How EA Lost Its Soul(polygon.com) |
How EA Lost Its Soul(polygon.com) |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight
Starflight's a great game. And we were all having a great time reminiscing over it when I made the mistake of saying "Why not do an update? You all seem to love this game."
Their response was that space games and RPGs are both dead genres. We all parted a few minutes later as I had apparently killed the mood.
Most of these games will not make obscene profits. But it should be really clear by now that it makes sense to invest in and sell a variety of games, not just mass-appeal action games.
Bigger structures like EA have a lot of overhead, making small projects not as worth it (even if its just opportunity cost)
Steam and Kickstarter (combined with everyone having good computers now and of course the internet) have made small games super viable now, luckily
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...
In another other industry, that mentality makes sense. In the video game industry, it doesn't. Video games are so tied to emotion that you really need to strive to create something new, to induce something novel in your customers.
I think the best example of this was the release of NBA Live 10 vs NBA 2K10. Since 1995, NBA Live was the basketball game. They (in my opinion), crushed the 2K series. For years, it was a really polished game and sales were pretty consistent. They continuously improved on the menus and on the actual basketball games.
Then, something changed around 2010. Suddenly, EVERYONE preferred NBA2K over NBA Live. Here's a good article about that:
http://bleacherreport.com/articles/416482-nba-live-10-or-nba...
In my opinion, EA kept optimizing for local maxima. When 2K10 started experimenting more with simulating the business side of NBA teams with Association Mode, more people were hooked. The metagame became way more fun. And My Player mode was great too.
EDIT: I think there's a lot of parallels between the video game industry and the film industry. The companies that stay on top (Disney, Nintendo, Blizzard, Valve etc.) are fiercely protective of their brand and never release something they think is just okay.
The "people will forget about our mediocre games" mentality is very, very off in industries so tied to emotion.
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.
The corporate structure is incredibly heavy on management and lacks communication. You could have more managers than you knew and it wasn't unusual to be told to work on something else by someone you'd never met, which put you at odds with your known managers...
When I was working on The Sims 1, Luc Barthelet [1] was the VP who was closely shepherding the project, and he just loves to code his ideas up in Mathematica. (He later became executive director at Wolfram|Alpha.)
He would come over to my desk and show me some cool character animation trick he'd coded up in Mathematica, and suggest I implement it.
He had it reading in the Sims character animation files that I was exporting from 3D Studio Max, blending them together, drawing stick figures, and exporting web pages with animated gifs.
It's quite impressive what he can do with Mathematica, and of course I felt compelled to take some of his suggestions to heart and work on implementing them in the game.
But of course that pissed my direct manager off to no end, who insisted that Luc stop putting things on my plate without going through him first.
Luc's quite an animated character himself!
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 agree that Hawkins wasn't a great businessman, but I think you're a bit off on both how quickly EA became EA and how invested they were in entertainment software from the start.
(That is, you were hired by a company that EA bought, then you resigned from EA later. Getting fired counts too! ;)
Why is there all this ADHD frame-shifty-scripty "chapter-one" and "look-at-this-shitty-cover-page-where-you-can't-scroll-right-or-down-and-spacebar-isn't-taking-me-to-the-words-and-neither-is-reader-mode-so-now-you-get-to-play-"find-the-fucking-button"-which-is-camoflaged-next-to-the-social-media-faggotry-because-surprise-motherfucker-it's-a-slideshow-but-not-really"?
I'd argue this is not true of Disney, who churn out endless zero-budget, cookie-cutter direct-to-video sequels and spinoffs from their big theatrical hits (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Disney_direct-to-vide...) in order to milk them for every cent they can. Disney does this because they're an easy way to squeeze a few more bucks out of the parents of kids who are obsessed with a particular Disney property, not because they are stories that demand to be told.
http://jimhillmedia.com/editor_in_chief1/b/jim_hill/archive/...
I don't know of any CEO (successfully) legally persecuted for 'not maximizing shareholder value', or having a more 'long term strategy'. The most that can happen afaik is getting fired, which is scary enough.
In the end what I got from the article is that the initial vision of EA largely succeeded: to replicate the music industry and Hollywood with a steady big budget revenue stream. The only problem is the glaring misnomer: the correct term would be the unsavory 'Electronic Mass Media' instead of 'Electronic Arts'.
The sad fact about the shareholder revenue maximization in this industry is that people are happy to be fed dog food, and producers are happy to make tons of money off of it. They shrug off the moral dilemma and say "we're just making what people want!". This situation is reproduced verbatim across mass media -- the largest revenue share is absorbed by content that is simply not good at all. If you look at music, I would say at least 80% of the top revenue generators out there produce music that is objectively worse than centuries old music. Take this for example: [1], how can one not say it is altogether a better, more energetic, more expressive, more moving piece of art than the vast majority of what is produced? Yet people seldom listen to it. Who makes money off of copyright-free Mozart works? Of course, there are exceptions, but the situation overall is an unhappy conjunction of the vast majority of people being satisfied with repetitive industrialized hits, lame jokes with explosions, and the sports game or first person shooter of the year -- while the industry is satisfied with flooding the market and the media with this rehash-able mass produced content. With no good consumer content discovery and reviewing tools, I believe that's a stable status quo for the majority of the population.
