I know this is probably part of the Saudi strategy of "sportswashing"[1], but I don't really care about EA or their legacy anymore.
[1] https://www.eurogamer.net/ea-sports-fc-24-boss-on-sportswash...
Not only did they get out of the way, but they actively hired the studio that sprung up from the corpse of the original developers (Westwood): Petroglyph. Not only letting the original designers/developers do their thing, but giving them a chance to work on their own baby again.
It’s rare for larger companies to be willing to humble themselves for something like that, so they gained an iota of respect from me.
The quest for realism without gameplay of many AAA games, with exorbitant prices, and GB sized textures, is not something I care about.
I may spend more time playing something with Atari 2600 graphics, and enticing gameplay than caring about latest COD.
I would be busy for hours playing Laser Squad, Quazatron, ATF,....
The big difference she observed is that older games don't hold your hand the way modern games do. They expect you to think hard, work hard, use trial and error, and generally, in her words, "use your brain." She spent a while talking about how old games have a manual where new games have a lengthy tutorial, automap, quest log, helpful companion constantly telling you what to do next, etc. etc. etc.
She didn't quite get there herself, but the juxtaposition really brought it home for me: the reason modern AAA games hold your hand is because they have to. Because they're just too big: too many game mechanics, too many locations, too much story, etc. etc. etc. If they tried to just sit back and let the player play the game for themself, nobody would would even scratch the surface of the game before they get bored and leave.
It was a little liberating because I finally realized I really can just stop paying attention to AAA games in general, and I don't have to feel weird about it. I'm not going to say they're bad. Plenty of people enjoy them enough to support a company the size of EA. But I'm now prepared to recognize that the kind of gameplay experience that I grew up on and continue to find most compelling is fundamentally incompatible with a AAA-sized budget.
This doesn’t touch on one key difference between games now vs. games then: there were some secrets in games that you just didn’t ever know about unless there was a (printed) walkthrough, or through the word of mouth of friends. The Legend of Zelda is a great example.
Nowadays, many games can be 100%’ed without even having to jump online or ask someone for help. I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing.
I’m playing the Metroid Primer Remaster on the Switch 2 (originally for the GameCube), and even it can be 100%’ed without having to look much up or without even a manual.
At a base level, it tells you about abilities that you have from the beginning of the game but don't know the buttons to press to trigger them, but it goes much deeper.
Great game, 100% recommend.
Shoutout for the Chris Houlihan room.
Their target consumer now is as high a percentage of the population as possible; they aim for the lowest common denominator being able to play and thrive in the game. Hence, needing insane levels of handholding and guidance in the game.
In the past, it was mostly just geeks/nerds playing video games, and so things didn't need to be dumbed down to that level.
Plenty of my friends who were less than geniuses enjoyed these same games I did.
Games now just focus more on lower engagement players. It's easier than ever to get into a game but, easy come, easy go. Frustration just serves to get someone to move on rather than buckle down and persist. Previously, when gaming was less easy to get into, the population of gamers self selected to people who had already significantly invested in the hobby and were much more dedicated to it.
I think the ability to solve the obtuse puzzles and deal with unexplained mechanics had a lot more to do with lack of alternative options and the sunk cost fallacy rather than superior intellect.
I remember playing Myst as a not-particularly-bright grade schooler and banging my head against puzzles for weeks without making any progress. It wasn't some great intellectual challenge -- I was just bored and didn't have any other games to play. I can't imagine I would have stuck with it if I could have watched YouTube or played Fortnite instead.
Moreso than needing handholding due to game mechanics or "too much" anything, I've always felt that it stems from a developer need for players to experience what you made. Or even just convincing the accountants that each additional cost of development will directly impact the majority of players (aka they don't get stuck or give up halfway through.)
That's why I think novelty and 'old AAA game' richness has a ceiling development_cost : unit_of_content ratio.
There are things that were feasible for Fallout 1 to do that accountants would lose their shit over today, precisely because they were relatively cheap then and astronomically expensive now.
... the real travesty is the corollary of that though: that gameplay/difficulty must ensure a maximum number of players see all the content.
Which has led to the 'impossible to fail' gimmicks that make modern AAA games feel less satisfying.
