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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."
There's no NHL season this year. I've bought the EA NHL game for years... but not this year. Why? Not because I bought a different game, but because I'm just not interested in playing a hockey video game when there's no hockey season.
MORTAR COMBAT!
The Madden vs. ESPN fanboy war had just died down, the remnants taking refuge in the teenage spam havens of IGN boards and the like. Now comes word that the ESPN Games price cuts worked, and out come the fanboy trolls to take up the fight with renewed fervor. God help us.
Maybe some people decided they were tired of buying the same game over and over again every year. I mean seriously. NHL and Madden are great sports games. Probably the best sports games ever (discounting 10 yard fight and Ice Hockey for the NES). But NHL '99 is every bit just as good as NHL 2k4 or 2k5. If you don't have it yet, buy the newest one. But if you've already got an NHL game or a madden game, there is no reason to buy a newer one.
So maybe a few of the dummies who rebuy the game every year finally realized the dumbness and decied to spend less money and try a game that might actually be a little bit different.
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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.
There's also the issue of the bugs in Madden that were causing people to "exploit" the stamina features in Online games.
I personally just think EA has taken their mindshare for granted. SegaSports gave them a run for the money, and now it seems ESPN has broken through.
Was because it was right at the high end of the "impulse buy" range. Most people will spend up to $20(one bill, well more than that with tax but people don't really think of that) on a whim, but when you start to get higher than that, many people will think twice about it, and probably go with madden because it's a $50 game, so it must be better than your $30 or $40 game...
Monstar L
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.
It could be that in a relatively weak economy with relatively high unemployment, that price matters more. This would difinitely give the ESPN line of games an edge. And, as some have already mentioned, $19.99 is at the sweet spot of the typical impulse buy. Now that we're entering the holiday shopping season, sales should go up for both EA and ESPN lines, but I'm guessing that grandparents will be preferentially buying the ESPN line of games for their spoiled grandkids!
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
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
"the only platform that matters -- PC"
check out the 2004 esa report "essential facts":
http://www.theesa.com/EFBrochure.pdf
in 2003, sales of cosole games were $5.8 billion, compared to $1.2 billion for pc games. oh, and the ps2 version of madden was the best selling console game - and it's not even on the top 20 list of pc games....
i'm a pc gamer at heart myself, but it's a small market when compared to the consoles... this year should see an increase though, with all the good pc games...
Some EA reps were recruiting in my area not too long ago, and the head of research (his name escapes me, but he was really cool guy) gave a speech. He explained to us that for sports games, they try to get the bulk of their revenues in the bag during the first 6 weeks of the respective sport's season. In NHL 2005's case, he explained that EA was already expecting that 2005 would not do well because nobody was psyched for the season with the strike, and hence nobody would be psyched to buy the game. Especially telling was the 25 minutes of EA game trailers before the speech with trailers for every EA Sports game, except NHL 2005.