I consulted for a couple weeks at EA about 10 years ago. On one of those days, I got 2 VPs and a director into a half-hour talk in a break area about how much they loved the game Starflight:
Starflight's a great game. And we were all having a great time reminiscing over it when I made the mistake of saying "Why not do an update? You all seem to love this game."
Their response was that space games and RPGs are both dead genres. We all parted a few minutes later as I had apparently killed the mood.
It's really funny how many "dead" genres have been revived thanks mainly to Steam and Kickstarter. Or how Minecraft would have certainly been laughed out of the room by any major publisher.
Most of these games will not make obscene profits. But it should be really clear by now that it makes sense to invest in and sell a variety of games, not just mass-appeal action games.
Just because some genres were revived doesn't mean you can predict which genres to dump money into. Also, what some consider revived others consider still dead.
I never played Starflight, but I believe it influenced a game I loved as a kid, Star Control 2. It was given a sequel (...Star Control 3) but without any of the original makers being involved - IIRC they wanted more money than the publisher was prepared to pay.
And what do you know, the bad sequel killed the franchise.
People have ported the original to modern platforms, but if anything was due a Kickstarted sequel...
The original studio is now doping the wildly profitable skylanders franchise, falso the studio is owned 100% by Actvision, i doubt they will be doping anything that is nota skylanders unless they pull a Infinity Ward
I'm not seeing where EA lost it's soul simply because it made the correct business decision to not go with the CEOs idea of 3DO. It was a bad decision especially given Sony's upcoming entry. The fact that the then-CEO decided to make an offshoot company instead of miring EA with trying to go into the hardware field was probably one of the better ones to keep EA functioning well. However, despite EA not backing their CEO's offshoot company, I don't see how that signifies that they lost their soul. I think people would attribute it more to the move to yearly releases, consuming studios for their IPs, etc. Rather than choosing to not promote a specific piece of hardware. Like I really want to like 3DO and it's open spec ideas, but holding a grudge over not getting exclusives just makes me think less of the guy.
I admire iteration - the idea that you make a basketball game and you keep making it better makes sense to me. Eventually, it'll be as good as it can be, right? When you're out of improvements, you can just update it every year with better graphics and updated rosters.
In another other industry, that mentality makes sense. In the video game industry, it doesn't. Video games are so tied to emotion that you really need to strive to create something new, to induce something novel in your customers.
I think the best example of this was the release of NBA Live 10 vs NBA 2K10. Since 1995, NBA Live was the basketball game. They (in my opinion), crushed the 2K series. For years, it was a really polished game and sales were pretty consistent. They continuously improved on the menus and on the actual basketball games.
Then, something changed around 2010. Suddenly, EVERYONE preferred NBA2K over NBA Live. Here's a good article about that:
In my opinion, EA kept optimizing for local maxima. When 2K10 started experimenting more with simulating the business side of NBA teams with Association Mode, more people were hooked. The metagame became way more fun. And My Player mode was great too.
EDIT: I think there's a lot of parallels between the video game industry and the film industry. The companies that stay on top (Disney, Nintendo, Blizzard, Valve etc.) are fiercely protective of their brand and never release something they think is just okay.
The "people will forget about our mediocre games" mentality is very, very off in industries so tied to emotion.
> The companies that stay on top (Disney, Nintendo, Blizzard, Valve etc.) are fiercely protective of their brand and never release something they think is just okay.
I'd argue this is not true of Disney, who churn out endless zero-budget, cookie-cutter direct-to-video sequels and spinoffs from their big theatrical hits (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Disney_direct-to-vide...) in order to milk them for every cent they can. Disney does this because they're an easy way to squeeze a few more bucks out of the parents of kids who are obsessed with a particular Disney property, not because they are stories that demand to be told.
I think you will find that most of those movies are several years old or more. A while back, new management in Disney changed the company's strategy to focus less on churning out a bunch of direct-to-video sequels to make some easy bucks. Several that were in production at the time and close to release were actually canceled.
There was a period where they were infamous for this, yes, but it was one of the first things Bob Iger & John Lasseter stopped (in ~2007) when they took the top jobs.
I don't know how much I can blame EA as a driving force in the industry, vs. the industry as a whole and the nature of corporations and publicly traded companies.
Games got into a slump for a while because the average AAA title was stuck at a $50 price tag, yet years of inflation and increased production costs were hitting revenue and margin hard. While prices gradually started creeping up, DLC/IAP/microtransactions were really all that was left to them to find new ways of maximizing revenue and shareholder value.
