How EA Lost Its Soul

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.

And what do you know, the bad sequel killed the franchise. People have ported the original to modern platforms, but if anything was due a Kickstarted sequel...

Do you mean you were fired / you quit? Or was that the conversation?

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...) 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.

I don't know of any CEO (successfully) legally persecuted for 'not maximizing shareholder value', or having a more 'long term strategy'. The most that can happen afaik is getting fired, which is scary enough.

In the end what I got from the article is that the initial vision of EA largely succeeded: to replicate the music industry and Hollywood with a steady big budget revenue stream. The only problem is the glaring misnomer: the correct term would be the unsavory 'Electronic Mass Media' instead of 'Electronic Arts'.

The sad fact about the shareholder revenue maximization in this industry is that people are happy to be fed dog food, and producers are happy to make tons of money off of it. They shrug off the moral dilemma and say "we're just making what people want!". This situation is reproduced verbatim across mass media -- the largest revenue share is absorbed by content that is simply not good at all. If you look at music, I would say at least 80% of the top revenue generators out there produce music that is objectively worse than centuries old music. Take this for example: [1], how can one not say it is altogether a better, more energetic, more expressive, more moving piece of art than the vast majority of what is produced? Yet people seldom listen to it. Who makes money off of copyright-free Mozart works? Of course, there are exceptions, but the situation overall is an unhappy conjunction of the vast majority of people being satisfied with repetitive industrialized hits, lame jokes with explosions, and the sports game or first person shooter of the year -- while the industry is satisfied with flooding the market and the media with this rehash-able mass produced content. With no good consumer content discovery and reviewing tools, I believe that's a stable status quo for the majority of the population.

That's the role platforms like Steam with indie games (or Spotify with indie music, or Netflix with original productions) can perform: the consumers can seek directly quality, and marketers don't have the ability to distort this too much. With good discovery consumers should be able seek more engrossing experiences and share opinions directly, hopefully without bias towards what's brand new (although I confess that one is hard to get rid of). In this kind of marketplace producers can also target more specific markets, making what they enjoy and find beautiful (and still able to make good revenue off that niche) instead of aiming for generic mass market titles.

Of course, it could simply be that a large fraction of the population irremediably wants to just shut off their brains outside their jobs, but I don't want to believe that, at least not without unmistakable evidence.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISBNqJZVrXM

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

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.

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?

Now that we've made it to the Internet, even the lowest of budgets can have full color illustrations if it's willing to pay for the artist's time. No worries about minimum print runs before it's affordable.

I mean, oh no, you had to snap out of your click-trance for five seconds to find a button to stop reading?

(I may be biased, I'm an artist who very occasionally takes illustration gigs from online publications.)

Yes. I thought it was beautifully presented and nicely paced, and well worth my time.

Also: a single "Continue" button at the bottom of each page is "logic puzzles and shit"? Three tiny logos hidden in the title bar are "social media faggotry"? Seriously?

The web becomes a lot calmer without scripts (and you start to notice how little regard many sites have for proper web markup).

Not sure though.