I wonder what would happen to Bioware if EA went bankrupt...

... and now introducing, ladies and gentlemen! Army of Snooze: the 40th yawn!

@timtheterrible
They're profitable enough that someone would pick them up.

I seem to recall EA's line up being pretty decent last year.

I dunno what the deal is there's so many different theories being thrown around. Of all the EA titles I can recall over the last 2 years they all definitely had audiences and have all done north of okay critically. I just don't know what's going on. Their advertising has been top notch. Their timing doesn't seem bad.

I can't say that I disagree with him at all, because EA does seems to be mismanaged.

Why is it that when they finally get momentum and make excellent games, everything goes to shit?

they ane we really need a new ssx. the skate franchise has been great so far in beating the competition. they got bioware and numerous other good studios. they monopolized nfl games . and fifa is fifa.

unless they do indeed go bankrupt, i don't see any major issues other than them not being #1_in_the_hood_G!!

What have we learned?

Good games aren't worth it, and rehashed games make more profit.

Wait, wait, wait!??

EA finally start showing us some new, interesting IPs, and they're going bankrupt for it!?

I have never hated my fellow games as much - Fuck You All! I hope you're happy with yet another Call of Duty, and Virtual Tour: Jerusalem/Venice.

"fellow games"

Ahem, I meant "gamers".

And I still hate you all!

@hoodedmiracle: I know right? I really enjoyed both dead space games and have dantes inferno on preorder. Im not sure how C&C4 will be, but I will at least check it out.

JustLikeBuck, we are a terrible terrible market it seems :(

Thats pretty scary (especially if you work for EA). So if its a Bankrupt strategy does that mean they are hoping someone will buy them out, and therefor the top brass would get massive amounts of money while everyone else most-likely gets laid off.

Dear EA,

You'd have a lot more money if you hadn't bought exclusive rights to the NFL and NCAA like a bunch of pussies.

Rot in your own filth,
Love Lydeck.

I wouldnt be surprised to see their stock jump by the end of the year. Between Mass Effect 2, a new Dead Space (which seems to be drawing a lot of interest), the new Army of Two, the reinvention of the Medal of Honor series and Dante's Inferno, I wouldnt be surprised to see their Q4 or Q1 earnings take a nice little jump. If not then, than we will need to see what they bring to E3, and if they can produce any serious blockbusters on the scale of Call of Duty. EA has been on the right track for the last two years or so, and it will be interesting to watch them.

Hmm, we'll have to wait and see, but even from the looks of things, EA isn't sitting as pretty as it once was during the last console generation, that's for certain.

@Chronic Logic: Unfortunately, you seems to be spot on. Noone seems to care about Dead Space Extraction, Brutal Legend or Mirror's Edge. The public just wants more Fifa and more Madden.

I don't care if EA were being financially irresponsible... They brought us some great new franchises!

"New, interesting IPs" will do a company nothing if they're not great. Take Mirror's Edge, for example. It was a short, hollow game. Ubisoft was able to take that concept of parkour and make a game with far more substance in the original Assassin's Creed. I do hope Brutal Legends does well for Tim Schafer's sake, and I'm sure Mass Effect will do incredibly on shelves.


@Lydeck - You're absolutely correct. I'm appalled that so little uproar was caused after the purchasing of exclusive rights to those licenses. It's a complete bitch-move that stifles competition, which is the driving force in a capitalistic market. It's literally disgusting to me.

They can't expect every new ip to be a blockbuster, it takes time to build a new franchise.

About a third of my Xbox collection is published by EA. I'd take the new EA over the old any day

So EA is finally releasing decent, original games and they are losing money instead of making it.

Answer: Start buying their games.

People claim to want all this new and original game content, and then fail to follow through and buy the stuff, opting to buy the franchise sequels they claim to be tired of. This includes buying the DLC you think should be free (which shouldn't). Also, stop giving support to the super franchise bullshit that comes out of Activision. Show them your precious wallet-monies go to original awesome things, not rehashed franchise things. Unfortunately this concept won't even occur to alot of the gamers out there who just don't care. They'll eat up whatever is shoveled to them, and rather than research new things, if its a name they don't know, they won't drop money on it.

Making games you like doesn't matter when the company is both spending too much money on everything and those games you like don't have more than niche appeal.

I'm playing Dead Space now for the first time. It's frighteningly good, and I'd gladly have paid double its current $20 price tag.

DAAAAAAAAAMN! That's a beatdown!

Look, even if a game sells gangbusters and gets perfect scores across the board, if the investment into it is excessive it's still going to be tough to turn a profit. EA can make good games, they just shouldn't go overboard with the development and marketing costs. Of course, then they run the risk of not moving enough units.

Soooo... yeah, they're screwed.

As long as they keep making things like Dante, Mirror's Edge and Deadspace. I'll keep supporting them.

Lydeck: "You'd have a lot more money if you hadn't bought exclusive rights to the NFL and NCAA like a bunch of pussies."

Thisthisthisthisthis.

