
How EA Lost Its Soul - mikeryan52
http://www.polygon.com/a/how-ea-lost-its-soul
======
varelse
I consulted for a couple weeks at EA about 10 years ago. On one of those days,
I got 2 VPs and a director into a half-hour talk in a break area about how
much they loved the game Starflight:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight)

Starflight's a great game. And we were all having a great time reminiscing
over it when I made the mistake of saying "Why not do an update? You all seem
to love this game."

Their response was that space games and RPGs are both dead genres. We all
parted a few minutes later as I had apparently killed the mood.

~~~
TillE
It's really funny how many "dead" genres have been revived thanks mainly to
Steam and Kickstarter. Or how Minecraft would have certainly been laughed out
of the room by any major publisher.

Most of these games will not make obscene profits. But it should be really
clear by now that it makes sense to invest in and sell a variety of games, not
just mass-appeal action games.

~~~
twiceaday
Just because some genres were revived doesn't mean you can predict which
genres to dump money into. Also, what some consider revived others consider
still dead.

------
Sleaker
I'm not seeing where EA lost it's soul simply because it made the correct
business decision to not go with the CEOs idea of 3DO. It was a bad decision
especially given Sony's upcoming entry. The fact that the then-CEO decided to
make an offshoot company instead of miring EA with trying to go into the
hardware field was probably one of the better ones to keep EA functioning
well. However, despite EA not backing their CEO's offshoot company, I don't
see how that signifies that they lost their soul. I think people would
attribute it more to the move to yearly releases, consuming studios for their
IPs, etc. Rather than choosing to not promote a specific piece of hardware.
Like I really want to like 3DO and it's open spec ideas, but holding a grudge
over not getting exclusives just makes me think less of the guy.

------
temuze
I admire iteration - the idea that you make a basketball game and you keep
making it better makes sense to me. Eventually, it'll be as good as it can be,
right? When you're out of improvements, you can just update it every year with
better graphics and updated rosters.

In another other industry, that mentality makes sense. In the video game
industry, it doesn't. Video games are so tied to emotion that you really need
to strive to create something new, to induce something novel in your
customers.

I think the best example of this was the release of NBA Live 10 vs NBA 2K10.
Since 1995, NBA Live was _the_ basketball game. They (in my opinion), crushed
the 2K series. For years, it was a really polished game and sales were pretty
consistent. They continuously improved on the menus and on the actual
basketball games.

Then, something changed around 2010. Suddenly, EVERYONE preferred NBA2K over
NBA Live. Here's a good article about that:

[http://bleacherreport.com/articles/416482-nba-live-10-or-
nba...](http://bleacherreport.com/articles/416482-nba-live-10-or-nba-2k10)

In my opinion, EA kept optimizing for local maxima. When 2K10 started
experimenting more with simulating the business side of NBA teams with
Association Mode, more people were hooked. The metagame became way more fun.
And My Player mode was great too.

EDIT: I think there's a lot of parallels between the video game industry and
the film industry. The companies that stay on top (Disney, Nintendo, Blizzard,
Valve etc.) are fiercely protective of their brand and never release something
they think is just okay.

The "people will forget about our mediocre games" mentality is very, very off
in industries so tied to emotion.

~~~
smacktoward
_> The companies that stay on top (Disney, Nintendo, Blizzard, Valve etc.) are
fiercely protective of their brand and never release something they think is
just okay._

I'd argue this is not true of Disney, who churn out endless zero-budget,
cookie-cutter direct-to-video sequels and spinoffs from their big theatrical
hits (see: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Disney_direct-to-
vide...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Disney_direct-to-
video_animated_films)) in order to milk them for every cent they can. Disney
does this because they're an easy way to squeeze a few more bucks out of the
parents of kids who are obsessed with a particular Disney property, not
because they are stories that demand to be told.

