Phoenix Publishings

Challenge Anything?

EA Games is a pretty big company, I mean, their annual turnover for the last three years has averaged at around 2.4 billion US dollars. Last year it was nearly 3 billion. They have around 4500 employees. Yet in the months between the release of the last two major patches for C&C Generals: Zero Hour most modding teams have made a considerable start on re-writing the game. The team at EA Games doing the update work, however, have only managed minor bug fixes, and very little balance work has been done.

Surely this points towards the fact that EA games had given up on Zero Hour, and only came back to it with the imminent release of Act of War: Direct Action (Site and Preview), some major competition for the EA owned brand.

The thing is, EA Games is widely hate within the gaming community, to the point that people were actively promoting the pirating of Battle for Middle Earth (and EA Game) on the EA message board, in protest over the poor customer support. It is quite obvious, from the humble point of view of the customers, that EA is more interested in making profits than actually building a fanbase for any of its products.

Contrast Valve's (the team behind the big hits, Half Life and Half Life 2) community support with that of EA. Valve has actively promoted modding amongst the community, even going so far as to release the Half Life 2 SDK (software development kit) only days after the game was avalible. This meant that, while some people were still playing the first levels of the game, or even wondering whether they should get it or not, teams of dedicated fans could begin their own versions of the game. (The SDK is the basis for doing anything using the game physics and graphics engines). With the original Half Life they encouraged the community to develop the game, updating it nearly as often as the community found a bug. EA Games wont even tell people the console key. Look at their standings within the community now. Sure EA is bigger, but will they stay big?

Unfortunately, the answer to that one is yes. In their bids for ever greater profits, EA Games actively seeks to buy out titles that they can re-release every year, with a minimum amount of updating. The EA Sports Big brand owns tens, if not hundreds of titles like this, such as the Formula One series. And, where possible, they buy the rights from the owners of a particular sporting league, eliminating competition. And without competition, the quality of the games collapses.

On the X-Box, EA games insisted that their online games would be hosted on their own severs, rather than those belonging to Microsoft as is the case with most other games. Presumably this is not an act of kindness, but rather a means towards EA being able to cancel support for older games when they release new versions, forcing fans to spend more money on the latest version, with little change to the game itself.

Treating the community like this is a bad idea. The community of gamers across the globe is a very powerful force. When the Half Life 2 code was stolen gamers from across the globe managed to track it down and return it to the developers within days of it being reported missing; co-ordinating their actions across the internet. Sure there are some bad apples amongst the gamers of the world, but that is true of even the nicest communites. What you have to remember is that they are the group of people that can make or break some of the biggest companies in the global economy. And EA knows that.

But they aren't dealing with it in the right way. They use all the sneaky tricks they can to keep sales up and revenue rolling in. They want people to buy their producs without actually looking after their customers.

Much of the content of Generals:Zero Hour was originally announced for the preceding title, but was removed to keep something back for the add-on pack and bost its sales. And this isnt the only game where this is thought, no - known, to be true.

Surely EA could acheive even greater sales simply by producing good quality games? If they actually put the effort into the game design process, made some good quality, original games they could sit back and watch the money, and newly found support, roll in.

Give something to the community, and maybe, just maybe, they will give something back to you.

Perhaps one day webcomic artists will be able to stop making jokes like this.

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posted by Anonymous @ 6:01 AM