EA SPORTS and the PC

Peter Moore, President of EA SPORTS talks about EA's sports games and the PC in his official blog. He takes a stab at addressing the reasons why many of the EA SPORTS franchises won't be available on the PC this year.

The reasons for EA SPORTS skipping the PC - at least this year - are many, but it seems to us that Mr. Moore is skipping the real reason why PC gamers are skipping EA SPORTS titles... and people are calling him out on that in the comments section of his blog.

But first, Mr. Moore's take on the situation.

The PC as a platform for authentic, fully-licensed, simulation sports games has declined radically in the past three years as the next generation consoles, with their high definition graphics and 5.1 sound capabilities have attracted millions of consumers to eschew the "lean in" PC sports gaming experience for the "lean back" full room console experience.The business model for PC games is evolving from packaged goods to a download model. The on-line experience is paramount, and hundreds of companies in this space are experimenting with direct-to-consumer revenue models, incorporating premium downloadable content, sponsored downloads, micro-transactions, subscriptions and massive tournament play.Piracy is an issue. Sorry, I know many of you disagree with me on this, but the numbers don't lie. Companies spend millions developing content, and deserve to see a return on investment for their risk. The employees developing the game design, writing code and creating art deserve to get paid for their work. Period.Businesses have to make hard trade offs for where to invest for the best return, thus creating capital to make even more games. They have to take expensive risks in our hits and misses industry with new intellectual property to keep the games available to gamers fresh, innovative and pushing the technical boundaries of the hardware platforms.In order to make fundamental shifts in an ecosystem, you sometimes have to hit the reset button. That's what we have done this year at EA SPORTS as regards some of our franchises on the PC. That does not mean that we aren't coming back next year with new, innovative, maybe even less-expensive ways to play all of our franchises on the PC, but for right now we are assessing all of the options open to us to shift the current paradigm for our games on this platform.

The last point indicates that the retreat from the PC is most likely temporary, and in a way I agree with the ultimate conclusion - sometimes you need to "reboot" the assembly line that keeps pushing out the same stuff when nobody is buying it any more.

Go On, Keep Blaming Everyone Except EA

But let's get to the rest of Mr. Moore's points. Players have moved over to the consoles - can't argue with that - but I disagree with the assessment that it's all about the couch factor. Yes, players like the shiny HD visuals offered by the next generation consoles, but it's all EA's fault if the PC versions they push out are not offering what players expect. The consoles pale in comparison to what a gaming PC can push out if you choose to exploit that power. EA does not.

Instead EA SPORTS has kept churning crappy PS2 ports for the past few years on the PC - of course the players have opted to buy the games on the XBox 360 and PS3, when the PC version looks the same as it looked three or four years ago, with "shiny" PS2-ported 800x600 visual elements, crippled online play and unplayable control schemes (unless you plug in a game pad).

It's also true that PC gaming is moving toward download services. Only the "not invented here" syndrome is preventing EA from putting all their PC stuff up on Steam and making a big dent to piracy at the same time. EA Link indicates that EA "gets it" in principle, but the practical implementation falls short.

See a pattern forming? EA might have a clue, but their implementation is consistently falling short of expectations.

Beyond technical solutions such as Steam, the other way to curb piracy is to actually offer good value for money - enticing players to give you money in exchange of something that is perceived to offer something in return. EA has perfected the art of milking the consumer dry with yearly "updates" at full price. The lack of after-launch support and built-in kill switch in the online play support ensures you have to keep buying the latest version while EA keeps killing of the older versions. Then EA feigns surprise when the players opt out of this madness and the latest cosmetic update no longer sells. That's what happens when clueless beancounters get to make big decisions.

Look at Blizzard and Valve. They actually support what they put out, and suddenly their games from the last century (Diablo II) bounce back to the sales charts - because you know that the game works, and as long as you can find someone to play with online, you can do so.

The only reason why EA's sports titles have kept selling at least some copies has been the lack of competition due to EA's licensing stranglehold. They have a monopoly, and monopolists tend to get lazy.

On the subject of investing money to push technical boundaries... I'm not even going to go there, simply because EA has not been doing that on the PC. Ever. All they have done is kept churning out same crap, developed to the lowest common denominator - both in content and technology. As an example, for many years the NHL series has been all about exploiting - "Find the way to exploit the AI in this year's game, then skate for victory". EA's solution to a broken game? Buy the next year's version! How about actually developing the AI over several years and actually patching the flaws so those who bought this year's game become happy customers?

For the past few years EA has been perfecting their complete disrespect towards the community that embraces any given title - and they have a track record to prove it. EA is the company who canned Ultima Online 2 because "gasp, it might compete with Ultima Online". EA is the company who published, then immediately pulled the plug on Earth & Beyond when they figured out that people were not buying a half-finished crap game in the numbers they expected. EA is the company that completely blundered the license to print infinite money that is "The Sims Online". EA is the company that let Battlefield 2 rot with known bugs that went unaddressed for ages even as fairly faithful playerbase kept playing the buggy game in huge numbers.

Maybe it's for the better that they are not pushing their crappy console ports of their sports titles on the PC as much as they used to. Now all we need is some fresh competition... how about giving up exclusivity on the big sports licenses for the PC - it's not like you seem to be doing any good with them.

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