Honestly, it feels like Rockstar and Valve are the only ones making truly great AAA games these days...
(But mostly because they're on stable financial footing and willing to take as long as it takes)
So I wouldn't pull in questlog with rest of stuff. You need history if you have any sort of side quests.
I enjoyed the exploration, the setting, the cryptic writing. Even some of the more obtuse game design decisions appealed to my tastes, such as the lack of a quest log and a map that is just a geographical representation of the world, with minimal markers. It forced me to pay more attention to the world, recognize the terrain, learn the paths to navigate, etc. It was a game where I really was ready to lose myself in.
But it ultimately failed to have minimal respect for my time, and for that I hated it.
First when I accidentally killed a boss that could be spared. I didn't want to kill him, I just happened to be too strong and failed to react mid combo when he surrendered. The game fucking auto saved and I had to start over from scratch.
Second time when I was in the middle of a conversation when I was interrupted by my wife. I couldn't load a game to watch the cutscene again. It fucking autosaved again. I had to read a transcript online to understand what was going on. Total immersion killer.
Lastly, I remember a boss that took me like 40 attempts to kill. I am okay with the challenge. I am not okay with having to go through a mostly boring gauntlet of enemies for each attempt. It offered no challenge, I just felt like I was filling a form before each attempt. A long, 10m long form.
After killing that boss I uninstalled.
Rant over.
Maybe 4 things in that game are what I would describe as quests and mostly they don't matter if you do them or not
I am, however, very with you when it comes to not paying attention to AAA games despite being the kind of person who plays games every day. I agree that no one is offering deep experiences anymore outside the Soulsborne genre, which just isn't fun for me, so I end up focusing on novelty more than anything. My favorite game of all time is a top down roguelite stealther called Heat Signature that I've put hundreds of hours into and done at least one thing that the developer believed to be impossible based on the tutorials (kidnapping someone using only a lethal weapon). The last game I was truly excited about was a quest 1 VR game that was called Help Yourself at the time. Its changed its name since, but the idea is still really cool: it's a puzzle game that involves shooting targets with a gun. It's a bit hard to explain but the tldr is that you have to orchestrate multiple copies of yourself across multiple runthroughs until you shoot all of the targets. A typical level might have to targets with a wall between them such that there is no place where a player has line of sight to both targets, but there is a gap between the wall and the ceiling. On the first runthrough, an instance of you shoots the target on the right, then throws the gun over the wall. On the second runthrough, an instance of you is recreating the action of shooting the target on the right and throwing the gun over the wall, and another instance of you that you're currently in control of walks over to where the gun will land, waits for it to be thrown, then picks it up and shoots the other target. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GENqINO7pXY has some gameplay footage. I haven't had my brain bent by something like this since Portal came out.
The first good console for me was the NES. I enjoyed the Atari 2600, but only because it was the best at that time. But I can still enjoy a good NES game.
There aren’t many games on the Atari 2600 that I would still consider fun today. Maybe not necessarily because of graphics, but the graphics were pretty bad too.
It’s interesting that most modern retro-style games seem to keep a higher color and resolution than even the last great 2D generation (SNES/Genesis).
There are some games that hold try to that generation’s specs, though, but I don’t see many go as far back as the NES (and especially not the 2600).
There’s a small niche of people that make/have made modern NES games (actual cartridges for the actual console or remakes of the console), and those that play them, but I’m not aware of any super popular ones. If anybody’s aware of any, let me know!
And even then it's just the aesthetic that's fun. I don't think anyone aside from a small core of enthusiasts who really enjoy a technical challenge are particularly nostalgic for the 2600's sprite count or palette limitations, let alone the compute, memory, and data storage constraints.
https://www.gamesradar.com/retrogamer/
They tend to have a section with homebrew for classical systems, there are also a few quite good podcasts around,
When I to find joy in recent titles, it is typically indie games, or titles from small studios.
Part of it may be that photorealism as a graphical style does not appeal to my senses, but that is not all. I think that in many ways contemporary games have the need of keeping me busy and engaged. When I hear that a game is 200+ hours of content, instead of being intrigued I feel just overwhelmed.
