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Electronic Arts Leadership Are Out of Their Goddamned Minds

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Re: Electronic Arts Leadership Are Out of Their Goddamned Minds

#11

Post by boxed »

Nathanba wrote: post #4

There is nothing wrong with setting high goals and trying to reach them. That they are failing is a different issue. This article is trying to farm outrage but there isn't any.

It sounds like they tried to achieve their goals not by making a game that people wanted to play, but by resurrecting The Mythical Man Month and not only believing that this zombie anti-science idea works, but that it could produce a massively fun game.

Re: Electronic Arts Leadership Are Out of Their Goddamned Minds

#13

Post by slg »

Nathanba wrote: post #4

There is nothing wrong with setting high goals and trying to reach them. That they are failing is a different issue. This article is trying to farm outrage but there isn't any.

The article also feels a little dishonest comparing total unit sales to cumulative player statistics over an extended time period. If you click through to the linked Ars Technica article, it says the cumulative player number for the previous entry is 22 million and 30 million for the best of the series. Is a 3-5x increase from going from presumably a $60 game to free to play really that crazy of a goal?

That isn't to say that EA doesn't suck. This 100m goal just wouldn't be among the top 100 reasons I would point to as evidence.

Re: Electronic Arts Leadership Are Out of Their Goddamned Minds

#16

Post by soup10 »

Nathanba wrote: post #4

There is nothing wrong with setting high goals and trying to reach them. That they are failing is a different issue. This article is trying to farm outrage but there isn't any.

every video game is a financial gamble, it's not his money so who cares if they try to make a battle royale and it flops

Re: Electronic Arts Leadership Are Out of Their Goddamned Minds

#19

Post by bdcravens »

I used to spend way too much time, and money, playing the mobile game Tap Sports Baseball. A fairly simple take on a baseball simulator, but with an insanely set of team/club competitiveness and upgrade mechanics. After EA bought the company that owned it, it literally lasted a year before they decided to end it, as its tens of millions of dollars in revenue each year apparently didn't meet their goals.

Re: Electronic Arts Leadership Are Out of Their Goddamned Minds

#20

Post by joegibbs »

I think the thing a lot of people don't realise when trying to make the next runaway hit game is that most of the games they're trying to emulate weren't produced with that intent, and didn't get their popularity with a running start as some massive AAA behemoth.

Fortnite itself was originally a base-building PVE zombie game that Epic cranked out a battle royale mode for in a couple of months after seeing that PUBG (which at the time was a janky, unpolished and presumably cheap-to-develop standalone version of an ARMA mod) was a huge success. Then after it's out, Epic restructures behind it as a cash cow, makes it into a modding platform, uses it to improve Unreal Engine, etc.

Minecraft was a little solo project in Java - now 350m copies sold. It didn't start off as a platform for other games, available on every console with cutting edge graphics and $100m in marketing spend behind it.

Ark sold 80 million copies. It was an Early Access game on Steam by a team of 35, then it took off and they ported it to everything.

Battle Royale's been done and been a huge hit for PUBG (2017), then Fortnite, then Warzone. I think it's about time that people would be getting sick of it, same as open world survival crafting games were the big thing (Minecraft, DayZ, Ark) and MMOs. Next Battlefield is $400m, all those other big hits were probably more in the $100k-$1m range. Maybe it would be better to make a bunch of $1m-$10m range games, see which one is a hit, then move resources behind it. I imagine changing the structure of a big business like EA to be able to make a move like that would be a very, very difficult undertaking though.

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