Visceral Games shut down by EA, Amy Hennig's Star Wars game cancelled - LOL new game cancelled too

[GreyWardens Rock]

Maybe some of them apply but a lot of them don't. Maxis was killed because EA forced the bullshit they did on SimCity (I doubt anyone forgot, but it was always online and a fuckton of people couldn't play the game, even singleplayer and the game was far inferior to older SimCity titles with forced online shit no one asked for) and as a result of EA's decisions they killed Maxis due to poor sales. What about Pandemic? Both Mercenaries 1 and 2 were good games, and most of their games were well received with Mercenaries 3 looking extremely good from the leaked gameplay.

And don't forget Saboteur, as much as I hate "Nazis are evil, worship your Allied saviors" bullshit propaganda, it was fun. Better than notMafia 2, L.A. Bore or most GTAs anyway.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

 

[Roguey]

So Mass Effect Andromeda is the last big story-focused single-player game from EA?

I'm curious what's going on with the next Dragon Age and the departure of Mike Laidlaw has something to do with this trend.

Pretty sure Andromeda had both multiplayer and open-world. It was following the marketing trends.

 

[DeepOcean]

Really would love all those shitty publishers going to the multiplayer only route, "Whot? Not want to be griefed by some 13 year old little asshole sociopath? Well... It serves you right for supporting decline." With the growth of steam, we don't need those big publishers anymore.

 

[Alienman]

I loved the Dead Space franchise.
First EA removes the developers to other projects and then they killed them off! Fuck you EA!
I'm joining the boycott bandwagon, they won't see my money again...

They have killed three nice (at least to me) Sci-Fi franchises. Dead Space as you said, Kotor and recently Mass Effect

 

[GreyWardens Rock]

They have killed three nice (at least to me) Sci-Fi franchises. Dead Space as you said, Kotor and recently Mass Effect

The way they bastardised Kotor with that mmo, and Mass Effect and Dead Space right after the first titles, I think they're better off dead, provided they stay that way.

 

[Lyric Suite]

I see EA still got it:

 

[Grauken]

This story I've never heard before, how EA tried to take over Project Cars dev Slightly Mad Studios
https://gamerant.com/project-cars-ea-kill-studio/

Can't decide whether EA is neutral or chaotic evil

 

[Unkillable Cat]

As shitty as EA is, most of these studios were bought when they were well on the way to decline anyway

And who do you think put them there?

You named the example of EA screwing over Origin with the sole purpose of acquiring them at a later date. There are HUNDREDS more examples out there, with dozens of them involving EA.

 

[Grauken]

Do you have reading comprehension problems? I said no such thing. Garriott himself has said he sold to EA because of a changing market situation (https://gamerant.com/project-cars-ea-kill-studio/), not because of anything EA did, and a lot of the problems with U9 were because Garriott himself had declined af at that point already.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I don't want to defend publishers much, most of the EA or Ubisofts I wish cancer on as much as everybody else, but honestly, Origin of for example was well on the way to decline and its failures just as much internal as forced by EA

Keep in mind (and this is where your accusation of reading comprehension comes in) that I'm referring to the time before EA bought Origin Systems.

I can't find the specific post here on the Codex, but there's a story here somewhere about how EA screwed over Origin in those days. Something about returning unsold copies back to Origin to claim they didn't meet a quota or something similar. IIRC this cost Origin hundreds of thousands of dollars.

 

[Grauken]

I've never heard about that, but on the other hand EA is certainly not above these methods.

But for me, U7 showed the first signs of decline, great sim/adv but terrible RPG. This wasn't EA's doing, that was all on Garriott, and a lot if his later inclinations show that Origin would have gone in a shitty direction anyway, with or without EA. That might not be true for all the studios EA acquired, but to say that all the studious would have flourished without EA is ludicrous

 

[Fowyr]

Let's wait and see.

 

[Space Satan]

>single player games don't fit in today's market

 

[vonAchdorf]

>single player games don't fit in today's market

Only 2 of these move enough copies to be of interest for EA.