One of the most groundbreaking trilogies in gaming with tons of potential and it’ll get relegated to the dustbin of history no doubt.
If I was absurdly rich I’d buy up lots of underused and/or abused IP and start a game studio around it. I feel like that would be a good business if you have the capital to handle game dev costs
Maybe I started with BioWare too early, but everything after NWN felt incredibly empty... in that 'world breaks if you look left or right of the main plot' Call of Duty way.
Which is fine, but always gave me an itch that I was really strapped into a plot-on-rails amusement park ride rather than a world.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1328670/Mass_Effect_Legen...
Part of the EA autumn sale. More discounts here:
https://store.steampowered.com/developer/EA/sale/ea-autumn-s...
When first person games became a destination for gaming (and not just another genre that we move on from — like "fighting games") is when I checked out of gaming. I know, I know, there are no doubt plenty of cool indie games out there (and other genres) but I guess in the meantime I found other ways to spend my time and haven't really looked back into games.
(I think too "AAA" as a moniker is kind of a huge red flag for me anyway. Like how "Now a Major Motion Picture" means it will be artless and instead appeal to a broad demographic in the most banal of ways.)
I still remember the “Westwood Studios Proudly Presents…” on the RA2 intro cutscene and that pride really shined through. Even the installer for the game was a blast (full-screen, dropped you into a faux game-UX and gave you a military briefing with their kickass soundtrack while the progress bar ran). Modern AAA games lack the soul that games of this time had.
The tracks in FIFA 14-15 was also so much better than the tracks in today's FIFAs. In every way. They handpicked not-mainstream songs too
They own the entire sports gaming genre, and it's a massive money maker.
There are two big audiences for sports games, I think, and I'm in the one that doesn't give a shit about realism or real team names or real-world rosters. I have no interest whatsoever in modern EA-type sports games, and most (not quite all) of my favorites for any give sport are from the '90s or '00s. I would characterize myself as a pretty big fan of sports games, actually (look at that list! I have put lots of time into pretty much all of those! I didn't even list all of them, like snowboarding games) but don't have any interest whatsoever in the latest EA NFL games and such.
fr tho you and the OP are talking about two different things here. it's possible to be an avid gamer who just does not care about sports games, in which case EA is both an absolute titan of the industry and of little to no relevance to you
NBA Live hasn't caught up to 2K for a long time and Sony still has MLB
The consolidation of publishers/developers in controlling all of the online experience has started limiting online gaming's ability to be a reasonable third place.
The further they moved away from that, the more generic it became. I don't want to say any one was really the "last good one" but the last one I put significant time into was BF2 but I played all pc versions up to 4 and you're right, it was absolutely broken on launch. It's not why I haven't played one since but I never did go back to BF or even really FPSs since. They all seem like CoD clones now, even (or especially) the CoD franchise and it's tiring.
They're even shipping Godot based modding tools.
How much of the new Battlefield actually been coming from EA though? I feels like the relatively new "Battlefield Lab" (which EA seems to have a really hands-off approach with so far) seems to be the main credit for that.
Has there been any interviews or anything that clarifies how much EA been involved? Otherwise I'd continue give credit to the developers rather than the publisher.
Labs is the name of their playtest program.
I've noticed this attitude is not yet "mainstream" but the first and the second derivative of its prevalence ought to worry the AAA industry. If their moat essentially collapses to "we can afford to spend a bazillion dollars on marketing" their death won't be too many years behind.
You should try Factorio, it'll find the time for you.
I wonder if the new owners would care to port it or sell it again.
It's thanks to capitalism that you get to choose which one you want to play.
Sports:
- Madden
- FC Soccer
- F1
This area should grow to cover other major sports. Others have mentioned how strong the sports offering is, and it’s also worth noting how strong Wii Sports was for the monumental success of the Wii.
FPS:
- Battlefield more or less
The Battlefield universe can cover anything you can dream of when it comes to FPS, so that’s another platform that is still a growth sector imho.
I think this is a very lucrative approach.
I respect this company a lot, even though they always seem to do things that embitter the gaming community against them.
Unfortunately these types of buyouts usually come with layoffs, after a year of tough layoffs in games. I hope anyone who will be affected can land somewhere safe.