Still makes me sad though, considering the first thing they'd cut would be a game like Dead Space 2. Makes me want to go buy a few digital copies of the original for my friends.

it's not that they arent making money, it's that they aren't making ENOUGH... which in case you're new to america and don't know already THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS "ENOUGH" MONEY.

MONEY = PERSONAL VALUE yet it also unfortunately equates to self sustainability which is a fraud because were all codependant whores here.

/rant

Look, even if a game sells gangbusters and gets perfect scores across the board, if the investment into it is excessive it's still going to be tough to turn a profit. EA can make good games, they just shouldn't go overboard with the development and marketing costs. Of course, then they run the risk of not moving enough units.

That's why they should just throw all their cash into Rock Band DLC. Right guys? Right? C'mon we need some decent DLC over here. For a game dependent on DLC the licensing department has been really sluggish lately.

I had the same shitty feeling when I watched a presentation of that new Def Jam hip-hop karaoke game, where some white guy is saying that they can make a lot of money on black and latino young audience. And then he's rapping. This white guy in a suit. Talking about profit they can make on black people. And then rapping.
And this guy is basically saying that new IPs are bad for business and EA need to feed people with putrid. These motherfuckers. I think it's wrong to give this kind of policy any publicity. Just like with Def Jam. I really am amazed impudent these bastards are, they've got balls to say that they want to make more money with less effort.
Jesus will rape their mothers with a shotgun.

I would imagine we're going to start seeing a lot of the big publishing houses have a lot of problems with game budgets. They've gotten too high to take risks and be consistently profitable. I was reading on kotaku that it would take the average ps3/360 game selling in the 500k range to break even now.

Hell, FF13 has to sell on the level of their best ever selling title, FF7, to break even. That's not a viable business model.

This is good! This is dynamite! If EA goes, though, the vacuum would be huge. Doubt it will ever happen, I hope they smarten up.

What he is saying is that the EA's development costs for AAA games are too high compared to their competitors. The subtext is not bankruptcy, but an expectation that investors will go elsewhere making it harder for EA to raise capital, making harder for EA to make games.

The thing is strategies have to be adaptable and change. The older EA had a bad name with one of their core demographics (interested or "hard core" gamers) and they had to do something to change that to be profitable in the long term. I have to question the guy's intelligence if he did not see that.

@GreatRedneckHope What is wrong about making a product targeted for a specific audience? Is the game some sort of exploitation? Should white people not be able to sell things to black people, or give things away at cost? Should only black people be able to sell things to each other?

I understand that seeing a dorky white guy in a suit rapping would register largely on the Cheesy scale, but I don't get your complaint.

I agree will all the above comments. I buy a ton of games and the only EA game I bought last year was need for speed shift. The new game engine was damn awesome. Everything else ea released was shovelware.

The thing is, is he saying Activision are doing better? Because basically the assessment here is that EA failed because it had no hit games (and it had Madden, which, if we recall, sells half a truckload every year), while Activision succeeded because it had Modern Warfare 2 (which made up for all their failed games, and I cannot name another activision release that wasn't of the Hero variety). They seem to be in a similar awful place to me.

I find these comments rather shortsighted, and also somewhat strange. He says that only the the digital assets and distribution model is intact. I was unaware that EA sports was in trouble. I mean aside from Fight Night round 4 not selling extremely well I was under the impression that the majority of EA sports title's were still selling as well as always, and that the cornerstone products Madden and FIFA were both doing excellent. As for the franchise portion, again The Sims 3 is selling well, Command and Conquer 4 is on the way and seems to have some buzz. Need for Speed is still a viable franchise and it's current breakdown of arcade style for the WII and more sim style for the ps3/360 seems to be a good model to build off of. So his main problem seems to be developing new franchises. Well any business that sells "creative" product is going to have to develop new franchises, and those franchises are unlikely to be huge initial hits. So EA is in a restructuring phase of building up a new suite of franchises, this happens to most large publishers as every few years gamers grow tired of iterations of the same product and are forced to build new IP. Activision, which is the closet analogue to EA will face a similar situation within the next year or so as the bottom falls out of it's "hero" market of music games. As for the comments about triple A development costs, what you're starting to see and what I believe will continue to happen is that large game companies like EA will become more and more like film distribution companies. Individual developers will be in a sense production companies, while companies like E.A become primarily a financial and distribution mechanism. The only thing is that it will be an inverse business model then the film industry, where large scale blockbusters are the primary source of income which is then used to fund smaller projects and "prestige" work. In the game industry I believe the future model will be the opposite, smaller, cheaper to produce games that many so called "core" gamers will hold in disdain will generate the money used to create large scale triple A titles. For an example, look at Ubisoft, their Imaginz line of products is reviled by gamers, yet they generate huge windfalls for the company that can be used to fund development on assassins creed, or splinter cell, or beyond good and evil.

So wait, ActiVision gets praised for shit sequels and glitchy games, but EA receives criticism for trying it's hand at new IPs?

Wait, WHAT!? (Oh, for got the obligatory "FUCK YOU Bobby Kotick"!).

that's kinda funny, considering that their sports games usually sells pretty well. I mean, Fifa 10, per example, sold a lot of copies in europe, didn't it?

