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EA Exec Won't Green Light Any Single Player-Only Games
An anonymous reader sends this quote from Geek.com:
"Frank Gibeau, the president of EA Labels, has shown that business truly does come before gameplay with comments he made as part of a preview document for the CloudGamingUSA event happening on September 11-12 in San Francisco. Gibeau is very proud of the fact he has never green lit a single project that consisted solely of a single-player experience. He insists that every game EA publishes has an online component to it. His reason for doing this? Apparently EA has 'evolved with consumers (PDF)' suggesting he thinks this is what consumers want in every game. ... Forcing online into every game makes little sense. While it works for a Battlefield, Medal of Honor, Fifa or Need for Speed title, there's just as many games that don't need it to succeed, or even work for online play. A good example of this would be the forthcoming SimCity, which has upset fans of the series because it will require an constant Internet connection to play. That isn't a DRM measure, it's due to the tight integration of multiplayer and how all players impact each others games."
"multi player only" is just code for "always connected to the internet", been there, tried that, no thanks.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
LOL The reality is he wants to use the internet to normalize DRM one small step at a time. Everyone has seen diablo 3's success and the are CHOMPING AT THE BIT to do the same to every other game. See through the PR matrix.
Seriously, what the fuck?
If you asked me to name one thing that pisses me off more then most other things today, I'd say that it's this "forced-socialization" everyone is jumping on.
I deal with people all day, I'm a consultant for some seriously niche and highly proprietary technology. Sometimes I deal with nice people. Sometimes I deal with smart people. Sometimes I deal with stupid people, and sometimes I deal with complete and utter fuckwads. I do this every day, five days a week. I usually spend one day on the weekend hanging out with friends and family, which leaves me one day to forget about reality and escape to the far reaches of some magical galaxy where I can have a nice private adventure in the comfort of my own living room.
The last thing I want is to be forcefully shoved into a virtual room with a bunch of vulgar screaming 12 year olds who think they're "the shit" while I'm simply "shit".
I don't play games to deal with people. I play games to get away from people. I deal with people enough during the day.
Why the fuck can't game companies understand this?
-AC
He isn't saying that they're shoehorning multiplayer into every game. He's saying that every game should include an online component of some sort, as he says right here. They're not saying that games should all have multiplayer involved. They're saying that they should involve the internet in some way. There is nothing wrong with this. For example, take optional high score challenges in Mirror's Edge. The Sim City example, where online is required, is a bad example because that's just one game and the game was designed to be multiplayer-centric from the start. There are many, many single player games, like Mass Effect, that don't require the multiplayer or online functionality whatsoever. This is just FUD. EA isn't the best company around, sure, but including online features in single player games is definitely possible and it can't always be a bad thing depending on how it's implemented.
Mass Effect is a great example. Thanks for bringing it up. When the series began, Bioware wasn't part of EA and there was no online component. EA's Mass Effect 3, on the other hand, requires players to either pvp or play an awful iPhone game to improve the effectiveness of their forces and unlock the most positive ending. This is the sort of shoehorning EA demands.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Spore didn't suck because of Maxis or developer involvement. Spore sucked because of EA and EA's business decisions.
The huge buzz caught the attention of executives and they decided to take their high-concept property and rape it's corpse for all it was worth, even before it launched.
Pencil dick middle managers smelled another sims, and with dreams of endless expansions, tried as hard as they could to turn spore in to a product they could sell the public incrementally over many years.
Well, you know the rest. The game sucked. Every bit of awesome creative vision was dashed out at the hands of the clueless goons that pat themselves on the back for running EA.
Today, here we are again hearing clueless shit from some shirt who would not know fun if it was beaten in to him with a rusty pipe. We know why EA's game suck. It's not the developers, its the useless layers of executive staff and management parasites that define the modern American business.
Last year EA bought PopCap, the producer of a number of simple, but well done single player games, including Plants vs. Zombies. Although they've added multi-player elements to their games, the core experience is a single-player one. Recently they laid off about 50 people, including the designer of Plants vs. Zombies.
It seems to me that EA doesn't care much about game play, just raking in more profits.