The campus has a labyrinth with a plaque that's always inspired me: "As in life, the walls are only in your mind."
> I respect this company a lot, even though they always seem to do things that embitter the gaming community against them.
What I saw, more often than not, was most of the company consisted of the biggest genuine fans of their own products, and it was a few well placed ultra cynical bad apples that persisted in causing such enormous antagonism.
The games in question were on my Commodore 64. But still, there was such a time.
EA has a reputation for buying companies and draining all of their reputation for money. The first company that the EA of today did that to was EA itself. There was a time it was just a gaming company.
Actually it was about up to the Origin acquisition that I still had at least some positive feelings for them, before the pattern really settled in. After that, though, I got nothin'.
If you saw this from the other side you'd see just how much the reverse was true. This was one of the great mysteries of the place.
It's one of those situations where in the public perception the blame all flows up to EA, but the credit is always with the studios. The truth is somewhere else.
Nobody thinks the investors are what make the company. It’s the founders.
To take the case of Bioware, the SW:TOR launch was a notable disaster. There is no way in hell Bioware by themselves could have recovered from that, and it took a lot of "external" firefighting to get that under control.
OTOH various decisions many people assume came from EA were actually made by studio heads, against EA wishes, because the studio head thought it would increase their revenue and thus bonus.
One of the reasons Activision outperformed EA was they have a better culture of co-operation between departments. Efforts to improve this at EA never ceased to actually make it worse.
They were pretty universally admired then, as far as I can remember, but not for much longer.
The NHL Player's Association (so the PA in NHLPA) is the organization that collectively bargains on behalf of the players in the NHL. That's why all of the players were in the game, but the NHL logo, team logos, and team names weren't.
I genuinely hope they lose ALL of their exclusive sports licenses. They shouldn't be exclusive to begin with, but enabling these companies to hold the entire place hostage with their inferior and poorly crafted games just drives away competition and makes everyone play something else.
I have zero interest in football, soccer, basketball games, etc. but I did play them as a kid and I know young kids play sports games more. The fact that Madden has been re-publishing that game with the same Groundhogs Day release notes for 20+ years speaks volumes.
I don't think you can meaningfully call EA the same company -- it's more like a different company with the same name, and doesn't deserve respect for its past achievements
By the time I was there, over 20 years ago now, the management was already shitty. The people were great, but the management took advantage of employees' love for games. (I was part of the "EA Spouse" settlement)
---
In fact I now remember an utterly bizarre experience when I was an intern at EA. The CFO spoke in front of 20 interns, and reminded us that our jobs was to make the stock price go up. Like whenever you do anything, you should think about the stock price as your ultimate goal. So the company isn't really about making games?
I mean I can appreciate his honesty, compared to later big tech "make the world a better place" slogans, while also just trying to make the number go up
But it's a weird thing to say to a bunch of 22 year olds, since they have little influence on the stock price, other than trying to increase their knowledge of the craft
There were a number of other shady characters in EA management. They were often brought in from outside
Even though I criticized "don't be evil", I have to say that by and large Google management was much more competent, and they came off as kinder, even though the company changed eventually too
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I do think it has to do with whether the founder still leads the company -- there has to be someone mission-driven, not just money-driven
I think Trip Hawkins was mission-driven. Larry Page was to an extent, but I think he got sick of managing the company, so he let the optimizers take over
And private equity are almost universally short-term optimizers, in favor of themselves and against customers, which tends to ruin the company in the long term. So I see this as a continuation of a multi-decade trend with EA.
Though I'd be interested in any counterexamples, i.e. private equity that actually made the company better in the long term
Personally I hope there are tons of layoffs. The entire industry needs to be rinsed clean and refreshed, especially the US gaming industry.
Why does promoting games as if they were movies is an issue? Is this just about the rising development costs of AAA games, or is there something else here that you're alluding to?
As you can imagine, I mostly enjoy single-player narrative games with exploration and some RPG elements, rather than multi-player ones, or open-ended ones with infinite-replayability mechanics. For reference, some of my favorite game franchises include: LBA, Zelda, The Last of Us, Mass Effect, The Witcher, Portal, Talos Principle, GTA, Kotor, Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts.