@ Anthony Noel

Learn to paragraph. You could have the greatest insights in Dtoid history, but few people will read a big block of text like that.

NateT: "@ Anthony Noel

Learn to paragraph. You could have the greatest insights in Dtoid history, but few people will read a big block of text like that."

Agreed. I stopped after about line 3 when I saw how much more was to come.

@ v0odka

Yes, yes it did, as well as many other games they have produced/published.

This dude sounds bitter that he got "laid off" or whatever excuse he conjures. EA may not be the most efficient Media producing monstrosity on the planet - but i would rather have them around than not at all.

Despite any fond nostolgia people have of either Mercenaries or Destroy All Humans (1) on xbox, EA really did need to shut down Pandemic. (and even then, it's not "technically" shut down, new people with that label will be putting out Mercs Inc.)

After suffering through both Mercenaries 2 and now Saboteur...I suffer through them because there are really fun open world shooters buried underneath, especially Saboteur...but what it's underneath is a LOT of garbage.
My God, for all the good bits from the acting to the type of missons, Saboteur does not look like a game with years put into it.
Graphics that are barely above an Xbox original game, more glitches and weird characters stuck on things than I can recall EVER seeing, a world that can't even load itself without pausing the screen while I'm in the middle of the simple task of driving down the street, animation hitches left and right....hell, I had a scene that loaded the sky wrong. How do you load sky wrong? Absolutely no polish and huge lack of quality.

They didn't actually fire everyone at Pandemic, at least half the team was kept and absorbed into EA LA, one of EA's new divisions.
The people they got rid of were the people not doing their job and making the low quality state of Mercs 2 and Saboteur.
Hopefully the people with the good gameplay ideas can now work with people who know what they're doing, because Pandemic fell to sh*t all on it's own, not because of EA.
I'm all for damning a corporation when they do wrong, but I only see right in shuttering what Pandemic had become. When EA bought them, they were still making good games. EA got burned like Microsoft did with Rare.

The original article is fairly interesting.

Truthfully? This shouldn't be a huge surprise. Building cool original IP is a long-term strategy, not a short-term one. From the titles they've released over the past couple of years, they've restored a lot of trust with the fanbase - people don't see EA as the evil empire (completely) anymore. I'm now excited to see what titles they might come up with this year and next; the list above is full of titles that, while they didn't hit sales expectations, are critically acclaimed (and also awesome).

However, in the short term, when you create new IP, you're not bringing along your old fanbase that is programmed to eat up Madden rereleases every year. New franchises take time to build up a following - more than a couple years, like 5 or 10 years really. It requires a different strategy - you have to cut your costs, work with smaller budgets, come up with some creative marketing strategies that don't cost an arm and a leg. And it's going to be hit or miss; you can't guarantee that an experiment or new IP will sell strongly. But it's not a waste of money to try, if you learn something and built better games as a result.

So you're going to see a loss in the short term, and hopefully gains in the far term. It's a good philosophy, and suited for digital distribution where you don't have to invest as much in manufacturing and such. But instead of fully adapting themselves to it, EA seems to be still running itself like a juggernaut, spending mad money on huge AAA releases that just get more and more expensive. And execs don't really care whether or not what they do is "good for gaming."

Bankrupt strategy?

EA's change from evil megacorp, to decent developers/publishers, creating new IP has changed them for the better. I for one have supported them more since their change and will do soon, with Mass Effect 2, Dante's Inferno etc. So long as EA go this more positive route, I'll support them. They also listen more to us gamers, which puts them more on track to do better, a vital thing they didn't care about before. Even in business, you cannot build an empire in a day.

This way they can still do their sports games, and give us something cool as an option besides. I don't think this should be seen as a bad thing, since every business has ups and downs. Perhaps this Ex-EA chap should come back once the year is over, and EA's takings can be scoffed at.

Basically this guy is criticizing them for making new IPs when he thinks it would be smarter to just keep milking old crap, but possibly at a slower pace. The same old crap they've already drained dry.

He criticizes them for being beaten by the competition, while ignoring the fact that using your own milked franchises to fight other milked franchises doesn't work. Especially when the other guys still have fresher stuff, even if Activision is doing their best to fuck that freshness up.

What a moron.

MS should put in an offer to EA for Bioware.

@Arttemis

How does holding down A to do every possible contextual action amount to more substance than Mirror's Edge? Substance was exactly what it did right, at the expense of freedom and exploration.

what mass effect going to the ps3. lol i keeeeeed

So wait, EA starts making great games and they aren't making money for it? Well, no shit. New IPs take time to become staples in this industry. It's not like they aren't selling, it just takes time for one to get it's feet on the ground. Once ME2, Dante's Inferno, the Criterion NFS, and DS2 all sell well, this dude will be eating his words. And even if they don't sell well, at least they are respecting their core consumer these days, not like Activision who will take every chance they have to sound like assholes.

Im still sad about Pandemic shutting down, i really liked The Saboteur, hell i think if it wasn't rushed up it would been one of the best games in the past year!

You have half an hour to dress. I should have given you notice, but I cheap theo-24 cr