When you are legally mandated to do what is right for shareholders, is it really your fault that you have to optimize for what makes the most money vs. what is right for your customers, especially when the two are not always perfectly aligned?
As an avid gamer I remember way back in the day when we first started getting a whiff of microtransactions becoming a "thing." I knew it was going to be the new reality and fought it tooth and nail. To date I've only made a small handful of microtransactions to support games I truly love that have tried to do the right thing for their users.
That said, they really have brought out the worst in gaming companies and while gaming has finally "hit the masses" with mobile gaming, there has definitely been a drop in the average game's quality in the gold rush.
The reality is though that whales drive gaming, and microtransactions facilitate whales spending massively more on games than the "buy it once" model. So game developers optimize towards that, and unfortunately that tends to skew towards addictive treadmill models that have to make the game less fun to maximize revenue. At least with old school expansions and such, they had to actually make the game awesome and enjoyable to get people to buy more content for it.
A quote I came up with when reading about Satoru Iwata (President and CEO of Nintendo from 2002 to 2015) life which is relevant to this article:
For gaming to succeed as an industry it is necessary to have business men and women who are gamers at heart. Richard Boegli
> When you are legally mandated to do what is right for shareholders
I don't know of any CEO (successfully) legally persecuted for 'not maximizing shareholder value', or having a more 'long term strategy'. The most that can happen afaik is getting fired, which is scary enough.
In the end what I got from the article is that the initial vision of EA largely succeeded: to replicate the music industry and Hollywood with a steady big budget revenue stream. The only problem is the glaring misnomer: the correct term would be the unsavory 'Electronic Mass Media' instead of 'Electronic Arts'.
The sad fact about the shareholder revenue maximization in this industry is that people are happy to be fed dog food, and producers are happy to make tons of money off of it. They shrug off the moral dilemma and say "we're just making what people want!". This situation is reproduced verbatim across mass media -- the largest revenue share is absorbed by content that is simply not good at all. If you look at music, I would say at least 80% of the top revenue generators out there produce music that is objectively worse than centuries old music. Take this for example: [1], how can one not say it is altogether a better, more energetic, more expressive, more moving piece of art than the vast majority of what is produced? Yet people seldom listen to it. Who makes money off of copyright-free Mozart works? Of course, there are exceptions, but the situation overall is an unhappy conjunction of the vast majority of people being satisfied with repetitive industrialized hits, lame jokes with explosions, and the sports game or first person shooter of the year -- while the industry is satisfied with flooding the market and the media with this rehash-able mass produced content. With no good consumer content discovery and reviewing tools, I believe that's a stable status quo for the majority of the population.
That's the role platforms like Steam with indie games (or Spotify with indie music, or Netflix with original productions) can perform: the consumers can seek directly quality, and marketers don't have the ability to distort this too much. With good discovery consumers should be able seek more engrossing experiences and share opinions directly, hopefully without bias towards what's brand new (although I confess that one is hard to get rid of). In this kind of marketplace producers can also target more specific markets, making what they enjoy and find beautiful (and still able to make good revenue off that niche) instead of aiming for generic mass market titles.
Of course, it could simply be that a large fraction of the population irremediably wants to just shut off their brains outside their jobs, but I don't want to believe that, at least not without unmistakable evidence.
The corporate structure is incredibly heavy on management and lacks communication. You could have more managers than you knew and it wasn't unusual to be told to work on something else by someone you'd never met, which put you at odds with your known managers...
When I was working on The Sims 1, Luc Barthelet [1] was the VP who was closely shepherding the project, and he just loves to code his ideas up in Mathematica. (He later became executive director at Wolfram|Alpha.)
He would come over to my desk and show me some cool character animation trick he'd coded up in Mathematica, and suggest I implement it.
He had it reading in the Sims character animation files that I was exporting from 3D Studio Max, blending them together, drawing stick figures, and exporting web pages with animated gifs.
It's quite impressive what he can do with Mathematica, and of course I felt compelled to take some of his suggestions to heart and work on implementing them in the game.
But of course that pissed my direct manager off to no end, who insisted that Luc stop putting things on my plate without going through him first.
I'm not sure how an article about Trip Hawkins could possibly take this tone. Trip's approach to business is legendarily eccentric/arsty/wacky -- for better and for worse. A business mastermind he was not. A man with a clear vision for "Electronic Arts the Game Company" in 1982? No way. For starters, it was not yet called Electronic Arts. And secondarily, it did not author much (if any) game software for years.