First, I absolutely hate who is buying them. Especially as a huge Bioware fan with a Mass Effect tattoo.
That being said, putting aside who is buying them for a moment. I would actually be happy to see more gaming companies going fully private. I feel like the need for constant growth (instead of just sustainability) is what has caused much of the issues in the current gaming market.
So not exactly super excited about how exactly this is happening, but I do hope that we can see other gaming companies do it with better sources.
I'm not sure the investment group attempting to diversify Saudi oil income is going to be less profit oriented than the stock market in general
For what it’s worth, MBS is reportedly an avid gamer.
It sounds silly at first but the US military has been doing something similar for ages with Hollywood, at least since WWII. The difference is the armed forces use access to military equipment for filming as the carrot rather than financing the productions directly.
That said, given Saudi Arabia's whole vibe, one can't expect that angle to go all that well for anyone else's representation (Women, Israelis, LBGTQ+ folk...)
That the message is going to be “Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are tier-1 allies / partners / powers” depends on your perspective. Lots of gamers outside the US these days!
Either way, human rights journalists lose.
I think most companies satisfied for being sustainable are probably owned by their original founders or their families, not private equity.
This is an impossible status for public ownership as people don’t want a stock that stays at 10usd for multiple subsequent quarters. They see it as an investment. So you either have to offer significant dividends or find a way to show growth. If not, investors lose interest and your value drops, despite being perfectly profitable.
That’s not to say this private owner set will be happy with that, but that’s the benefit private ownership offers over public capital.
It's something that feels good, but when you dig into the nitty-gritty of it, it's basically a "This guy should take the hit so we as a group can enjoy the fruits of it"
A “stagnant” company isn’t a failed one. It’s profitable. But perhaps it has saturated its market, or otherwise has no other avenues of growth without handicapping what it excels in. This is fine, as long as it continues to increase with inflation (as it should, if it’s increasing its prices to match so) it will stay profitable and increase your capital at a sustainable and normalized rate.
Or, you can force them to continually increase that profit rate infinitely in a closed system, an impossible ask.
This is literally the concept of “late stage capitalism”. What do you do when there is no more growth to sustain because you’ve saturated the closed system that is earth? You can either go hyperaggressive and eat into other avenues, hoping you can beat their incumbents (but either way, one is going to lose their own profit) or continually increase your profits by lowering quality and production costs. Thus why things like coke “used to taste better” or why Ford’s “used to be built better”.
Private capital isn’t beholden to that requirement. It’s an advantage, not a disadvantage. They simply need to remain competitive and everyone wins: the labor gets a stable job, the owners get a stable income, the industry gets stable (if not increasing, from better technology) products, etc.
If you have $100M tied up in a game company that (maybe!) returns 3% a year (matching inflation), why the hell wouldn't you sell it for $100M, and then go put that in bonds which will return 5% with much less risk and no work or time needed on your part?
Again, it's not fair to expect charity from owners (public or private) so you can stretch your dollar further. Whether we are talking about video games, napkins, coffee beans, or warehouse leases, it's all investments that give returns, and generally people with money are extremely smart about good and bad investments, just like you would be if you were in that position (i.e. not voluntarily taking 3% when 5% is easier and safer).
I literally outlined the return. You are receiving the profit from a very profitable firm, which compounds year over year. Literally, you could not call that 0% (or “near 0%”) even in the most reductive of arguments.
Let’s simplify it for you: I buy a magic well for 1000usd. It gives me 500usd/yr. In 10 years, I’ve gotten 5000usd. Somehow that’s 0%, in your math. Additionally, from here on out, I’m making pure profit off of the well.
Again, you seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of even basic capitalism. I suggest you read up on it, which might be difficult as you seem unwilling to read even the entirety of what you’re responding to.
SWTOR was maintained pretty well for a while and was fun.
The issues with ME3's ending were blown way out of proportion and was still a fantastic trilogy.
Andromeda had its issues no doubt about it but I am still mad at a certain website deciding that they were going to just go hard on attacking it. It was a fun game, it had some development issues and some nasty bugs at launch. But was still fun.
