EA Turns Its Back on Single-Player Games

[The Rogue Wolf]

Lemme run their statement through my patented Bullshit Extractor[sup]TM[/sup] and see what comes out.

*ding!*

Okay, here we go:

"We here at Electronic Arts have finally realized that we are neither capable of, nor interested in, providing coherent storylines or engaging narratives, so we have decided to embrace our core strength of selling new and shinier arenas in which prepubescent boys may regale you with stories of their sexual escapades with your mother."

Yep. Sounds about right.

 

[Vigormortis]

Btw, most people only like Valve as the people who run Steam. Valve's game record isn't really that impressive. Portal was OK, imo. But the last REALLY good game they made was HL2. And that's almost a decade old now.

Actually, most people like them for their games, not Steam.

Save for Ricochet, they've never once put out a bad game. All of them critically and commercially successful. Some, incredibly successful and extremely popular; like Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, and Left 4 Dead. (and soon, Dota 2)

Hell, among it's 40+ million users, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Left 4 Dead, and Dota 2 remain among the very top most-played games on Steam. Some of them beating out the number of players playing any of the Call of Duty games.

Whether we like their games or not is...well...sort of irrelevant to the fact that they are "impressive". In terms of critical acclaim and user popularity.

Everyone's welcome to their opinions, but don't use them as a statement of fact.

 

[yeti585]

Oh god.

Fuck off EA.

Seriously.

Someone please put this on a flag, banner, burning cross, or whatever it takes to get the message across.

But, Seriously? Is this just some plot to sell ALL the online passes?

 

[AniThari]

All I got from this thread was a ton of "EA go burn in a fire" caps lock yelling, and these posts:

This one is a gem - slightly flawed in my opinion but still worth a recap:

Didn't Valve say the exact same thing a ways back

Well, I haven't bought a Valve game since Half-life 2, so what does that tell you?

Also, the problem with EA doing it is they're a lot bigger. The idea that games have to have multiplayer is "a cancerous growth" on the industry right now. Valve can only do so much to further it, EA can (and apparently plans to) do a lot more.


Btw, most people only like Valve as the people who run Steam. Valve's game record isn't really that impressive. Portal was OK, imo. But the last REALLY good game they made was HL2. And that's almost a decade old now.

This awesome piece that I was waiting for all my live-long forum life for since Facebook began to spiral:

It's time for the "social gaming" bubble to burst.

Yes, humans are social creatures, but they also do lots of things alone. This whole "let's turn the entire world into a giant facebook because life is all about socialization" fad is going against human nature.

People sometimes like to listen to music with headphones, walk alone in a forest, read a novel in their room, or build a scale model of the japanese parliament building in their basement out of matchsticks, without constantly sharing their status, and interacting, and getting feedback, and competiting with others.

And this - which made me chuckle and left the smile on my face:

Oh, god. That picture. That picture truly scares me.

Spoiler

Assimilate. Assimilate. All will be one.

Any who for all the hate, most of you can't name a developer beyond Bioware or the latest shooting/sport franchise thereby - in your own way - proving EA right in their focus. How about we all get together and say, "EA, we'll make you a deal. The Bioware team (the whole lot of them) get a month vacation to recharge the creative juices and we'll play the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer until blood spurts from our eyes." Or sports fans how about this: Just tell them the graphs are fine and if, maybe, instead, you could just by the updated roster next year as DLC?

Just saying, lotta yelling no solutions gets us bureaucracy and not results. Now off to work!


P.S. He retracted his statement. Check page five.

 

[GundamSentinel]

And I'll turn my back on EA, for the part that I hadn't done that already. Goodbye EA, it was a fun time. No it wasn't, but whatever. Were they born this stupid or did they study for it? Good Lord, it's like a bunch of monkeys is running that company.

 

[ElPatron]

Electronic Arts has made a lot of noise about the interconnected, digital future of videogames, and how the growth of the industry will come mainly via mobile devices, smart TVs and the cloud. Even so, recent comments by EA Labels President Frank Gibeau in the "Cloud Gaming Prospects for 2012" report are bold, to say the least. As he explains it, the publisher has effectively turned its back on single-player-only experiences, as it moves to make everything connected and online.

My opinion is the last line of this video.


God damn it, kill it already. It hurts itself by living.

 

[Dark Prophet]

I have know for a long time now that EA is all kinds of stupid and this just adds another stupid to already overcrowded room filled with stupid that is EA. After Mirror's Edge and the first Dead Space I thought to myself maybe EA isn't that bad, but then it went out and just straight murdered two of my childhood franchises NFS and C&C the tiberium one. And now the whole thing has gone only down hill at ever accelerating speed.

 

[StriderShinryu]

Will the hate be unjustified? Yes. Why? Because it's a videogame company that exists to make money off of videogames and various videogame related services. Perhaps I'm out of the loop here, but I don't recall ever hearing anything about EA kicking puppies or shoving grandparents. If you don't like the way EA operates as business, that's cool. Don't buy their games or support their products. Buy from people that you do want to support, but don't act like them making what they feel to be smart business decisions is somehow ruining your life. In this case, of course, I'm not referring to you directly but just more of a "you" being people who pop into any thread that mentions EA and immediately begin spouting off on how terrible and hateworthy they are. Put it this way, if a local restaurant stopped selling your favourite meal would you picket outside it's doors and make internet posts about how awful and terrible and hateworthy they are every time their name was mentioned? Or would you just go to the place across the street that serves what you want?

