How EA Lost Its Soul

The conversation ended.

I'm not sure how an article about Trip Hawkins could possibly take this tone. Trip's approach to business is legendarily eccentric/arsty/wacky -- for better and for worse. A business mastermind he was not. A man with a clear vision for "Electronic Arts the Game Company" in 1982? No way. For starters, it was not yet called Electronic Arts. And secondarily, it did not author much (if any) game software for years.

For sake of brevity I will quote this gem from the back of the Deluxe Paint II manual, published in 1987:

"About our company: We're an association of electronic artists who share a common goal. We want to fulfill the potential of personal computing. That's a tall order. But with enough imagination and enthusiasm, we think there's a good chance for success. Our products, like this one, are evidence of our intent. If you'd like a product brochure, send $1.00 and a self-addressed, stamped envelope to: Electronic Arts Catalog Request, 1820 Gateway Drive, San Mateo, CA 94404."

That is truly delightful and a great reminder of the tone of the early Valley. It is also a sign of weak management, lack of vision, and in many ways a cry for help coming from a five year-old company.

I never played Starflight, but I believe it influenced a game I loved as a kid, Star Control 2. It was given a sequel (...Star Control 3) but without any of the original makers being involved - IIRC they wanted more money than the publisher was prepared to pay.

And what do you know, the bad sequel killed the franchise. People have ported the original to modern platforms, but if anything was due a Kickstarted sequel...

It's the bent to 'now profits' that ends up killing them. They can't see the forest for the trees.

I don't know how much I can blame EA as a driving force in the industry, vs. the industry as a whole and the nature of corporations and publicly traded companies.

Games got into a slump for a while because the average AAA title was stuck at a $50 price tag, yet years of inflation and increased production costs were hitting revenue and margin hard. While prices gradually started creeping up, DLC/IAP/microtransactions were really all that was left to them to find new ways of maximizing revenue and shareholder value.

When you are legally mandated to do what is right for shareholders, is it really your fault that you have to optimize for what makes the most money vs. what is right for your customers, especially when the two are not always perfectly aligned?

As an avid gamer I remember way back in the day when we first started getting a whiff of microtransactions becoming a "thing." I knew it was going to be the new reality and fought it tooth and nail. To date I've only made a small handful of microtransactions to support games I truly love that have tried to do the right thing for their users.

That said, they really have brought out the worst in gaming companies and while gaming has finally "hit the masses" with mobile gaming, there has definitely been a drop in the average game's quality in the gold rush.

The reality is though that whales drive gaming, and microtransactions facilitate whales spending massively more on games than the "buy it once" model. So game developers optimize towards that, and unfortunately that tends to skew towards addictive treadmill models that have to make the game less fun to maximize revenue. At least with old school expansions and such, they had to actually make the game awesome and enjoyable to get people to buy more content for it.