When battlefront 2 was at the peak of the loot box controversy it was on the international news media..... that's special for a video game.
But a couple of big things are working together here.
For one thing reality is all the games EA cancelled were one's that didn't originally start as Star Wars game as far as I can tell, and that kind of development hell is a big problem. Because if you take too long developing a game it's going to be stagnant technologically by the time it comes out, and that makes it much harder to sell unless it's totally killer on store and gameplay. Not many games manage that. EA might be greedy, but it's also got the sense to avoid the sunk cost fallacy and abandon ship when needed. This is why EA isn't bankrupt and a million other companies went bankrupt and got bought out by EA. They wouldn't have killed these games if they were going somewhere good. Games are cancelled all the damn time in the industry. The biggest publishers just get more attention.
Isn't for nothing that while in ~2000 about 100 different AAA quality studios existed in the world now its more like 15. The money involved is just too vast now.
Lets be realistic here, Disney trying to make lots of Star Wars movies quickly has blown up in there face. The fiscal loss was limited, but nobody knows what it will mean long term (I think not much though, but profit won't grow either)
What's more EA got this license in the middle of it's great pivot towards making 100% of it's games on the Frostbite engine, and that pivot has been very troublesome for them. Frostbite isn't easy to use and originally was only setup for FPS games. Mass Effect was completely killed by the difficulty of this transition and it's still affecting other things. As a strategy this wasn't a bad move by EA, but it was never going to be easy.
Also, EA has to pay license fees on every game, not just for the rights to the IP in general, such fees usually involve a large minimal payment, and that makes it implausible that they will spam a really large numbers of games. Given the need to pay minimal fees, the bias for them is in favor of scarcity, total revenue per year is variable but in the end finite. Disney is fine with this because the whole reason Disney went this way was to offload risk, all risk is on EA.
That said the stock market is certainly abash with concerns that EA as a whole is loosing it's edge in development terms, but the reality is the only thing actually undercutting it really just seems to be mobile gaming in general, and whatever you can say about EA, the mobile market is so much damn worse on average. I imagine though the insane success of Apex Legends might be changing that tune. 10 million unique players in 72 hours, and it's crushing Fortnite on Twitch by 3:1 viewership numbers after Fortnite was the crown of Twitch for I dunno, two years?
The Romulan Republic wrote: 2019-01-28 04:40pm
I'm planning on buying a new computer soon, and was thinking of finally buying the Battlefront games at the same time.
I think I will pass, now, to demonstrate my displeasure with EA.
You might want to try battlefront 2 while it still has a decent player base, I doubt anyone is left playing Battlefront 1. Flawed and screwed up as its loot box crap was, it looks amazing, like Star Wars for real if you can play in 4K, the droids are hilarious and frankly the way things are going we might not get another Star Wars game with this kind of graphical fidelity for a decade. While EA basically nerfed the live service post launch they did still make the Clone Wars heroes and Geonosis map everyone asked for, and sure didn't skimp on the original game. That might well never happen again, the Clone Wars are popular as an era with a certain kind of fan, but long term they aren't going to have the pull the original trilogy heroes have or ever increasing numbers of new Disney Era characters and settings.
Patroklos wrote: 2019-01-25 11:01am
Its been 20 years since the last X-wing title. Probably a very easy game to make given most of its environments are empty space. The SW flight sim games were always blockbusters, not sure why nobody has grabbed that free cash.
Not really, even by completely different industry standards and development costs then existed then as now. When most of those X-wing games were made 10 million dollars was incredibly expensive for a video game and the flight sim game market was bigger in general. According to wikipedia the last X-wing game, Alliance, sold under 150,000 copies in the US alone. So probably not a vastly higher total in the world. That's a successful indie game today, but it means nothing to a company like EA and could only justify a very small developmental budget and something like generation before last graphics. But the X-wing games had very good graphics for their time.
That's why we used to get such vast ranges of niche games. They were very cheap to make, and buyers didn't expect better because hardware people owned couldn't display better. Today yeah sure you can still make cheap games, but the cost of creating graphically advanced content is very high.
Battlefront 2 actually has pure ship to ship combat in space though, as well as flying during the Galactic Assault mode that has ground fighting. Battlefront 1 didn't.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
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