Hacker News Reader

Comment by lofaszvanitt | Hacker News Reader

"EA is one of the largest video game developers and publishers in the world." Yet, it creates zero value. As an added plus EA is a publicly traded company....

View on HN

> Yet, it creates zero value.

Then why do people give them money?

Yeah, it’s like saying Netflix doesn’t create value, or Universal Pictures doesn’t create value. I do not agree with the GP. As far as I can tell, openAI has created very, very negative value as of today, financially.

What he meant is that company's MO is buying IPs of successful franchises that are dear to many gamers, release 1-2 crappy games on that IP that is filled to the brim with microtransactions which is not well received by the customers (but makes them money), resulting in the death of that franchise. Rinse and repeat for whatever IPs still remain to be bought.

It creates money, but contributes 0 or negative value for the actual gaming industry, unlike other companies like FromSoft that consistently hits the ball out of the park, pushing the envelope on new franchises and new gaming genres. THAT, is creating value.

>which is not well received by the customers (but makes them money),

stated preference vs revealed preference, or alternately, the people commenting about games on HN or reddit aren't reflective of the average EA customer.

That a heroin addict's "stated preference" is to quit does not mean they secretly want to be a drug addict when their "revealed preference" for something deeply addictive comes around.

That argument might work against f2p lootbox games, but that does not explain the "release 1-2 crappy games on that IP that is filled to the brim with microtransactions" phenomena that's described in the GP. Nobody is like "wow this game doesn't have lootboxes? I guess I'm not going to buy it". If someone is buying such a game, to a first approximation they're buying for the gameplay, not because they're addicted to gambling and are buying it to get their fix.

Some folks get suckered into a gambling addiction via the buffet, too.

The point is when microtransactions are involved, the gameplay and overall quality of the game suffers, because they are no longer the priority, the microtransactions become the priority. Decisions will be made by the game developers to increase the spending on microtransactions with less regard to the effect on gameplay, and from the studio perspective, this is fine as long as its profitable. In the short term this could be true (despite bad reviews these games tend to still be profitable), but in the long run this is rarely true as they end up milking the loyal fanbase for as much money as possible with the mtx, until there is no one left to milk and hence the IP dies.

This approach doesn't look to add value to the existing IPs, it looks to drain as much money as it can out of whats left of the IP, before shelving it completely (and then coming up with remakes of the old games after 10 years etc.)

There are certainly a lot of people who do actually like their games, but a lot of their revenue comes from a combination of aggressive marketting and that old P.T. Barnum adage. There's a lot of new gamers born every minute, and it takes being burned a few times before somebody learns to avoid EA products.

Right, the 15 year old paying for Madden 32 doesn't realize that they could play Madden 08 released on the gamecube and have a nearly identical experience, including literally the same bugs and broken behavior as that game from 20 years ago.

Do people get that? Modern madden has worse oddities. Madden 08 wouldn't allow you to put more than 255 points on the scoreboard. Modern madden will completely break before you can even reach that point.

The animation/behavior systems have the exact same flaw where if you run a play for more than about 20 seconds characters just... shut off. They stop trying to run after the ball carrier even!

The knobs you can tweak on the simulation engine are the same on N64, Xbox 360, Xbox 1 X series X X'er hyper X, the damn Nintendo DS!

No wonder companies are so hostile to emulation. They would rather just resell the same game, sometimes with nicer textures.

Not liking Battlefield 6, I take it?

Battlefield peaked with BF3

Value is subjective

Reply on news.ycombinator.com