EA CEO Wants Its Games to Fail For the "Right Reasons"

[Ed130 The Vanguard]

I heard a similar spiel back in 2007 from EA and I believed it, mind you I was young and stupid back then.

Yeah I've heard this before, didn't work out then, not likely to happen now.

Took the words right out of my mouth, the only announcement from EA that would excite me now would be for it filing bankruptcy.

 

[Genocidicles]

I really don,t get the whole worst company in America thing... yeah EA is far to being the ebst company around.. but the worst? really?

Well I mean people expect a bank or insurance company to screw them over. When they just want to relax with some entertainment and they get fucked over, it hits a little harder.

 

[cerebus23]

Either way they got years and years of walk to walk.

You want to win back my trust? And i do mean my trust you are the spawn of satan from every experience i have ever had with you over the last 15 years, calling customer service? i would get further ramming my head into a chipper.

Stop treating costumers like criminals.

Piracy happens get over it. Piracy especially happens if you do everything you can to grind franchises and studios under, put so much drm into junk the people that buy it wo cracking it cannot play.

Stop treating customers like atms, day one "dlc" should never exist since well 90% of the games have day one dlc have nothing to download it is an UNLOCK. It was already into the game when it went gold, you more than likely just locked it off so you could have another day one dlc, or some pre order bonus to force a few buys at retailer x.

I really do not expect you to go the full cdprojekt but you could make a bleeping effort, more free stuff, less drm, and fire i mean fire your entire customer "service" department.

You can say anything you like politicans do it all the time, it does not mean squat, lets see some real effort, some real work, and start earning back all the trust you squandered over the years.

 

[Furism]

Easy to do, EA. Go back to being cool. That means:

1) Don't sell your games $60 (or 60? in Europe).
2) Don't MAKE me use Origin. If your platform is better than Steam, people will move to it. If you coerce them into using Origin, it will fail. I know people who are pirating your game just because they do not accept you forcing them on your platform.
3) Stop lying. Yes you lied. Don't say no, you know you do that a lot. No, it's not called 'marketing.' It's called lying. I'm thinking about the "Sim City requires online to offload some calculation to 'the cloud.'"
4) Don't sell your games $60 (this must be repeated).
5) Go back to taking risks. Go back to release extensions instead of brand new games.
6) Just, be cool, man. Like you used to.

 

[hazydawn]

I really don,t get the whole worst company in America thing... yeah EA is far to being the ebst company around.. but the worst? really?

It's from a consumer perspective not some environmental or "we use child labor for the production of our product" point of view. Even then they might not be objectively the worst company but they are the best at incurring their customer's wrath, hence the deserved title.

Edit: And they are one of the few companies I know that make public statements that tell me: "Fuck what you want and fuck you!"

 

[VoidOfOne]

Easy to do, EA. Go back to being cool. That means:

1) Don't sell your games $60 (or 60? in Europe).
2) Don't MAKE me use Origin. If your platform is better than Steam, people will move to it. If you coerce them into using Origin, it will fail. I know people who are pirating your game just because they do not accept you forcing them on your platform.
3) Stop lying. Yes you lied. Don't say no, you know you do that a lot. No, it's not called 'marketing.' It's called lying. I'm thinking about the "Sim City requires online to offload some calculation to 'the cloud.'"
4) Don't sell your games $60 (this must be repeated).
5) Go back to taking risks. Go back to release extensions instead of brand new games.
6) Just, be cool, man. Like you used to.

I like all that is said here, and I would like to add one more thing.

7) DON'T make us have to be online to play single-player.

This is the main reason I don't feel like playing Mass Effect these days. And why I'm never touching SimCity.

 

[Glaice]

How about not mucking with the gameplay or storyline of certain games (Dead Space 3, SimCity, etc), as well as making absurd sales number requirements for games or putting your half-baked Steamesque client embedded with your games and maybe consumers wouldn't hate for what you have become? If you want me to buy games from you again, you have to stop fucking up my favorite games by developers, because I cannot forgive you for ruining the Command & Conquer and Dead Space franchises.

