DBWI: What if Electronic Arts didn't go bankrupt

[Matti23]

We all know the story of how Electronic Arts went bankrupt. How might the gaming industry have turned out if this didn't happen?

Would they ever be able to challenge the powerhouse Bullfrog-Westwood we know today? Bullfrog seemed to have been instrumental in making God games a popular format. How might it affect the Command and Conquer series?

I think most people loved Command and Conquer 4, the last entry in the series. Was a hell of a gamble to have a God Game set from an ascended Kane's point of view. Control and Past, Control the future indeed. Some had a issue with the GDI becoming a hilariously weak NPC faction (like barbarians from the civilization series) and the main antagonist in the grand finale being the god-like Scrin. Good revelation on his nature though and loved how they connected the Red Alert and Command and Conquer series.

 

[Denv]

Starcraft could actually have hit it big if it hadn't lost the RTS war with Command and Conquer. For some reason the thought of EA surviving the early 90's fills me with dread. It seems to be the case with many on this forum. Perhaps a bleed though from another universe perhaps?

 

[Hulkster'01]

Probably would’ve just remade the same game year after year till the end of time.

 

[Nivek]

We all know the story of how Electronic Arts went bankrupt. How might the gaming industry have turned out if this didn't happen?

How? Sega suing them for hardware piracy was so brutal make a precedent...Console are close system and if you take one without license the console maker can sued you out the market, sega lawsuit both in japana nd usa were brutal and destroyed EA...

 

[Kalga]

EA would have been a very good company to be around these days... from an investment point of view. I ran the old data (part of a group project about financial predictions analysis) and in terms of ROCE and such it was actually pretty solid.

Unfortunately the 90s wasn't the time for that kind of thinking. The market was simply too full of unexpected events (as was such for any new/developing industries/markets) for that kind of data analysis to actually predict shit.


That being said, what makes a entertainment company successful doesn't mean that it's good for producing actual artistic content. Not that investors care, at least not to the same extent as to game fans attached to their particular drug game of choice (i.e. investors are a less less emotionally attached to any particular company as compare to gamers with their favor games)

 

[Roches]

Has anyone else read EA's 1991 white paper titled Solving the Piracy Problem with Networked Minipurchases? Certainly we remember EA as being paranoid about piracy and including heavy copy protection in almost all their games. That's part of why they failed. They never got to implement networked minipurchases, but the idea went something like this: instead of charging $60 for a game that could be easily copied, they would charge only, say, $20 for the game -- or even give it away for free. Then players would be offered special ammo, new weapons, or access to additional maps -- for a fee. The report even said that a player might well pay $20 for, say, a few day's supply of special ammo. The idea was that it would be possible to make well more than $60 by selling "optional" extras. And this method would solve the problem of piracy since all the transactions would need to go through game servers.

Today, piracy is still an issue, but much less so because of online gaming that requires authentic copies. Still, gamers are satisfied to know that when they pay $60 for a game, they own the whole game and won't have to pay any more to enjoy playing it. EA's dystopian vision of the future would have us paying $120 or more for that $60 game -- plus they wanted to sell everything on a subscription basis! Just imagine playing, say, Candy Crush under EA's regime. For those who don't play, you win a lollipop hammer that can crush any candy piece every time you get five five-in-a-row matches. What if, instead of that, lollipop hammers sold for $1 or even $2?

 

[Kalga]

Has anyone else read EA's 1991 white paper titled Solving the Piracy Problem with Networked Minipurchases? Certainly we remember EA as being paranoid about piracy and including heavy copy protection in almost all their games. That's part of why they failed. They never got to implement networked minipurchases, but the idea went something like this: instead of charging $60 for a game that could be easily copied, they would charge only, say, $20 for the game -- or even give it away for free. Then players would be offered special ammo, new weapons, or access to additional maps -- for a fee. The report even said that a player might well pay $20 for, say, a few day's supply of special ammo. The idea was that it would be possible to make well more than $60 by selling "optional" extras. And this method would solve the problem of piracy since all the transactions would need to go through game servers.

Today, piracy is still an issue, but much less so because of online gaming that requires authentic copies. Still, gamers are satisfied to know that when they pay $60 for a game, they own the whole game and won't have to pay any more to enjoy playing it. EA's dystopian vision of the future would have us paying $120 or more for that $60 game -- plus they wanted to sell everything on a subscription basis! Just imagine playing, say, Candy Crush under EA's regime. For those who don't play, you win a lollipop hammer that can crush any candy piece every time you get five five-in-a-row matches. What if, instead of that, lollipop hammers sold for $1 or even $2?

Yeah I'm not exactly sympathic to you all's suppose fear of not truely owning a piece of something for good and forever. Given the complexity of games these days the buying of such should be akin closer to that of a vehicle/computer/complex goods rather than that of simpler goods like a set of chinaware. When you buy a vehicle you don't stop paying for it when the cash exchanged hands for the goods (or if it's by payments, when the payments ends), you also have to pay for gas, maintenance, licenses, permits, etc.* I wouldn't call the minipurchases "dystopian" but rather closer to how the material/real world functions (and save me the cries of "real life is a hopeless dystopia", you might want to go out and get some air).

What I do see if they go through such a thing would be a stratification of gamers among social-economic classes mirroring the material world, for better or worse. Presumably such tactics would work (after all, it is pretty much the classic "give away the razors to sell the razorblades" trick) and all the major companies would follow suit. However the market being what it is I still see the more traditional forms of game transactions would continue to exist, assuming you gamers are as adamant on not falling for such tricks (I doubt it though, for the same reasons I don't see many people buying junkyard vehicles, slapping a farm vehicle plate on them, and doing all the tinkering themselves, though I do currently live next to one).


*ditto with computers and anti-virus, extra memory drives, etc. though to a lesser extent, and in theory all that is unneeded). Also of note televisions, you still have to pay for cable/satellite dish after buying the physical thingy and pay the monthly subscription.