Anthem... man that game had potential but just was not ready to ship. Was a ton of fun to play and I loved the bits of story we got but it really was just a tease of a story sadly.
DA Veilguard... definitely not up to the standard that Bioware set but there is still something uniquely Bioware about the characters that I fell in love with. That games potential was not helped by a vocal minority being mad about one specific character and not caring about anything else in the game.
Has Bioware gone down since their peak? Yeah. But I think claims that they are dead are overblown and people parroting it on youtube for clicks sure isnt helping that sentiment. Play the games and make your own decision.
Anthem came across to me that it had most of its story "filed off" at the last minute. I can't prove it, but Bioware was said to have been working on a Mandalorian game for years and so much of Anthem from the KOTOR-like macguffin that gives the title of the game to the underutilized Cantina in the main hub to the fact that AT-ATs (under a slightly different name) just show up in the middle of plot like you should have already been expecting them feels like Bioware in the very last minute had to pull every Star Wars character and Star Wars reference out of a game that was designed to be a Star Wars Mandalorian simulator.
At least as a player of Anthem, I think it's a tale of weird timing that EA was afraid of losing access to the Star Wars license in the wrong week, and also didn't anticipate that Disney would heavily promote a Mandalorian themed TV show not soon after the expected release date. As an officially licensed Star Wars Mandalorian simulator, just as or just before the first couple of seasons of The Mandalorian were premiering could have been incredible. Anthem hints that it was almost that in such weird ways it's hard not to wonder if EA and Bioware just got Anthem's timing wrong.
(It's also not hard to blame Anthem's weird timing for messing up Andromeda by consequence. Andromeda's team got retasked away from story DLC to help Anthem in whatever its last weird rush was, which in my theory is the "removing Star Wars from it" and I still think Andromeda was only one good story DLC from being among the best of the series.)
I did play the game and no they weren't. The issues truly started with ME2, but ME3 was an awful game that was an embarrassment to the standard of quality set by ME1. Dragon Age also went downhill starting with DA2 (which again I did play at least some of it though I didn't bother finishing because I hated it).
You're obviously still enjoying their work and that's cool. I'm genuinely glad you still do. But don't act like everyone is just being haters who don't play the games and parrot things that other people say. I did play Bioware's games, and that's why I no longer play them and consider them to be long since dead.
Bioware was always trying to reinvent the wheel. They never wanted to make the same game twice. It was both their strength and their weakness. Every time they released a sequel, it felt different than the previous game (except maybe ME3).
In my opinion, ME2 was the last unambiguously good game Bioware released. They made a few good games after that, but every game starting from DA2 also had major issues.
Apparently they're working as support for other studios while they do pre-production on the next Mass Effect, and that game needs to walk the line between staying true to the identity of the old games and bringing in new entrants. They're an established operating studio, but I'm not sure that counts for much when the mega publishers can shut down and start studios on a whim, they need to justify staying around whether that's because they make games that sell or because having a workforce in Canada is worthwhile.
It does seem like they tried to avoid just becoming the "Mass Effect and Dragon Age" developer but that did not really work that well for them. Maybe that turned out to be a distraction. I think it also did not help that everything they put out was compared to both of those and seemed to have an expectation that it had to be as big or was a failure.
It isn't like they had a constant stream of massive hits. Don't get me wrong I love Jade Empire but how many people actually remember that game exists?
Likely also did not help that their 2 biggest IP's also had gameplay that very different from eachother.
I am (or maybe was until this news) cautiously optimistic about the next Mass Effect.
It relates to one of my bugbears about how a subsection of gamers have grown to dislike the big productions often for some valid reasons, there's a lot of potential pitfalls in making a game like ME, but a company like EA is the only place that big impressive experience can be done. Right from the earliest previews introducing ME1 they were going into the cinematic style of it and how good it looked, which was an evolution of what they'd done before with Jade Empire/KOTOR (and still seems to be there with parts of DA:Veilguard). While there's (again, potential) competition in the coming years from Exodus by Archetype, and Owlcat's The Expanse: Osiris reborn games, it's hard to see them providing quite what could be done at the largest games companies.
