Nintendo Okie

Electronic Arts, for many years was the evil empire of video games.  They were known for putting out a new version of the same titles year after year only iterating on those franchises slightly with each release.  It was at its worst with the Madden franchise, especially after there was no one to compete with them.  Slowly, though, over time and for the last couple of years EA has been known in a completely different light.  The introduction of John Riccitiello brought about a change at the company and around 2008 they began taking risks and introducing new IP’s; things like Boom Blox, Dead Space,  and Mirror’s Edge all came out in 2008 and were critical darlings.  Only one sold successfully.  The EA Partners program allowed companies to develop their own games with a little help from EA and the company blossomed.  They weren’t the evil empire anymore.  That title was very quickly moving to Activision who decided to go with that same formula of releasing the same game or multiple games in the same franchise year after year.

EA was taking risks and they weren’t paying off financially.  They wanted to get their average metacritic score up by releasing new IP’s and quality titles.  They were going to shed that old image.  Critically they were very successful.  A number of the games hit the 80+ metacritic score they were hoping to achieve.  The problem is people weren’t buying them.  It was recently announced during a conference call by John Riccitiello that the company was releasing a huge number of employees in an effort to cut costs.  He also said that the company will release approximately 30 titles in its 2010 fiscal year, a 50 percent cut from fiscal year 2008 and that any titles that can’t be expected to be a “very high profit contributor and high unit seller” is out from “this point going forward.”

That essentially means, at least to me, that the company is going back to the old model of only releasing guaranteed successes.  We’re going to continue to see the Madden’s and the Rock Band’s year after year.  Hopefully they’ll continue to innovate with those titles and make them fresh.  I really like what EA has been doing the past few years and have started to turn my opinion of Activision.  The problem with history is that if you don’t learn from it you’re doomed to repeat it.  If EA can’t make these titles new and interesting every year they’re going to, once again, become the evil empire.  Honestly, part of me can’t blame them.  The economy is terrible right now and they’re in the business of making money.  With big risks comes big reward, but big risk is also accompanied many times by big failure.  I think you’re going to see more companies, during this bad economy especially, adopt a similar mindset.  They’re only going to release what they feel is going to be a huge success.   Again, part of me thinks it’s a good move.  Part of the problem may have been there was just too much stuff out there for us to play and we, as gamers, had to be very selective with what we bought.  We didn’t want to risk buying something only to realize we hated it and had, in a sense, wasted our money. 

All of the blame can’t be on the game companies.  Many of them, EA especially, released a lot of very quality titles that gamers should have bought.  Developers are also going through a similar problem on Wii where quality titles on the system aren’t being bought.  Games like Mad World, Boom Blox, Zack & Wiki, and Dead Space Extraction aren’t being bought in the number they hoped.  Part of that does belong with the developers for not marketing the games properly, but we are also to blame, with every platform, not just Wii.  We need to make sure to reward developers when they do well by buying their games.  The success of games falls on both the developers and the consumers.  Developers have to make quality products and in turn gamers have to buy them. 

This downturn in the economy may end up being a good thing.  If developers decide to release fewer titles each year that gives us, as gamers, more of a chance to learn what’s out there and play the games that are the best.  Developers will be able to devote more time, and potentially resources to making sure each title is the best it can possibly be.  We also have the ability to spend more time just enjoying the games that are released and telling our friends, family and co-workers about what’s out there.  Sales are down on all three platforms from the same time last year.  We’ve also seen reports of the quality, in terms of Metacritic scores, going up.

Let’s make sure we all make the best of a bad situation.  My thoughts and prayers go out to everyone who’s lost a job recently.