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Electronic Arts - Resistance Is Futile?
Thanks to USNews.com for its feature discussing the increasing dominance of videogame publisher Electronic Arts, pointing out that, using figures from its recent financial results, that: "In 1999, EA had eight platinum, or million-plus-selling, titles. In the past year, it produced 27 of them. Back then, EA possessed 10 percent of the North American game market. Today, it has captured 22 percent of it." The article discusses EA's wish "to double the size of the company every four or five years", and also talks about revenues from online gaming, where it's hoped "some 15 to 20 percent of EA revenue should come from... during the next console cycle", despite the "costly failure" of The Sims Online - however, EA CEO Larry Probst "...guesses that future online gaming will follow the cable television model, where you will pay a subscription to access various 'channels' of gaming services"),
Budgets are getting bigger. Development times are longer. Teams are (much) bigger. Licenses are more expensive. Game complexities are bigger.
As long as those trends continue, and they likely will, EA is one of a vanishingly small number of publishers that can fund a significant number of high-end titles. Few publishers seem able to increase their hit rate, so they need to ship several titles annually in hopes of scoring big.
It'll take an order of magnitude improvement in development tools before the smaller guys can compete at this level. And unfortunately the tools developers haven't stepped up to the plate yet.
Look for more consolidation over the next 3-5 years. It's going to get much harder for the little guy before things start to shift again.
EA's only real danger is its own weight.
Keep in mind that the video game market grows over time (or at least should), therefore EA will have to continue to increase their size in order to keep up.
EA doesn't "eat up" small companies. It pays the proprietors good money for them. If the owners don't like what happens after they become part of EA, that's just their tough luck - they've probably got the scratch to try again with a new company if they really care that much. If consumers don't like it, they can stop buying EA games. As large as EA is, they're still not the only game in town.
They also killed Privateer Online, Battletech 3025 (MMP Battletech anyone?), and a whole host of other titles. Many of these cancellations were accompanied by the associated teams being laid off. Being a part of EA rapidly came to mean dreading the first quarter of the fiscal year. March is almost always EA's layoff month. It appears that the foolishness of laying off an entire team at one whack hasn't dawned on them yet. Much of their competition in the MMP space (and other markets) has come from ex-EA employees. The Privateer Online team wound up becoming the Star Wars Galaxies team for SOE. The Ultima Online 2 team comprises a large chunk of the developers over at NCsoft Austin working on Richard Garriot's next game, Tabula Rasa. ION Storm Austin recruited much of it's talent from EA layoff's. As did Digital Anvil and Wolfpack studios.
EA's bumbling in the MMP market is often amusing, however, as they can't seem to grasp that it takes longer than a year to produce a MMP product of any worth. On top of that, they seem eternally frustrated by the continued success of the now ancient Ultima Online. EA wants and expects to have 6 month to a year product cycles. To have a game live on for 7 years drives them a bit batty. Not only are they dumb as fence posts when it comes to the MMP market, but they don't listen to those of their employees that have been there before and repeat mistakes made with previous products.
They also tend to be total jerks. When UO: Third Dawn was coming out, they had just laid off the UO2 team (I forget if Kesmai was shutdown that March or the next) and when speaking to the survivors they were asked if the Origin name and logo were going away (it had certainly felt like that for a while). The CEO asked what the employees thought and everyone vehemently expressed their desire to keep the OSI name and logo. At this, he stated that he had a strong belief in the employees of OSI and would make certain that the OSI name and logo continued to exist. Then the Ultima Online: Third Dawn retail boxes were handed out to everyone. No Origin logo...anywhere. No mention of OSI as an entity, studio, nothing. Except in the fine print of the license agreement. Plenty of EA logos everywhere, though (actually EA.com, the bizzare, doomed to failure enterprise that was to be structured around magically converting the 1.5 million unique visitors of Pogo.com, which they had just bought for around $150 million, into $10 a month EA.com subscribers). No subsequent product would ever carry the Origin name. Just this last March, EA shutdown the Origin studio in Austin.
Of the great PC gaming companies of the 90's, EA has taken over and slowly strangled to death Bullfrog, Westwood, Origin, Kesmai, and Maxis among a number of other smaller companies.
Part of the reason that may be is due to artists' egos ;) As an artist's or musician's work is considered a more "visible" aspect of a game, so naturally they'd want to take full credit. There's also the fact that, with some exceptions, artists aren't used to working on collaborative projects, be they open source or not.
Let me ask Probst this:
Would Arcades have been as successful in the 80's if they charged a membership fee instead of a quarter per play??
I sorry i miss the old EA. one of my first game purchases was starflight, and i waited eagerly for starflight 2. Racing destruction set on the c64, Theme Hospital by bullfrog published by EA (that i just played again last week)
and no post is complete without the 7 cities of gold and marble madness:)
*sigh*