My wife and I have played through the trilogy twice together. I've played it solo separately once. We're talking about a third joint play through soon, I expect we'll start it before the end of the year.
We made it six or so hours into Andromeda and dropped it, with no desire to ever revisit. Characters, gameplay, and story, all three failed to appeal to us at all. Trying to get into it was a chore, and after three or four feature-films worth of time with zero fun experienced, we cut our losses.
(agreed about ME3's ending, but to be fair we didn't play that until they fixed it, the original presentation does seem really bad from what I've read about it)
This will probably result in more money extracting schemes and less editorial freedom, even without thinking about MBS having a massive amount of influence in the company now.
However this is the rare exception because this is more about oligarchs making a play for total control over the media sphere rather than any sort of financial independence. That said, cornering the entertainment side of things is going to be much harder especially since the people that do this kind of thing have zero clue what a video game even is or how to make a profitable one.
I have very little respect for any company that is only interested in the next couple of financial quarters and in making their shareholders as much money as fast as possible (while all else can go f itself). And that's exactly the kind of company EA was for at least a decade. Good riddance.
> The investors are betting that AI-based cost cuts will significantly boost EA’s profits in the coming years, people involved in the transaction told the Financial Times.
It halfway makes sense. EA is priced at current game production costs, but if that goes down, it'll be worth more. The other side of that is that someone might be able to vibe code with "make the next iconic video game franchise in the vein of Zelda or Pokemon." If EA's sports license moat is strong enough, this might not be an issue, but otherwise, it feels like that cuts both ways.
Affinity Partners: Jared Kushner.
Plus you can pull a Facebook/YouTube/Tiktok and use it to push impressionable people politically towards you. Media made for viewing is all a state enterprise at this point. Interactive media (games) have been looked over, but it seems that won't be the case anymore.
The Saudis through the PIF are heavily invested in entertainment brands and sports to distract from the fossil fuels (and worse) that create most of those investment funds.
As to Kushner's-specific role, could just be cynically seen to money itself, as a US-based middleman of the PIF deal trying to take a cut. "Administrators" in these sort of private equity buyouts (leveraged buy outs) can make a lot of fast, stupid cash in a grift that probably should be illegal but still currently is not. (LBOs saddle the company being bought out with a lot of debt to pay the "Administrators" what they think they are worth. That debt often leads to the original company going bankrupt and selling their IP at auction to highest bidder and the "Administrators" also take their cuts of those auctions. It's a corporate ponzi scheme that no matter how many huge companies it takes down like Sears or Little Debbie or MGM or many more we still haven't actually put a law on the books to stop it.)
Modern Games also lack the Game and Fun part. They either make something super complex I no longer have the time to dive in, or pay to win.
Oh man, it’s often worse than you think. So many games now have a lot of “complexity” the complexity is all really surface level leaving you desiring.
On the upside, maybe they will release a new AAA Dilbert game though!
Mass Effect 2 is the primary reason I've only played Mass Effect 3 once, because I just can't get myself to go through 2 again despite having replayed Mass Effect 1 several times. I don't think it's a terrible game, on the technical side it improved so many things, but I just don't like the story. To be fair, Dragon Age and Anthem were the only ones that really dissapointed me.
ME1 is a an excellent story-driven action RPG with clunky combat and issues with environment size/complexity due to technological limitations of the platform it was built for.
ME2 is a very good story-driven third-person shooter with excellent combat and a thin veneer of RPG elements that has overcome a lot of the technical issues with ME1 despite the same platform/engine.
ME1 by far has the better story and I enjoyed it more than ME2 on my first playthrough years ago, but now, already knowing the story, ME2 was more fun to play this time. It's a shame they couldn't have improved on everything good about the first one instead of turning it into a shooter.
Personally, I'd love to see the whole trilogy reimagined and remade as a single giant open-world action RPG, but that's probably never happening.
What will PIF, Silver Lake and Affinity partners do to monetize such client software, beyond games, that is pre-installed on 1 billion devices?
How is this different than something like Broadcom buying VMware? Corporate machines are probably far juicier than a bunch of 18-35 yr olds computers. Not to mention that a wide install base also means if they go rogue it'll be detected even faster.
