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EA: "I struggle with the perception that we're just a bunch of bad guys"
- Thread starter Lant_War
- Start date
Ok so EA isn't the bad guy in this no matter how mad I am that the superior 2K series is no longer made.
John Madden is the bad guy in this, but EA is more than happy to keep the money rolling. It would be nice to see the arcade like games come back out.
yeah i guess this needs to be said, they can critisize them for their scummy business practices but at the end of the day EA is doing what they are supposed to do,making money đź’µ
Companies are NOT your friends, not even videogame ones.NOT your friend.
EA still sucks, others are more charismatic and sensible and make more fun products thats why i buy them instead :3
I feel like EA's problem, outside of predatory monetization, is that just don't even make games I'm interested in anymore. Maybe it's because I only liked their Bioware output in the past, and even that's gone way downhill. The only other games they offer that I'm ever interesting in is what Respawn puts out. Nothing else they make ever catches my eye.
The entire world ignores those other companies and doesn't really give a shit about them either.
The executives at EA have made shitty decisions but I find the overreactions gross. They make money from a hobby. A hobby which they do not have the power to destroy. They employe a lot of people who I'm sure have passion to develop great games.
EA has needed new leadership and has gone from a company I used to buy lots of games from to a company if spend little with anymore but they aren't a threat to humanity. The anger and vitriol is over the top. Just ignore their products until they have executives making better decisions.
EA has needed new leadership and has gone from a company I used to buy lots of games from to a company if spend little with anymore but they aren't a threat to humanity. The anger and vitriol is over the top. Just ignore their products until they have executives making better decisions.
You should've been mad at Sega / Take-Two Interactive for not having the confidence in the product.
realistically, shitty working conditions of someone I don't know effects me less than someone putting out a bad Starwars game.
Seriously. Im just asking for a Remaster. not a remake. This seems like Easy money. They can win a ton of good will with fixing ME1. But...eh
Yes, but there is a big difference between the NFL offering it directly to one company and putting it up for auction to anyone wanting to acquire it.
This ridiculous narrative that EA purchased the license because they wanted to avoid competition has always been incorrect.
Perhaps if Take-Two wasn't so entangled with buying the exclusive third-party rights to the MLBPA at the time, they would have had more flexibility in making a larger play for the NFL license.
No I don't think theirs a difference the NFL/Madden offered exclusive rights,only a fool would turn it down.
EA isn't at fault here.
The auction story is basically a facade for what was going on. The NFL nominally opened a bidding process for the NFL license amongst Sony, 2K, EA, and Midway. But Sony's game seemed to be limping along on inertia more than anything, and Midway was just making Blitz games and had just skipped a year. So, really, we're talking about it being offered to two companies.
2005 was in many ways Peak Madden at least in terms of Madden as a brand. It was huge, and it being so big and dominant is exactly why 2K did the year of $20 titles, because their game was so much smaller that it didn't get anything resembling the attention. And this is important, because a genuine decision to offer an exclusive license that they'd sell to anyone would mean that any company other than EA winning would put an end to Madden. The amount of ill will that would be generated by the news that the NFL shut down Madden would have be something the NFL would have to contend with, and, frankly, I don't think there was any path towards them doing it.
I don't think the NFL ever really intended to just take the biggest pile of money on the table. I think the idea of an auction was a nice public face being put on the NFL asking EA what it'd be worth to them to put an end to their competition, and if the number wasn't what the NFL wanted to see, they'd drop the idea of going exclusive and stick with what they'd been doing.
And I would be surprised if anything with the exclusive MLB deal had been in motion at the time of the NFL thing. The stupidity of the MLB deal has always stuck out to me as 2K trying to lash out to respond and making a bad deal in the process. The weird "third-party exclusivity" thing was expensive and basically only targeted EA's MVP Baseball.
That's what daily/weekly mandatory meetings are for (which you don't need to be physically available for in this day and age)...
A combination of designing your software for the lowest common denominator with no ambition to innovate + an absolute lack of ethical responsibility will get you that title.
I recall SEGA being involved as well, weren't they?
The MLBPA deal was announced something like 35 days after the NFL deal. Maybe I'm just jaded by my job, but things like that normally take more than 35 days to agree to with all of the legal vetting and revisions on both sides. Meh, kind of irrelevant at this point though, right?
At the time of this going down, Sega owned Visual Concepts and Take Two was signed up as the publisher for the VC sports games, with T2 being in the process of buying Visual Concepts from Sega. So Sega probably wasn't in on it except perhaps as some sort of joint interest with T2. The only real other parties that'd made NFL licensed games in the previous few years before that were Microsoft, who had been making NFL Fever but cancelled the series a year earlier, and Acclaim, who had made NFL Quarterback Club but went bankrupt a few months before all this. If someone else was in on the bidding, it probably would have had to be some total outsider without an existing NFL licensed product.
The timeline between the NFL and MLB deals is a little longer than that, it's like 50 days or so(12/14/04 on the EA/NFL deal, 02/05/05 on the 2K/MLB deal). It'd be a short turnaround for sure, but I can't imagine MLB having any reason to seek an exclusive license deal, particularly that weird third-party exclusive, before any of the NFL exclusivity stuff happened.
This was the earliest article I could find: 1/25/05
I swear I heard a rumor Disney was part of the bidding process, but I can't find anything that mentions them, so I don't know if I'm crazy or if someone from EA had mentioned it to me over a decade ago when it was going down.
You're probably right though in that it was definitely all for show. Stand corrected :)