Was TOR a game with forced multiplayer? Yes, but it was an MMO albeit one of the most solo friendly out of the box that I've heard about in recent memory. Was it the right decision to make the follow up to 2 completely single player experiences a MMO? It certainly appears not right now, but there were a lot of people who were very excited about it a year or so ago. A lot of huge Star Wars fans, including some of my close friends, were sure it was going to be the second coming and couldn't wait to play it. The failure of the game from all I've heard, however, wasn't on the the game being a bad single player experience, it was on it being a bad (or at best middling) MMO. Most players got what they wanted out of the single player side and then stopped playing.

Oh, and yes, I did read the article. The only parts of it that actually say EA is stopping making single player offline only experiences are put there as author interpretations of what EA meant. And these interpretations are then clarified at the end of the article. Is Gibeau proud of the direction his company is going? I would hope so being that he's one of the heads of the company. Once again, that doesn't mean anyone has to agree with him but if he wasn't at least saying out loud that he likes the decisions his company makes he'd probably not have the job title that he does.

 

[shrekfan246]

Seriously, WHAT?

WHAT?

EA are you TRYING to run yourself out of business?!

They won't run themselves out of business. They'll just run beloved franchises into the ground by forcing studios to waste time, effort, and money on superfluous multiplayer modes that would have been better spent on making the games actually good.

So they'll kill off everything you ever loved about your favorite franchised while they force their studios to develop not based on their own vision but some executives list of bullet points that are necessary for a top selling game. They'll run your favorite studio into the ground and shut them down, all why wondering why they lost the support of their fans.

But they'll always have franchises that make them plenty of money - people will keep buying EA sports games, and the other various cash cows they have.

EA proudly bringing us into the "Paint by the numbers" age of game development.

So... basically no different from how EA has done business since the mid-90's? Yeah, that's how long they've been absorbing and killing off development studios.

As for the topic at hand, as long as the multi-player things aren't required to 'get the best ending' or whatever for the games, and as long as we're not forced to be connected 100% of the time just to play the thing, I've no problem with this. It does nothing to hurt me personally, and I'm sure there are people who love meta-gaming like that.

 

[freaper]

Didn't Valve say pretty much the same thing a couple of months ago?

 

[portal_cat]

you can really feel the love for EA.....just kidding they really need to get real. Not everything needs multi-player to sell.

oh well, Good-bye EA don't let the door hit you where the dog should've bit ya.

 

[XDravond]

*Head desk so hard that the desk breaks*

Well EA keeps on showing how dumb they really are. Lots of people don't want to play with other people because, to cite Yathzee, "People are shit".
And sometimes I feel truly unsocial and don't want anything else than to mess with a bunch of NPCs or just enjoy a great story alone without someone telling me all about how bad I am at this or that and so on...


Well Ubi figured out that people really hate always-on-DRM so we only have to shout, nag, whine and b!tch to our hearts content in a few years, so finally EA might listen, sure they will be able to ruin a whole range of game series before that might happen but still... They *might* change their mind... (of to look for the flying pigs so I know that EA is about to change their "mind"..)

 

[Catrixa]

Omg, this makes me super excited! Thank you so much, EA! I've been looking for a reason to stop buying your crap, but you used to make games that were fun despite the crap. Now, though, it looks like you'll just start producing games I legitimately don't want to buy! No longer shall I have to debate over whether giving you money would only increase your bad business practices--your bad business practices have finally reached the crap singularity and I can finally ignore you like I do Zynga! So, thank you EA, you're going to save me a lot of money.

 

[TJC]

you know... thinking about it, focusing on either single player or multiplayer is for me a perfectly fine concept. EA chose the latter option and I'm fine with that. I think they're doing it wrong but hey, if they got their profits figured out: Good for them. I sure as hell won't buy any of their games because I like me some single player games where I'm saving hyrule, beating up gods or chasing dragons. I also like me some local multiplayer where I'm smashing peach's face with king dedede's hammer or race towards my first carpal tunnel syndrome.

The whole SHARE WITH THE ENTIRE WORLD BIT BY BIT F2P approach just isn't appealing to me. Maybe I'm lacking the proper community to truly enjoy these games (because everything's better with friends) but even then I like to go back to my cave and do shit alone.

But... I honestly believe that the market for F2P games is getting uncomfortably crowded. Or at least too much to build a business plan around that market. Somehow I think they're vastly overestimating how long people will be playing and PAYING for such an experience. There's a limit as to how many games a person can keep up with if there's an entire community filled with relationships, responsibilities (sorta) and issues and the community is in the end the motivation to be invested in a certain game. Changing that is a hard thing to do and I don't see many people willing to do so and playing more than one or two MMOs (or sorta MMOs) isn't fun. It's tedious.

maybe I'm the one who underestimates the possible profits but then again, it's not my problem. I'll just do what I like to do. Buying games that are single player and maybe sometimes a game with online capabilities 8D

 

[Not G. Ivingname]

This is news?

I thought this had been official policy since at very least 2010.

I guess they just hadn't announced it until now.

 

[Programmed_For_Damage]

Fuck you EA. Trying to force me to deal with other people while gaming. Don't you know that's one of the primary reasons why I play video games, to get away from other people!

 

[beastro]

Didn't Valve say pretty much the same thing a couple of months ago?

I can set Steam to offline mode and still play all SP games if I want to should I expect an internet disconnection.

 

[Tentaquil]

It's as if EA feeds on our disappointment and sadness.

I miss Westwood and Bullfrog....

 

[6SteW6]

And once again EA manages to make themselves look like incredible assholes, and will still invariably make millions of dollars! Vote with your wallets people, vote with your wallets.