"Jucier" in what context/for what? Say you wanna influence how people feel about social issues, what computer user is "jucier" then? Not saying that that's the plan or whatever, just that the context matters.
How are you going to "influence how people feel about social issues" without being overly obvious? In contrast there's plenty of nefarious stuff you can straightforwardly do on corporate machines: insider trading, corporate espionage, sabotage, PII theft, ransomware, and credit card fraud just to name a few.
Unless some of that cash is staying on the balance sheet, they will NOT be investing in growth and innovation.
PE is not what I normally think of when I think of innovation and (non-financially engineered) growth.
Though, the cancer of gambling will continue spreading.
[x] - Employees are overworked and underpaid
[x] - IP treated as infinite cash cows loaded with micro-transactions
[x] - Games turned soulless in pursuit of wide 'rated E' appeal
Sports is ~50% of their revenue. I wouldn't be surprised if this is a sports-washing exercise where revenue growths takes a back set to normalizing Saudi Arabia to the new generation.
Bandwidth is the only limit...
One can hope.
And maybe that makes that one person realize they still have a backup disk of the source code of Red Alert 2.
Yeah, business-people famously don't like to sit on things that have a 1% chance of being valuable in the future, usually selling them off to smaller entities so the fans of those things can actually enjoy them.
Jared Ibn Kushner: "hold my شاي"
I remember when they were the good guys. I’d see that EA logo on my Commodore 64 load up and I knew I was in for something amazing like Archon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archon:_The_Light_and_the_Dark
It only shows that their business model is creating value for the people who matters to the detriment of others.
The millions of people who play FIFA, Madden, and Battlefield don’t sit around on niche forums bashing EA for not making enough innovative indie-style titles.
EA even puts out titles that are legitimately critically acclaimed every once in a while (Split Fiction as a recent example).
Its not even that, both Mass Effect and Dragon Age are fantastic series with latest games being mediocre at best. If they did the same thing as before it would be more successful, so they clearly don't know what is the right thing for the customers.
Dragon Age: Veilguard was actually a solid game, and it got review-bombed by angry right-wingers. It does make some traditionalist fans upset but it’s not some kind of disaster like it’s been painted to be.
Of course this is entertainment-washing at the end of the day, but I just find it funny the that MBS is going about it: buying EA the same way I would buy a used copy of NHL 97.
It's a very simple money-printing machine, with plenty of people addicted to it with its gambling/gache style game.
All the other IP barely make any revenue and will likely get even less attention. RIP Bioware.
Maybe this will be part of a bigger acquisition... or maybe they have already acquired everything they could, except that they don't want make FIFA look like a bad saudi organization?
Maybe they will limit how many minutes you can play before having to pay more?!
That was _quite a lot_ of money in Brazil at the time.
It's a digital market, NFT-esque, sold as a game.
Well we don't need to wait long. I think the history book will say this EA acquisition is the point PC gaming market becomes as predatory as mobile.
Good luck to the EA workers.
EDIT: I think I might have worded that poorly. I do NOT think a change is going to happen, at least not one for the better, especially considering the actors involved in the buyout. I think it's optimistic to think that it will.
Correct: “the transaction will be funded by a combination of cash from each of PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners as well as roll-over of PIF’s existing stake in EA, constituting an equity investment of approximately $36 billion, and $20 billion of debt financing.”
EA currently carries about $2.6bn in non-current liabilities of which $1.5bn is long-term debt. So an order of magnitude more debt.
i like this potential optimism. Even if its not likely, its fun to imagine this being a turning point where EA is suddenly just doing things to make games better, rather than chase numbers, and because of that, the competition is forced to match that better gameplay.
I just would love to see where sports games could ACTUALLY be at if a high percentage of the team wasn't focused on horrible predatory in game purchases/questionable card games that just skirt by the legal system for underage gambling.
Things really do seem bad enough that clearly something drastic is needed if anything is going to change, For an unhappy fan of one of the many EA franchises, I don't have any trouble imagining that even a major change that's unlikely to produce good still offers more hope than the status quo. If there's a 1% chance that taking EA private will improve things, it still probably is more likely than things improving with the current management.