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.
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.