For sake of brevity I will quote this gem from the back of the Deluxe Paint II manual, published in 1987:
"About our company: We're an association of electronic artists who share a common goal. We want to fulfill the potential of personal computing. That's a tall order. But with enough imagination and enthusiasm, we think there's a good chance for success. Our products, like this one, are evidence of our intent. If you'd like a product brochure, send $1.00 and a self-addressed, stamped envelope to: Electronic Arts Catalog Request, 1820 Gateway Drive, San Mateo, CA 94404."
That is truly delightful and a great reminder of the tone of the early Valley. It is also a sign of weak management, lack of vision, and in many ways a cry for help coming from a five year-old company.
I know they incorporated under a different name (Amazin' Software), but they changed it in 1983 -- only a year later. I'm not sure they ever released anything before the name change. They came out of the gate in 1983 with Archon, M.U.L.E., Pinball Construction Set and One on One, all of which were not only games but arguably historically significant.
I agree that Hawkins wasn't a great businessman, but I think you're a bit off on both how quickly EA became EA and how invested they were in entertainment software from the start.
Those were published (not written in house) and not even exclusively published -- often USA only. EA shifted its razor focus to games much later, in the process alienating many of their core engineers who were all about the "making tools for Electronic Artists" mission. Pretending this was some grande vision from day one misses the most interesting part of the story, and arguably the exact moment EA "lost their soul." (Hate that phrase, but I'll play it since the author used it.)
In the 8-bit days, EA was all about the games. It wasn't until the arrival of the Amiga and DPaint that they started selling tools. And the internal vision of their toolbuilders didn't match what they were selling to the end users, IMHO. I had more than a few EA c64/Amiga games, and some of their Amiga creative apps. Nobody I knew who was serious about music used DMusic, DVideo was an awkward attempt at solving a problem that the hardware didn't have anywhere near enough oomph to really nail, I can't even remember what the other Deluxe Tools were. But DPaint... DPaint was the king.
As a teenager with a c64, the EA brand meant "really interesting games that were worth buying for, which was good because their copy protection was really tough". And reading the album-styled packages with their moody photographs of game devs trying to look like rockstars along with the vision statement ads about how Games Are Art, and Game-Makers Are Artists? Hell, whether or not Games Are Art is argument still being had today.
Actually this article inspired me to look for some of the old packages on ebay, which actually are a little pricey.
Electronic Arts in their early years really inspired a vision of computers taking creative endeavors to a whole new level. Even their early ads in the computer magazines still give me goosebumps.
They were not a huge company and they had a full on "Creativity" group. Deluxe Paint, Deluxe Music, Deluxe Animation, Deluxe Video, Studio/8 and Studio/32 for Mac...
It wasn't until Sega Genesis that they went whole-hog on games. And even then they were distracted by edutainment software and other stuff.
I agree with what you're saying however I am pointing out that the core premise of the article ('Trip was all about games, he birthed a Game Company') is a little false. Trip was all over the map. For proof of this I typed in their official corporate charter above, as published in 1987. It does not contain the word "game."
EA began in 1982, not 1987. If I google 'c64 electronic arts', the entire first page of results is about games. Same with 'atari 800 electronic arts'; 'apple ii electronic arts' brings up mention of a few of their various 'something construction kit' titles, about half of which were really just games with level editors.
From the wikipedia page on DPaint:
DPaint began as an in-house art development tool called Prism. As author Dan Silva added features to Prism, it was developed as a showcase product to coincide with the Amiga's debut in 1985. [...] Deluxe Paint was first in a series of products from the Electronic Arts Tools group, which included such Amiga programs as Deluxe Music, Deluxe Video, and the Studio series of paint programs for the Macintosh.
I was there. EA optioned one of my games in 1989. Even the Wiki article gets it right: "In the late 1980s, the company began developing games in-house and supported consoles by the early 1990s."
They were a publisher and sort of a crappy one. And the reason EA exists today is because the tools/creativity group helped it weather the wacky games market.
The retro movement largely ignores all the amazing apps that were made back then. Old games are fun to play. Old apps? Not so much. Though you kids should. Now get off my lawn.
Why does no one just put all the words in a row like a book or a newspaper or something anymore? Does anyone actually enjoy this "experience" where you have to wade through a maze of obnoxious pictures and logic puzzles and shit? Is the general assumption that, now that we've made it to the internet we can forget our big boy book-reading skills and go back to pop-up picture books?
