EA is in a bad spot in the eyes of most gamers. Both hardcore and casual fans have become fatigued by their franchises and their greed. But is 2018 the year they can turn it around?
To say that EA has a bad image with players right now would be an understatement. After a year where they ruined franchises like Need for Speed, Star Wars: Battlefront, and Mass Effect, franchises that should be able to sell themselves, and yet underperformed in the market of what was otherwise a stellar year for many other publishers and developers. EA has garnered a lot of criticism over the past several years, and almost every piece of it is deserved, and with their image amongst gamers in a decline, many people might be wondering if EA can bounce back from their blunders in 2018. The answer to that is a strong maybe, but only if they can do a couple of key things in the next year.
Rockstar has launched an official marketplace for "every server and every player" to buy mods: Cfx Marketplace.
I wonder how much of this isn't just taken work of others who have modded for free.
Edit: Also, great way for R* to take popular ideas and build them into GTAVI based on demand.
What I see happening here is, R* is going to ban mods in GTA6 UNLESS you buy them from the marketplace and R* then gets a cut of that sale.
Ah, perfect timing with them taking down the Bully online fan mod. Greedy a$$ company.
Yep, right there with you. I'll happily donate to a mod creator if it looks really cool, or if I enjoy it. But expecting payment up front? Nope, not touching it.
I'm not entirely sure how to read this, as it doesn't seem exactly like an exact parallel to Bethesda's paid mods shenanigans.
Rather than single player stuff, this appears to be aimed solely on Cfx Servers. From what I've gleaned, apparently Rockstar bought the Cfx mod team several years ago, coming a few years after weird contentions led them to ban a few of their members. Ultimately, the question is if they plan to keep this contained to only online/servers.
I have to guess to a degree yes. It'd be pretty hard to "force" paid mods for single player when modding files locally on your own machine, but much easier for servers they'll control. So perhaps this is their soft launch ahead of GTA6 online and they'll clamp down more tightly on non-official servers going forward? Ever since they've become a 1 or 2 property studio, I haven't really cared much for Rockstar stuff, so I'm not entirely up on everything surrounding this. Sounds like it has the potential to be problematic further down the line, but right now fairly easy to ignore...I think lol.
Former CEO describes lawsuit filed by Swedish pension fund as a "collateral attack" on Activision Blizzard.
Kotick Made $155 million from MS in the buyout, the little b*tch needs to stop whining. Thanks to this Microslop deal and massive industry consolidation thousands upon thousands of devs and other workers lost their livelihoods. This greedy piggie pervert needs shut up and f-off.
BioWare's multiplayer shooter Anthem was terminated this week because EA no longer wanted to maintain servers for people to play the game on, and without them, no one can play the game. But the former executive producer of Anthem has revealed that BioWare had technology working, close to the game's release, that would enable us to host our own servers to play the game on.
I'd be fine just playing it as a localhost and dumb as rocks AI bots. Just give me the choice.
They can't and they won't. They will always be a rotten company. F*** EA.
Easy. Make decent games and give players a full experience without the introduction of microtransactions unless they are just cosmetic. No more pay to win or grinding, that has to go first and foremost. If dlc is coming then make it something extra like Horizon or Witcher III, not something that was held back.
With sports games like Madden which only get marginal updates per year, charge less. Make them $40 not $60.
EA will never learn. I can say the same thing to Activision. They are both disgusting.
You are giving them far too much credit by making it sound like this happened all at once. In my opinion, EA has been on a downward spiral since, at least, 2005.
This cycle of a topic about making them better is probably eleven years old now, so welcome to the thunderdome.
EA needs to give more creative freedom to their developers, stop marginalizing players, and start thinking with their gut as opposed to the checkbook.
Not sure about anyone else these days, but if these three things were to happen I would consider coming back.
Clearly, we've all got an idea about what Electronic "Arts" should do, whether it is going bankrupt or just making finished products, but they aren't going to do anything until we stop buying and start speaking up.
The community may be mainstream now, but our numbers of the ones who care are larger. You want a better company? Prove it.
Let's see here. We have about 35 years of EA to look back on.
They were a genuinely good and well likely game developer and publisher for about 10 of those years, as they were trying to build themselves up. That leaves about 25 years now, of them getting progressively worse, and worse, and worse.
So, I'm inclined to say, no, they will not "Win Back Gamers in 2018", nor any other year in the foreseeable future. I also genuinely hope to see this company tank and be driven straight into the dirt. Yes, sounds harsh, no more harsh than what EA continues to do to people's wallets by exploiting them in a manner that really, should be illegal. This is the world we live in though.