What happened to publishers just being publishers like they were in the 90s?

 

[james.sponge]

Just stop interfering in development process and listen to your community instead of your shareholders. No one wanted social features and always online in SimCity, no one wanted Spore to be a kids game, no one ever wanted battlelog to be introduced in BF series...

 

[Psychobabble]

"It's a sentiment that will likely play like music in the ears of many jaded sick of being lied to and ripped off gamers."

Yeah and the name of the tune is Saddam Hussein's "I Can Change" from South Park The Movie. I'll believe it when I see it. Until then EA won't be seeing one copper fig from me.

 

[putowtin]

Bottom line

"we're sorry we'll try better but in the mean time our current tactic of....
micro-transactions, bug riddled releases, games that take a step backwards, innovative studies canned, ignoring our consumers, will continue!"

 

[Lightknight]

Hmm, good talk. They see how the public sees them. It's all good to hear. Now let's see some movement and then we'll talk back.

 

[TiberiusEsuriens]

So far he is actually making sense. The other day he mentioned encouraging different teams to work together on shared technical issues. Perhaps the company is thinking that if one server-based game launches well, that team can now work with other less skilled teams to ensure something like Sim City never happens again.

Again, it's all talk right now, but at least it actually makes sense this time.

 

[grigjd3]

I think the biggest issue with EA is that they are afraid of their customers. I get that a great deal of communication from customers tends to be rabble-rousing. For gaming, I would guess about 95% of communication from customers is. That said, treating your customers like they are all criminals trying to destroy you is not a way to run a company. It is, however, a way to anger your customers.

 

[MCerberus]

"We need a mechanism and a process which we can get to [produce] better games more quickly"

My teachers back in engineering college had a saying that goes something like this....

You can make a product that covers, at most, two of the following three bases of business:
1) It's done fast
2) It's done cheap
3) It's done well

You can't have a product that does all three. So pick wisely.

Well in project management, we're taught that you can't ignore over any of those. One or two will always be a focus, but they'll all suffer if you lose control. EA is famous for playing fast and loose with two of the triple constraints (resource and scope, or cost and features if you use the engineering set).

It's a cultural issue too. Edicts seem to arrive from on high that they need to 'broaden the appeal' and this leads to management destroying a good project.

 

[Furism]

2) Don't MAKE me use Origin. If your platform is better than Steam, people will move to it. If you coerce them into using Origin, it will fail. I know people who are pirating your game just because they do not accept you forcing them on your platform.

That is exactly what steam did. It forced you to use it because you had no other option if you wanted to play Skyrim or Dawn of War 2, or myriad of other games. Either you use steam and play them or you do not play them at all. How is this different then what Origin is doing (at least with Origin some games do not need the client open to play them)?

What? No. You're completely wrong. For one thing, Steam isn't the product of a publisher. That is a big difference. When you are a publisher you have the power to decide that you won't release any game that you finance under any platform but your own. That's a slippery slope, one that could be seen as an abuse of power under a certain light.

Second, (to my knowledge) Valve doesn't ask publishers to make their titles available on Steam only. If a publisher decides to make their game available on Steam only, it's the publisher's fault, not Steam's. Also, you can still buy retail, physical copies of Skyrim or Dawn of War and play them without having to install Steam. However if you buy an EA (or Ubisoft, for that matter) game in a physical form, you still have to register it on Origin or UPlay if you want to play it.

So apples and oranges, basically.

Yes I like Steam, but only because I find it's a superior platform, and is not limited to one publisher's portfolio. Publishers will always distribute only their own games on their platform, and that it's plain stupid. I don't want to have 3 or 4 game librairies (one per publisher), I just want one. Steam fits that and works for me. Origin doesn't.

 

[Bluestorm83]

EA needs a Mechanism to get out of the way and let existing companies that they buy do the things that made them the kind of companies that EA wanted to guy!