Electronic Arts Leadership Are Out of Their Goddamned Minds

I think the thing a lot of people don't realise when trying to make the next runaway hit game is that most of the games they're trying to emulate weren't produced with that intent, and didn't get their popularity with a running start as some massive AAA behemoth.

Fortnite itself was originally a base-building PVE zombie game that Epic cranked out a battle royale mode for in a couple of months after seeing that PUBG (which at the time was a janky, unpolished and presumably cheap-to-develop standalone version of an ARMA mod) was a huge success. Then after it's out, Epic restructures behind it as a cash cow, makes it into a modding platform, uses it to improve Unreal Engine, etc.

Minecraft was a little solo project in Java - now 350m copies sold. It didn't start off as a platform for other games, available on every console with cutting edge graphics and $100m in marketing spend behind it.

Ark sold 80 million copies. It was an Early Access game on Steam by a team of 35, then it took off and they ported it to everything.

Battle Royale's been done and been a huge hit for PUBG (2017), then Fortnite, then Warzone. I think it's about time that people would be getting sick of it, same as open world survival crafting games were the big thing (Minecraft, DayZ, Ark) and MMOs. Next Battlefield is $400m, all those other big hits were probably more in the $100k-$1m range. Maybe it would be better to make a bunch of $1m-$10m range games, see which one is a hit, then move resources behind it. I imagine changing the structure of a big business like EA to be able to make a move like that would be a very, very difficult undertaking though.

> I think the thing a lot of people don't realise when trying to make the next runaway hit game

Okay sure, let's say that. I don't think it's true. I think anyone who has ever made anything creative, which is most people, know that chasing success just make your creative work bad. That doesn't matter though.

Surely the executives at EA should know better. Like it's literally their job to know better. They head an entire organization dedicated to creative production. Surely the board would fire them if they don't know better right?

What is going on?

DotA was a custom map for Warcraft III

How they actually would had a chance is to develop 1000 such experimental games with those resources and see what sticks. Unimaginable in a corporate setting though.

Left for Dead started as a Counterstrike mod.

The key insight into EA behavior is that "runaway hit game" is a subcultural term, not a business analysis. An EA executive would tell you that they published a runaway hit game just last year. You know and I know that they won't be able to get a bunch of Battlefield sales with the lessons they learned from EA Sports College Football 25 - but it's not so easy to explain why to someone who doesn't already agree.

And Counterstrike started as a Half-Life mod. It's elephants all the way down!!

> Surely the executives at EA should know better.

This...

> Like it's literally their job to know better.

...does not follow from this.

And executives get where they are, at least in significant part, because they are good at telling boards what they want to hear. They are also, generally speaking, in the same class as the board members, and together they are very willing to blame failures on those darn workers just doing a bad job at stuff.

"What is going on" is that the executive class in America has been progressively getting more and more divorced from the reality of actual production, and treating their opinions and expertise as if they are somehow definitive on everything related to their domain is very dangerous.

I don’t think it’s about the size off the project but the crestivity, cohesion, gameplay and good storytelling.

There are plenty of counter examples like Witcher 3, Desth Starnding, Resident Evil Village and Cyberpunk (regardless of its rocky launch)

The issue with EA and Ubisoft nowadays is that they are not run by game designers but by MBAs and HR departments. There is very little room to disagree with the mandates and if the game must have x,y,z then you need to find a way to cram it regardless.

When you kill the creativity and don’t take bold risks, you kill innovation and ultimately suck the soul out of the game.

Games are a form of art after all.

It’s not limited to games either. How many TV shows and movies in the last 10 years have shit the bed because instead of taking a good proven story from society and adapting it for screen, they decided that people actually want to hear a different story and had their “writers” hack up good art and turn it into gloopy strings of virtuous platitudes?

'Creative decisions made by people who don't even like the output' was a good phrasing I recently heard.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j9Qm6_lEdcQ&t=656s

It's incredibly difficult to pick good creative things if you don't have the same spark their actual consumers do.

Sure, maybe someone is experienced, but they'll always be looking at it through a completely different lens than consumers. Eventually that creates a blind spot and understandings diverge disastrously.

Ex: the infamous Diablo mobile game announcement