~~~
Aqwis
I think you will find that most of those movies are several years old or more.
A while back, new management in Disney changed the company's strategy to focus
less on churning out a bunch of direct-to-video sequels to make some easy
bucks. Several that were in production at the time and close to release were
actually canceled.

~~~
smacktoward
That's good to hear! Maybe there's hope for them yet.

------
shostack
I don't know how much I can blame EA as a driving force in the industry, vs.
the industry as a whole and the nature of corporations and publicly traded
companies.

Games got into a slump for a while because the average AAA title was stuck at
a $50 price tag, yet years of inflation and increased production costs were
hitting revenue and margin hard. While prices gradually started creeping up,
DLC/IAP/microtransactions were really all that was left to them to find new
ways of maximizing revenue and shareholder value.

When you are legally mandated to do what is right for shareholders, is it
really _your_ fault that you have to optimize for what makes the most money
vs. what is right for your customers, especially when the two are not always
perfectly aligned?

As an avid gamer I remember way back in the day when we first started getting
a whiff of microtransactions becoming a "thing." I knew it was going to be the
new reality and fought it tooth and nail. To date I've only made a small
handful of microtransactions to support games I truly love that have tried to
do the right thing for their users.

That said, they really have brought out the worst in gaming companies and
while gaming has finally "hit the masses" with mobile gaming, there has
definitely been a drop in the average game's quality in the gold rush.

The reality is though that whales drive gaming, and microtransactions
facilitate whales spending massively more on games than the "buy it once"
model. So game developers optimize towards that, and unfortunately that tends
to skew towards addictive treadmill models that have to make the game _less
fun_ to maximize revenue. At least with old school expansions and such, they
had to actually make the game awesome and enjoyable to get people to buy more
content for it.

~~~
richardboegli
A quote I came up with when reading about Satoru Iwata (President and CEO of
Nintendo from 2002 to 2015) life which is relevant to this article: For gaming
to succeed as an industry it is necessary to have business men and women who
are gamers at heart. Richard Boegli

------
jefe78
Working there a while ago was quite interesting.

The corporate structure is incredibly heavy on management and lacks
communication. You could have more managers than you knew and it wasn't
unusual to be told to work on something else by someone you'd never met, which
put you at odds with your known managers...

~~~
DonHopkins
VPs who program can be very disruptive!

When I was working on The Sims 1, Luc Barthelet [1] was the VP who was closely
shepherding the project, and he just loves to code his ideas up in
Mathematica. (He later became executive director at Wolfram|Alpha.)

He would come over to my desk and show me some cool character animation trick
he'd coded up in Mathematica, and suggest I implement it.

He had it reading in the Sims character animation files that I was exporting
from 3D Studio Max, blending them together, drawing stick figures, and
exporting web pages with animated gifs.

It's quite impressive what he can do with Mathematica, and of course I felt
compelled to take some of his suggestions to heart and work on implementing
them in the game.

But of course that pissed my direct manager off to no end, who insisted that
Luc stop putting things on my plate without going through him first.

Luc's quite an animated character himself!

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc_Barthelet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc_Barthelet)

------
tacos
I'm not sure how an article about Trip Hawkins could possibly take this tone.
Trip's approach to business is legendarily eccentric/arsty/wacky -- for better
and for worse. A business mastermind he was not. A man with a clear vision for
"Electronic Arts the Game Company" in 1982? No way. For starters, it was not
yet called Electronic Arts. And secondarily, it did not author much (if any)
game software for years.

For sake of brevity I will quote this gem from the back of the Deluxe Paint II
manual, published in 1987:

"About our company: We're an association of electronic artists who share a
common goal. We want to fulfill the potential of personal computing. That's a
tall order. But with enough imagination and enthusiasm, we think there's a
good chance for success. Our products, like this one, are evidence of our
intent. If you'd like a product brochure, send $1.00 and a self-addressed,
stamped envelope to: Electronic Arts Catalog Request, 1820 Gateway Drive, San
Mateo, CA 94404."

That is truly delightful and a great reminder of the tone of the early Valley.
It is also a sign of weak management, lack of vision, and in many ways a cry
for help coming from a five year-old company.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
I know they incorporated under a different name (Amazin' Software), but they
changed it in 1983 -- only a year later. I'm not sure they ever released
anything before the name change. They came out of the gate in 1983 with
Archon, M.U.L.E., Pinball Construction Set and One on One, all of which were
not only games but arguably historically significant.

I agree that Hawkins wasn't a great businessman, but I think you're a bit off
on both how quickly EA became EA and how invested they were in entertainment
software from the start.

