

Post by WorldMaker »

nerdjon wrote: post #60
herpdyderp wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BioWare is long dead anyway.

Honestly I disagree and I feel like this is largely parroted without playing the games. SWTOR was maintained pretty well for a while and was fun. The issues with ME3's ending were blown way out of proportion and was still a fantastic trilogy. Andromeda had its issues no doubt about it but I am still mad at a certain website deciding that they were going to just go hard on attacking it. It was a fun game, it had some…

> Anthem... man that game had potential but just was not ready to ship. Was a ton of fun to play and I loved the bits of story we got but it really was just a tease of a story sadly.

Anthem came across to me that it had most of its story "filed off" at the last minute. I can't prove it, but Bioware was said to have been working on a Mandalorian game for years and so much of Anthem from the KOTOR-like macguffin that gives the title of the game to the underutilized Cantina in the main hub to the fact that AT-ATs (under a slightly different name) just show up in the middle of plot like you should have already been expecting them feels like Bioware in the very last minute had to pull every Star Wars character and Star Wars reference out of a game that was designed to be a Star Wars Mandalorian simulator.

At least as a player of Anthem, I think it's a tale of weird timing that EA was afraid of losing access to the Star Wars license in the wrong week, and also didn't anticipate that Disney would heavily promote a Mandalorian themed TV show not soon after the expected release date. As an officially licensed Star Wars Mandalorian simulator, just as or just before the first couple of seasons of The Mandalorian were premiering could have been incredible. Anthem hints that it was almost that in such weird ways it's hard not to wonder if EA and Bioware just got Anthem's timing wrong.

(It's also not hard to blame Anthem's weird timing for messing up Andromeda by consequence. Andromeda's team got retasked away from story DLC to help Anthem in whatever its last weird rush was, which in my theory is the "removing Star Wars from it" and I still think Andromeda was only one good story DLC from being among the best of the series.)

Re: EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners

#305

Post by boston_clone »

boston_clone wrote: post #186
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not sure the investment group attempting to diversify Saudi oil income is going to be less profit oriented than the stock market in general For what it’s worth, MBS is reportedly an avid gamer.

So is Elon Musk.

To expand on this, the central issue is disreputable people obtaining a high degree of control over an industry; that their interests overlap is of little relevance - if anything, it’s a viable smokescreen for PR campaigns.

Re: EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners

#306

Post by WorldMaker »

Etheryte wrote: post #39
nerdjon wrote: post #23

I am finding myself having some conflicted feelings on this. First, I absolutely hate who is buying them. Especially as a huge Bioware fan with a Mass Effect tattoo. That being said, putting aside who is buying them for a moment. I would actually be happy to see more gaming companies going fully private. I feel like the need for constant growth (instead of just sustainability) is what has caused much of the issues in…

If you think private equity will be milder, you're in for a bad surprise. Most of the enshittification you see around you stems from private equity.

Yup, many private equity deals ultimately are to break a company up into spare parts (to sell individual IPs/sub-brands to the highest bidder.) The extra debt the buyout saddles the company with is in part to build a bankruptcy case to kick off that spare parts auction.

Re: EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners

#307

Post by ethbr1 »

no_wizard wrote: post #94
AlexandrB wrote: post #11

AAA gaming feels so tired (and tiresome) that this news barely registers for me. The last EA game I played was the excellent C&C remaster - and EA's main contribution was getting out of the way of the project. They still own the rights to a ton of legendary IP - SimCity, Command & Conquer, Battlefield, but I don't have illusions that new iterations of that IP will be any good. I know this is probably part of the Saud…

RIP Mass Effect and by extension BioWare. One of the most groundbreaking trilogies in gaming with tons of potential and it’ll get relegated to the dustbin of history no doubt. If I was absurdly rich I’d buy up lots of underused and/or abused IP and start a game studio around it. I feel like that would be a good business if you have the capital to handle game dev costs

> RIP Mass Effect and by extension BioWare. One of the most groundbreaking trilogies in gaming with tons of potential and it’ll get relegated to the dustbin of history no doubt.

Maybe I started with BioWare too early, but everything after NWN felt incredibly empty... in that 'world breaks if you look left or right of the main plot' Call of Duty way.

Which is fine, but always gave me an itch that I was really strapped into a plot-on-rails amusement park ride rather than a world.

Re: EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners

#308

Post by WorldMaker »

imglorp wrote: post #164
nabla9 wrote: post #130

PIF: Saudi Arabian State fund. Affinity Partners: Jared Kushner.

Assuming the usual follow the money angle, what's the political play here for Kushner and the White House?

Most of the money is PIF, and that gets into a lot of accusations of "sportswashing": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sportswashing

The Saudis through the PIF are heavily invested in entertainment brands and sports to distract from the fossil fuels (and worse) that create most of those investment funds.

As to Kushner's-specific role, could just be cynically seen to money itself, as a US-based middleman of the PIF deal trying to take a cut. "Administrators" in these sort of private equity buyouts (leveraged buy outs) can make a lot of fast, stupid cash in a grift that probably should be illegal but still currently is not. (LBOs saddle the company being bought out with a lot of debt to pay the "Administrators" what they think they are worth. That debt often leads to the original company going bankrupt and selling their IP at auction to highest bidder and the "Administrators" also take their cuts of those auctions. It's a corporate ponzi scheme that no matter how many huge companies it takes down like Sears or Little Debbie or MGM or many more we still haven't actually put a law on the books to stop it.)

Re: EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners

#309

Post by ethbr1 »

brigade wrote: post #298
bunderbunder wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently watched a youtube video by a gamer about 20 years younger than me who had discovered older games and was reflecting on how deeply different they feel compared to modern games. The big difference she observed is that older games don't hold your hand the way modern games do. They expect you to think hard, work hard, use trial and error, and generally, in her words, "use your brain." She spent a while talking…

Back in the day, I remember a Blizzard interview on pre-Wrath WoW raid design. They explained how they didn't like that they spent a ton of money and effort developing end-game content that less than 1% of their playerbase would ever see. And development costs have only risen since then. Moreso than needing handholding due to game mechanics or "too much" anything, I've always felt that it stems from a developer need…

Exactly. It makes little sense to fund development that few players will ever see. A developer/publisher could instead cut that content and keep the money as profit.

That's why I think novelty and 'old AAA game' richness has a ceiling development_cost : unit_of_content ratio.

There are things that were feasible for Fallout 1 to do that accountants would lose their shit over today, precisely because they were relatively cheap then and astronomically expensive now.

... the real travesty is the corollary of that though: that gameplay/difficulty must ensure a maximum number of players see all the content.

Which has led to the 'impossible to fail' gimmicks that make modern AAA games feel less satisfying.

Honestly, it feels like Rockstar and Valve are the only ones making truly great AAA games these days...

(But mostly because they're on stable financial footing and willing to take as long as it takes)

Re: EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners

#310

Post by lupusreal »

ummonk wrote: post #218
ecshafer wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EA doing any amount of shenanigans isn't making people sick, killing people, making people homeless or destitute. Their crimes are minor and petty.

Addictive gambling for kids is hardly minor and petty. Many children have spent thousands on EA Sports games.

TBQH Valve/Steam is a major factor in this gambling in games scene but gamers love them. So I don't think this is the real reason gamers have a problem with EA.
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