 

[Neanderthal]

I don't want to defend publishers much, most of the EA or Ubisofts I wish cancer on as much as everybody else, but honestly, Origin of for example was well on the way to decline and its failures just as much internal as forced by EA

Keep in mind (and this is where your accusation of reading comprehension comes in) that I'm referring to the time before EA bought Origin Systems.

I can't find the specific post here on the Codex, but there's a story here somewhere about how EA screwed over Origin in those days. Something about returning unsold copies back to Origin to claim they didn't meet a quota or something similar. IIRC this cost Origin hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Think that were U5.

 

[Drakron]

I can't find the specific post here on the Codex, but there's a story here somewhere about how EA screwed over Origin in those days.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/issues/issue_14/87-The-Conquest-of-Origin

Nope, what happened was Origin sold itself to EA for $35 million in 1992 and for the next decade EA slowly dismantled the company ... EA did published some Origin games (such as Ultima 1 for DOS) but Origin slefpublished until they were brought by EA.

People in Origin got screwed over, I recall reading WC IV was set by EA for Chris Roberts to leave the company were they even withhold the team Christmas bonus in order to push him out, this been pretty much EA MO but this is likely because of how EA functions as a very office politics large corporation.

Think that were U5.

Nope, that was in 1988 and published by Origin itself ... EA retained Origin publishing label even after they brought them for a couple of years but Origin was still independent in 88.

 

[J1M]

Looks like Amy didn't suck enough cocks and her studio was shut down so Jade Raymond and Kim Swift could finish the game. Now, I'm not saying those two are talent-less whores, but we can be sure they won't run into the same problem that Amy did.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/issues/issue_14/87-The-Conquest-of-Origin

Thanks for that link, but it's NOT the article I'm looking for, though the start of it, why Origin hates Trip Hawkins, is what I was referring to.

That is a precursor to everything else that's in the article, and the point I was trying to make: EA (and other big publishers like Zenimax/Bethesda) will go out of their way to screw over smaller studios with the prospect of either destroying them, or acquiring them into their works.

And this has been going on for 30 years now... and yet people don't seem to get the picture. At the very least the gamers seem completely clueless.

 

[Roguey]

Only 2 of these move enough copies to be of interest for EA.

D:OS 2 isn't purely single player either.

The key to understanding EA is that they want their triple-As to move 10+ million units. Incredibly difficult to do that with a linear single player game.

 

[Infinitron]

The key to understanding EA is that they want their triple-As to move 10+ million units. Incredibly difficult to do that with a linear single player game.

Which brings us to the curious case of Call of Duty, a 20m+ selling multiplayer franchise that just can't seem to shake its linear single player campaigns. This recent article at PC Gamer theorizes about the lesson EA learned from that: http://www.pcgamer.com/the-history-of-the-first-person-shooter/

While the series weathered this crisis—thanks largely to Treyarch’s pop-savvy, hallucinogen-crazed Black Ops subfranchise—Activision and other publishers also had to manage a problem of budget versus expectation. Scripted corridor campaigns in the Half-Life vein were proving increasingly expensive, thanks largely to the cost of HD art assets, and telemetry showed that players spent the bulk of their time in multiplayer. However, attempts to remove singleplayer from the package led to an outcry. Among the teams that struggled with this problem was Respawn. The EA-published debut Titanfall pioneered the concept of campaign multiplayer, with narrative elements, such as picture-in-picture cinematics, dropped into rounds of team deathmatches. The game was enthusiastically received—a mixture of towering mech combat and nimble parkour duelling, it restored something of Quake and Unreal Tournament’s agility to a genre that had become bogged down in cover combat. Its audience tailed off swiftly, however—many first-person shooter enthusiasts found the mechs-and-pilots premise to be more of a novelty than a game-changing fixture, though the larger problem was perhaps that, on consoles, Titanfall was exclusive to the Xbox brand.

Didn't work though!

 

[Zenith]

What's the screengrab's context, anyway? What site / what criteria? Even if scores weren't meaningless already, that picture would be.

 

[Tom Selleck]

whocares.gif

 

[Deflowerer]

Visceral was an EA studio anyway.

Nothing of value was lost though, who the fuck cares about popamole Star Wars games at this point.

 

[ColonelTeacup]

10 000 hours in MSpaint.