Who here knows anything about games? Electronic Arts

A lot of game companies are feeling the crunch of the economy, I'm not sure about EA specifically but I know Midway may face going bankrupt sometime in the near future as 150 million in debts have been recalled. Several studios have announced they're closing up shop lately as well.

Piracy is definitely a concern, but I think a big issue for a lot of game makers is they've been pushing out crap at full steam for so long and people were buying because money was there. Now that money's tighter, they aren't buying quite as much of the crap. There were very few "great" games for 2008.

Shitty and crappy games are a threat to EA, not piracy.

EA is the devil.

Gamecompanies that have failed to move over to a online subscribtionbases system, or use Govenor to control licences will end up with no profit.

Strictly old fashion client based games is bad business

Example - Blizzard
They produce World of Warcraft and many other epic games.
11+ millions play world of warcraft.. that is 11.000.000 active players paying $21 a month

EA games are mostly shifty

All I know is that they have made some great games, entertainment for me, not addiction. You should look into every aspect and talk to more wise people in this field

The EA Sports series is popular as hell. I wouldn't have thought they'd have money troubles...

I play Battlefield2 daily and love it.

They made it so now you have to log into the play the game. I thought that was interesting.

all companies are doing bad right now

EA consistantly puts out the buggiest shit and in the case of EA Sports never has to upgrade much from year to year due to buying out the rights to things like NCAA and the NFL eliminating what at various points were simply better games. 2k College basketball has been far greater than EA's march madness every year for like 8 years. In the NBA they have sorta gone back and forth dependign on what you want. In the NFL 2k Had a clear lead in the early days but 2k fumbled it bad and eventually had to offer up a brand new game for $20 just to try to stay alive and now my beloved madden has gone stale.

I dont care if EA crashes and burns. They make dumb and bad games and treat their employees as crap then they go out and buy incredible game studios that then start to make bad games when they are moved to the EA business model.

can you guys name companies who put out real killer games?

Since when is WoW 21 dollars a month? It's 15 or something.

Rockstar games, bungie, dice, SCEA, Blizzard, Microsoft game studios, Nintendo, Bethesda Softworks, Konami, Capcom.

EA Sports....Its in the game!!

tiger woods must be the exception to this .. im addicted now.

UBI, EA all those big publishers remind me of the current trends in adult. They steam roll out a bunch of crap hoping something sticks. Hell man I used to buy a lot of games and I barely buy anything anymore, the last one I bought was COD4 and that was a year or so ago. The problem is these big publishers have taken over the market so it's impossible for a small developer to get his games in the stores, unless they play the game with EA, UBI ect..ect..

That means rushing shit out even if it's broken vs publishing a good product.

Need for Speed series is really good. Only been a couple of those I didn't like.

May have been a typo buy it in bulk its 12 standard rate is 15. Its cheaper then crack and more addicting.

EA bought exclusive rights for their NASCAR games which suck BTW and that
closed the doors on the guys that were making truly remarkable NASCAR racing sims like NR2003 by Papyrus

yep .. that was the price

They're kinda like GM, make the same product every year with minimal upgrades then expect everyone to buy the new version every year. Then when the economy slows and nobody is buying the new version (basically the old version) they blame it on "the worst finnancial crisis in a thousand years" instead of looking at thier business plans.

EA makes a killing on the Sims games.

Also the Medal of Honor series did well for them.

Don't like games sorry

as mentioned before, i think EA's biggest problem is putting out crap games

EA sucks
One of the few games I play is Tiger Woods PGA Tour and last years version slowed down so bad after playing for a while and this year they don't release a PC version

A lot of these companies that are now big gaming companies started out like a lot of big adult companies did.. not run like a business, and as they have moved over into a corporate structure and the chickens are coming home to roost, many of them are forced to do or die.

maybe piracy on the pc versions

also many people play multiplayer-based games now that requires a key or validation from a central server. bluray based systems burning a copy is almost the same cost of owning it

Valve!

.......................

Guitar Hero took the world by storm... some of the game manufacturers need to stop trying to cram every possible graphic and effect they can think of into every project, take a step back, and look at what the public demands sometimes...

I don't remember much killer games after 1998, really, they exchanged invention and story with "easy to use" and "graphics".

Guitar hero or Mafia seem to be interesting although I never played any of them.

Bethesda softworks were pretty cool, ID games, 3D realms, Blue bite, I don't know who owns now these companies, well I don't really play much anymore and don't have much overview.

Try to found games as original in their times as :

Doom
Warcraft
Fallout
Albion
Dagerfall
Settlers
Outlaws
NHL 97
Redneck Rampage
etc.

Fun and invention that's what I'm missing.

EA SPORTS used to be great with their sports games till they targeted real sports fans, sports fans are something else than gaming kids.

Piracy is an issue in countries where games are incredibly expensive like Eastern Europe.

I don't think it's that much of an issue in US or western Europe, hell I was so glad I could buy games for my brother when I was in US and it was so cheap.

Interestingly, EA's biggest piracy hit this year was from Spore.
They included draconian DRM - only 3 installs, ever.

In the last 3 months, it's established itself as the year's most pirated game.

Curious eh?

EA is driven by the stockmarket.. i.e. the number one thing at EA is to meet it's quarterly numbers regardless of anything else. The schedule on developing the next version of games is so tight that many end up shipping before they should just to meet the quarterly numbers. It's worse for the PC versions of the games as they don't have to be tested and approved by Sony etc. EA is risk averse because they are so driven by the stock performance. Thus they aren't willing to develop all that many new games internally. This leads to them becoming stagnent.

The EA Sports line is the cash cow for EA. If they put out a game in those series that doesn't perform well, they take a hit.

Consumer spending will impact EA's revenue numbers hugely...

When new platforms come out, EA "bets" on which one will be the money maker and puts their development dollars into more stuff for that platform. I haven't been following what they've done, but if they bet on the PS3 (which I would expect they did) and it hasn't performed to expectations in terms of sales, then they would take a hit as well. I seriously doubt they bet on the Wii and are probably hurting because of that.. They're also not good at developing games for multiple platforms at the same time in which those games have features specific to the platform (as would be the requirement for Wii games). i.e. they use the same core code on all platforms to keep the development costs down.

Piracy IS an issue they are activly fighting.. In fact they are part of a group that includes Microcrap etc. and they work with authorities in Japan, China etc. to get lots of places shut down. But we all know they just pop up somewhere else.

EAs growth for a number of years was fueled by purchasing smaller companies with successful games and then milking it until it's dead (typically)... eg: Westwood.. Bullfrog... Origin Systems (anyone remember Ultima, Privateer, Wing Commander) etc. etc. etc. There are a lot fewer small companies out there these days due to the cost of development skyrocketing. In addition, it's much harder for small startups to get shelf space in Wallmart etc. Thus, there's no one for EA to buy in order to fuel growth and give them more games to "milk"