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EA Predicted to Announce Madden, NHL Sales Drops
bippy writes "Analyst PJ McNealy predicts that EA will announce Tuesday a 20 percent drop in sales for Madden and a 50 percent drop in sales for NHL 2005, partly due to the success of ESPN's low-price, high-content games. McNealy says this likely won't have a huge financial impact on the game developer, but it will affect them psychologically. I'm just surprised that ESPN's price cut worked. It seems that when Madden came out everyone was saying that the price cut wouldn't help ESPN or hurt EA."
Come on guys, could we get it right? It's EA that will be announcing that their games are losing sales. ESPN is the one causing the loss in sales.
I'm not saying that ESPN is bug free, but in 3 online leagues and a ton of offline play, I've never experienced a freeze or crash. The only bug I've encountered is occasionly when starting an online game, the game thinks the controller is disconnected. Certainly, you've had your experience, but "full of bugs" to be a huge exageration. It's not dramatically buggier than Fatigue Madden.
Not sure if you knew this, but Sega Sports is ESPN Videogames.
I purchased NBA 2k5, also because of the price cut. I got used to the controls somewhat , and only noticed some graphical glitches. So things were pretty much all well and good until last week, when my 24/7 mode games would freeze whenever I finished a game/trial. Once I completed a game, The "Loading..." text would come up, and then the "..." animation froze, and the music would start doing a 5 second loop.
Thinking maybe it was a bad music track, I found the surface of the disc had no scratches of any kind. However, I was still suspicious of the music thing (as games I have had before would freeze because of bad tracks of music), so I tried to shut the music off. But since I can't do that from inside the 24/7 mode, and also shutting it off before entering the mode doesn't help (if you originally created the 24/7 savegame with the music on, you're stuck), I just started a new 24/7 character with no music. I lost basically 6 hours of gameplay. And now it works. grr
This might not be the true solution, but I'm done with 24/7 mode and the game, (I'm not going to play 82 games) so whatever. In any case, I started to hate the AI after awhile. I couldn't figure out a way to drive, jump to shoot, and then directpass to a specific player. I vaugely remeber the EA version being a little more intuative in its passing, whereas 2k5 tends to pass to people that are not necessarilally where you are pushing the controls. This makes fast breaks annoying and difficult (You have to press the alley-oop button to pass to the trailers on te break; It's not like EA where I would simply hold shoot, getting defenders to commit, and then hitting pass to pass to the cutters) Grr!
0- Eamonman Proud member of DNRC