Why is there all this ADHD frame-shifty-scripty "chapter-one" and "look-at-this-shitty-cover-page-where-you-can't-scroll-right-or-down-and-spacebar-isn't-taking-me-to-the-words-and-neither-is-reader-mode-so-now-you-get-to-play-"find-the-fucking-button"-which-is-camoflaged-next-to-the-social-media-faggotry-because-surprise-motherfucker-it's-a-slideshow-but-not-really"?
There are a lot of broken articles in the universe, but is this one of them?
This article seems to just have chapter separation and a cover image on each chapter, as well as some video inserts.
Apart from the video, this is pretty much exactly how it would be formatted in a magazine. Do you think magazines are for chumps too, because they use too many pictures?
I think a magazine that intentionally spurns it's own inherent benefits in favor of pretending to be something else, like a movie or a symphony, would be for chumps, yes.
Websites offer infinite scroll, that's their medium, pretending to be a magazine is ridiculous and frustrating.
"this is pretty much exactly how it would be formatted in a magazine."
But the web isn't a magazine. It's like arguing that printing a book on five pound clay cuneiform tablets is a good idea, because that's how the Babylonians would have done it.
I'm saying that because I found pretty much nothing offensive about this layout (compared to actually offensive things like scrolljacking and whatnot), and the only difference between this and an "ideal" webpage would be to have it all on one page.
Otherwise this is just a web page with some embedded images and some larger text (which is pretty common practice on any long-form story website).
For me it took minutes to load, then loaded some broken page with bright pink boxes over bright pink and I Camé here to sete if there was a transcription
I'm on my phone and honestly at first thought the "cover" page was just broken on mobile. When I realized what it actually was, I backed out of it and will likely never go back. I do most of my browsing/reading on a mobile device, and pages like this are just brutal.
Because they're trying to put them in a niftily-illustrated package like a magazine instead.
Now that we've made it to the Internet, even the lowest of budgets can have full color illustrations if it's willing to pay for the artist's time. No worries about minimum print runs before it's affordable.
I mean, oh no, you had to snap out of your click-trance for five seconds to find a button to stop reading?
(I may be biased, I'm an artist who very occasionally takes illustration gigs from online publications.)
I'm fine with the illustrations, the layout is just annoying and counterintuitive. Why would you not just have a long-ass column with some images in it like basically every other article? That's what's awesome about webpages, infinite scroll, maybe some hyperlinked table of contents in a frame to the left, you know 1990s HTML stuff.
> Does anyone actually enjoy this "experience" where you have to wade through a maze of obnoxious pictures and logic puzzles and shit?
Yes. I thought it was beautifully presented and nicely paced, and well worth my time.
Also: a single "Continue" button at the bottom of each page is "logic puzzles and shit"? Three tiny logos hidden in the title bar are "social media faggotry"? Seriously?
According to my internet experience:
1) scroll down - failure, maybe my scroll isn't strong enough to get past some weird header frame thing
2) space bar - failure, maybe it's a side to side thing
3) scroll right - failure
4) scroll left - go back a page, reload
5) look at bottom of page for navigation down - failure, only outside links
6) look to right - failure, no generic slideshow next button
7) scan top of page - immediately censor out what I assume is the menagerie of facespace, tweeter, clinked-in, youporn share links
The initial "READ ARTICLE" button is a tiny link, next to links you generally assume to be worthless, in the wrong part of the page. Yeah, I consider that a logic puzzle, not daunting, but yes.
And yes, any link to "please share me on the facespace and validate me with some twits" comes off as obnoxious begging.
Yes, I despise when someone begs me to force their work into my friends faces. If I like it enough I am perfectly capable of copy-pasting the link myself.
Slurs are generally less effective once they've become mainstream.
Go spend some time on 4chan, and this will become clear--'-fag' is used as a suffix/term-of-art, and basically doesn't even register on the radar anymore as being said with any seriousness.
"Goddamn" and "Christ" were once quite serious business as well.
Of course they're less effective once they've become mainstream. As you mentioned, many slurs gradually lose any hateful meaning, and I'm sure the term "faggotry" might be becoming a bit less offensive over time, but seeing as how it's still used by many people in a hurtful way, it's not unreasonable to expect some people to be upset in situations where it's less clear. If someone disliked a comment using the term on 4chan, I wouldn't assume they disliked it for the term, but this isn't 4chan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight
Starflight's a great game. And we were all having a great time reminiscing over it when I made the mistake of saying "Why not do an update? You all seem to love this game."
Their response was that space games and RPGs are both dead genres. We all parted a few minutes later as I had apparently killed the mood.