That's the role platforms like Steam with indie games (or Spotify with indie music, or Netflix with original productions) can perform: the consumers can seek directly quality, and marketers don't have the ability to distort this too much. With good discovery consumers should be able seek more engrossing experiences and share opinions directly, hopefully without bias towards what's brand new (although I confess that one is hard to get rid of). In this kind of marketplace producers can also target more specific markets, making what they enjoy and find beautiful (and still able to make good revenue off that niche) instead of aiming for generic mass market titles.
Of course, it could simply be that a large fraction of the population irremediably wants to just shut off their brains outside their jobs, but I don't want to believe that, at least not without unmistakable evidence.
This article seems to just have chapter separation and a cover image on each chapter, as well as some video inserts.
Apart from the video, this is pretty much exactly how it would be formatted in a magazine. Do you think magazines are for chumps too, because they use too many pictures?
Websites offer infinite scroll, that's their medium, pretending to be a magazine is ridiculous and frustrating.
But the web isn't a magazine. It's like arguing that printing a book on five pound clay cuneiform tablets is a good idea, because that's how the Babylonians would have done it.
Now that we've made it to the Internet, even the lowest of budgets can have full color illustrations if it's willing to pay for the artist's time. No worries about minimum print runs before it's affordable.
I mean, oh no, you had to snap out of your click-trance for five seconds to find a button to stop reading?
(I may be biased, I'm an artist who very occasionally takes illustration gigs from online publications.)
Yes. I thought it was beautifully presented and nicely paced, and well worth my time.
Also: a single "Continue" button at the bottom of each page is "logic puzzles and shit"? Three tiny logos hidden in the title bar are "social media faggotry"? Seriously?
According to my internet experience: 1) scroll down - failure, maybe my scroll isn't strong enough to get past some weird header frame thing 2) space bar - failure, maybe it's a side to side thing 3) scroll right - failure 4) scroll left - go back a page, reload 5) look at bottom of page for navigation down - failure, only outside links 6) look to right - failure, no generic slideshow next button 7) scan top of page - immediately censor out what I assume is the menagerie of facespace, tweeter, clinked-in, youporn share links
The initial "READ ARTICLE" button is a tiny link, next to links you generally assume to be worthless, in the wrong part of the page. Yeah, I consider that a logic puzzle, not daunting, but yes.
And yes, any link to "please share me on the facespace and validate me with some twits" comes off as obnoxious begging.
The web becomes a lot calmer without scripts (and you start to notice how little regard many sites have for proper web markup).
Not sure though.
Yes, I despise when someone begs me to force their work into my friends faces. If I like it enough I am perfectly capable of copy-pasting the link myself.
Otherwise this is just a web page with some embedded images and some larger text (which is pretty common practice on any long-form story website).
As a teenager with a c64, the EA brand meant "really interesting games that were worth buying for, which was good because their copy protection was really tough". And reading the album-styled packages with their moody photographs of game devs trying to look like rockstars along with the vision statement ads about how Games Are Art, and Game-Makers Are Artists? Hell, whether or not Games Are Art is argument still being had today.
Electronic Arts in their early years really inspired a vision of computers taking creative endeavors to a whole new level. Even their early ads in the computer magazines still give me goosebumps.
It wasn't until Sega Genesis that they went whole-hog on games. And even then they were distracted by edutainment software and other stuff.
I agree with what you're saying however I am pointing out that the core premise of the article ('Trip was all about games, he birthed a Game Company') is a little false. Trip was all over the map. For proof of this I typed in their official corporate charter above, as published in 1987. It does not contain the word "game."
From the wikipedia page on DPaint: DPaint began as an in-house art development tool called Prism. As author Dan Silva added features to Prism, it was developed as a showcase product to coincide with the Amiga's debut in 1985. [...] Deluxe Paint was first in a series of products from the Electronic Arts Tools group, which included such Amiga programs as Deluxe Music, Deluxe Video, and the Studio series of paint programs for the Macintosh.
It's almost certainly a complaint about the use of a slur, not about the underlying complaint about the buttons.
Go spend some time on 4chan, and this will become clear--'-fag' is used as a suffix/term-of-art, and basically doesn't even register on the radar anymore as being said with any seriousness.
"Goddamn" and "Christ" were once quite serious business as well.
They were a publisher and sort of a crappy one. And the reason EA exists today is because the tools/creativity group helped it weather the wacky games market.
The retro movement largely ignores all the amazing apps that were made back then. Old games are fun to play. Old apps? Not so much. Though you kids should. Now get off my lawn.
Quite right--4chan has a better sense of humor than HN, more original content, and is much more abrasive. :)
