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The Horrible Things That Could Happen To EA
A recent Gamasutra story noted something interesting in Electronic Arts' financials filing. The company is extremely reliant on brick and mortar retailers like Wal-mart (which made up 12% of its net revenue) and Gamestop (about 15%). Simon Carless, writing at the GameSetWatch blog, takes that analysis one step further and postulates some of the horrible things that could happen to the software giant if the conditions were right. It's all meant tongue-in-cheek, of course, but it's an interesting discussion of how even large companies can be vulnerable to simple issues: "5. Wrong System, Wrong Time! 'Our business is highly dependent on the success and availability of video game hardware systems manufactured by third parties, as well as our ability to develop commercially successful products for these systems.' More specifically, as EA explains, this is the Wii/DS effect in action: 'A platform for which we are developing products may not succeed or may have a shorter life cycle than anticipated.'"
Absolutely. Remember that the EA way would be for spore critters to wear T-shirts with ads for Pepsi and Burger King.
I just participated in a survey (paid for by guess who) about in-game advertising. One of the questions was how much cheaper a $40 game would have to be for in-game advertising to be acceptable. My answer: $80. Yes, if I am to watch ads, I want to get paid. With twenty hours play time, $40 is only $2 per hour, and they surely get more than that from the advertisers.
In my opinion, EA no longer serves a useful purpose, and should go beer-belly up. Redoing the same game every year, with a darker and darker environment (so there will be less visible textures, and the crappier code won't be too slow on a graphics card that's merely twice as fast as last year's) isn't innovative. Especially not when it fetches ads over MY internet connection in the background, and sends personal and marketing information back to them, at my cost.
Regards,
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*Art