~~~
tacos
Those were published (not written in house) and not even exclusively published
-- often USA only. EA shifted its razor focus to games much later, in the
process alienating many of their core engineers who were all about the "making
tools for Electronic Artists" mission. Pretending this was some grande vision
from day one misses the most interesting part of the story, and arguably the
exact moment EA "lost their soul." (Hate that phrase, but I'll play it since
the author used it.)

~~~
egypturnash
In the 8-bit days, EA was all about the games. It wasn't until the arrival of
the Amiga and DPaint that they started selling tools. And the internal vision
of their toolbuilders didn't match what they were selling to the end users,
IMHO. I had more than a few EA c64/Amiga games, and some of their Amiga
creative apps. Nobody I knew who was serious about music used DMusic, DVideo
was an awkward attempt at solving a problem that the hardware didn't have
anywhere near enough oomph to really nail, I can't even remember what the
other Deluxe Tools were. But DPaint... DPaint was the king.

As a teenager with a c64, the EA brand meant "really interesting games that
were worth buying for, which was good because their copy protection was really
tough". And reading the album-styled packages with their moody photographs of
game devs trying to look like rockstars along with the vision statement ads
about how Games Are Art, and Game-Makers Are Artists? Hell, whether or not
Games Are Art is argument still being had today.

~~~
tacos
They were not a huge company and they had a full on "Creativity" group. Deluxe
Paint, Deluxe Music, Deluxe Animation, Deluxe Video, Studio/8 and Studio/32
for Mac...

It wasn't until Sega Genesis that they went whole-hog on games. And even then
they were distracted by edutainment software and other stuff.

I agree with what you're saying however I am pointing out that the core
premise of the article ('Trip was all about games, he birthed a Game Company')
is a little false. Trip was all over the map. For proof of this I typed in
their official corporate charter above, as published in 1987. It does not
contain the word "game."

~~~
egypturnash
EA began in 1982, not 1987. If I google 'c64 electronic arts', the entire
first page of results is about games. Same with 'atari 800 electronic arts';
'apple ii electronic arts' brings up mention of a few of their various
'something construction kit' titles, about half of which were really just
games with level editors.

From the wikipedia page on DPaint: DPaint began as an in-house art development
tool called Prism. As author Dan Silva added features to Prism, it was
developed as a showcase product to coincide with the Amiga's debut in 1985.
[...] Deluxe Paint was first in a series of products from the Electronic Arts
Tools group, which included such Amiga programs as Deluxe Music, Deluxe Video,
and the Studio series of paint programs for the Macintosh.

~~~
tacos
I was there. EA optioned one of my games in 1989. Even the Wiki article gets
it right: "In the late 1980s, the company began developing games in-house and
supported consoles by the early 1990s."

They were a publisher and sort of a crappy one. And the reason EA exists today
is because the tools/creativity group helped it weather the wacky games
market.

The retro movement largely ignores all the amazing apps that were made back
then. Old games are fun to play. Old apps? Not so much. Though you kids
should. Now get off my lawn.

------
DonHopkins
How many other people were never hired by EA, but resigned from EA?

(That is, you were hired by a company that EA bought, then you resigned from
EA later. Getting fired counts too! ;)

------
tvawnz
Why does no one just put all the words in a row like a book or a newspaper or
something anymore? Does anyone actually enjoy this "experience" where you have
to wade through a maze of obnoxious pictures and logic puzzles and shit? Is
the general assumption that, now that we've made it to the internet we can
forget our big boy book-reading skills and go back to pop-up picture books?

Why is there all this ADHD frame-shifty-scripty "chapter-one" and "look-at-
this-shitty-cover-page-where-you-can't-scroll-right-or-down-and-spacebar-
isn't-taking-me-to-the-words-and-neither-is-reader-mode-so-now-you-get-to-
play-"find-the-fucking-button"-which-is-camoflaged-next-to-the-social-media-
faggotry-because-surprise-motherfucker-it's-a-slideshow-but-not-really"?

~~~
rtpg
There are a lot of broken articles in the universe, but is this one of them?

This article seems to just have chapter separation and a cover image on each
chapter, as well as some video inserts.

Apart from the video, this is pretty much exactly how it would be formatted in
a magazine. Do you think magazines are for chumps too, because they use too
many pictures?

~~~
Turing_Machine
"this is pretty much exactly how it would be formatted in a magazine."

But the web _isn 't_ a magazine. It's like arguing that printing a book on
five pound clay cuneiform tablets is a good idea, because that's how the
Babylonians would have done it.

~~~
rtpg
I'm saying that because I found pretty much nothing offensive about this
layout (compared to actually offensive things like scrolljacking and whatnot),
and the only difference between this and an "ideal" webpage would be to have
it all on one page.

Otherwise this is just a web page with some embedded images and some larger
text (which is pretty common practice on any long-form story website).

