Modern Electronic Arts

So it’s 2013 and EA have a little bit of a problem, not only are they now hated by almost everyone, but they’re bringing in billions of dollars a year. And still managing to lose money. Something has to change, the CEO was immediately exiled, the man who would replace him is Andrew Wilson.

The former FIFA producer and also the man who greenlit FIFA Ultimate Team a few years ago.

Also the CEO that replaces Hawkins in 1991 is made executive chairman. By this point it’s clear which direction the company is headed and it works wonders for them. EA also acquires the exclusive 10-year right to make Star Wars games and dice get to work on rebooting the Star Wars Battlefront series that EA had killed off a few years prior.

Trailers drop and it’s official a new Star Wars game is coming, November the 17th 2015. November finally comes around and commercially the game does really well, but when it comes to the actual game there are issues. The game was called Star Wars: Battlefront, so people expected an experience similar to the first two games, this was not that. For starters there wasn’t a campaign, space battles were gone and there was just way less content than the last one. That was a game that came out in 2005. On top of that, there was a DLC pass which was almost as much as the game itself. Okay so the game is not amazing, but it didn’t matter. Bioware was coming back and their next masterpiece Mass Effect Andromeda was just around the corner.

It’s finally 2017 and Bioware, the Masters of storytelling are back. A new Mass Effect game $40 million spent, five years in the making. It was going to be incredible. The game was terrible. While the games script was tight, the animations just weren’t quite there. There were also quite a few bugs, the faces were a bit off, voice acting wasn’t great, terrible AI and the main character looked like she injected half a pound of heroin before every cutscene. The facial animations were so bad that Bioware spent four months patching them. The final product still left a lot to be desired, besides the blinding technical issues, the story and writing wasn’t great and the only thing holding the game up was it’s alright gameplay. It didn’t take long for Bioware to jump ship. Alright Andromeda is a write-off but it’s okay, EA have another shot with Star Wars Battlefront 2. Coming out at the end of the year.

Battlefront 2 was going to be the definitive Star Wars game. EA had promised that they’d learnt their lesson from the first game and we’re going above and beyond the call of duty, to deliver with this one. Classes were back, a campaign, space battles, three generations and best of all, there was no season pass. Was this finally the classic battlefront experience? Launch day finally arrives and millions of players log in and start playing. EA executives are gathered around, clutching their chairs and sweating profusely. But then something extraordinary happens, people actually like the game. Had they done it, delivered on their promises, made a game that people thoroughly enjoyed without major issues. The executives breathe a sigh of relief. But just as Andrew goes to take a beer from the mini-fridge, something happens.

Articles appear, message boards light up, my god it’s Reddit. Turned out for after playing a few games, players started to realize something. They couldn’t play as Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker. Together they were locked behind a 120,000 credit pay wall. That sounded like a lot of credits, so someone on Reddit began the equations. A match takes around 11 minutes, you earn around 275 credits per match, that’s 25 credits per minute. That’s about 2,400 minutes per unlock and my god. Tt worked out that a total of 80 hours of gameplay was necessary to unlock the 2 characters. Or you could just, you know, Buy them both for $60.

They weren’t the only things that were borderline locked behind a paywall either. The entire progression system was too. EA had essentially ham fisted the pack system from FIFA into a Star Wars Battlefront game. Now at this point a few other shooters had also developed loot box systems, there was just one difference. They were only for cosmetics, this meant the game was pay to win, the gaming community went crazy. It wasn’t long before EA’s PR team were deployed on reddit, but this only stoked the fires further. By this point even mainstream media outlets were reporting on it. It was over, EA had lost. They announced a revamping of the progression system and got to work.

We’re not done yet though, it turns out that it wasn’t just the gaming community and the media they had enraged. But governments around the globe too. Discussion started, politicians held meetings and eventually the verdict was in.

Guilty!

EA had enabled child gambling in their online Star Wars video game. The UK undergoes talks about loot box regulation, American senators proposed a bill that would regulate loot boxes. Belgium outright bans them. EA would later come out and claim that loot boxes were fun and just like opening a kinder egg. Okay so Battlefront 2, also not too great. But it was alright, Dice had another shot with Battlefield V, coming out late next year. Battlefield 1 was very well received, so people were excited to see what dice had in store a couple of years later. That was until the trailer dropped.

The game seemed to take place in World War 2, but something in the trailer caught players eyes. There was a woman, a woman with a massive claw arm. Also lots of face paint and a katana. People were furious, countless reddit threads, tweets and comments questioning these design decisions appear instantly. And EA have to respond again. This time they weren’t gonna sit back and take it. Electronic Arts chief design officer, Patrick Sutherland, steps out and calls the fans behind the backlash uneducated. He also tells them that if it’s such a big problem, just don’t buy the game. Battlefield V sales were down by more than half. Southerland would leave EA later that year. Aside from that the game had many missing features at launch, it was also not much of a step forward from battlefield 1.

Okay we have one more shot at this. Anthem a game Bioware has been working on for seven years and this time, it’s Bioware’s a team calling the shots. At’s a whole new franchise, handcrafted from the ground up. This is the one fella. Before we get into anthems reception, I think it’s important we talked a little bit about the games development. In 2012, EA gave Bioware the go-ahead to create a new IP. They then gave them seven years to produce a finished product. Bioware spends a lot of that time on pre-production, a lot of that time. Like five and a half years. Pre-production basically consists of massive back and forths in meetings that ultimately resolve nothing and get the team nowhere. Time starts to pass and eventually they realize they only have 16 months to actually develop the game.

The game was released in February 2019, so that means that development must have started around July 2017. Wait a minute that’s after they revealed the game. So all the announcement trailer? They didn’t actually have a game at this point, we were finding out what the game was going to be at the same time as the developers. So 16 months to develop a triple-a game, that’s a heavy time crunch and on top of that. Athem was being built on frostbite, the same engine fuelling dices games for the last decade. This is a powerful engine, but it’s difficult to use. Not really meant for the kind of game that Bioware are making. This means that they have to create a lot of systems from the ground up. Which takes up a lot of development time.

There were also things that just wouldn’t work, for example Bioware wanted massive creatures in the game but fristbite struggled to handle it, the idea was just scrapped. So a lot of the stuff had spent five years planning, couldn’t even be coded into the game. Okay a lot of pressure now and EA decided to start taking engineers from Bioware to help on other games. The developers start to realize that the game they wanted to make cannot be created in the current timeframe. So they cut back on scope. At the start of development they wanted to have multiple cities, couldn’t do that so they then went for a city in a player created outpost, couldn’t do that. One city in a mobile ship? Nope. They ended up with a fort. Also Bioware’s management issue in official mandate to staff, the game was to be unnameable unlike a certain other game. One avenue of meme prevention was actual face animation, so they spent a lot more money on motion capture. Really advanced motion capture and they only had one shot at it. Because of the high cost, they ended up changing a few of the missions. Later down the line only to realize that they had no time or money to recapture the audio and footage. This results in dialogue that doesn’t really make any sense.

The team also doesn’t really know what’s working and what isn’t, because they were rarely able to actually play test the game. This was because Bioware had server problems at the time that prevented them from logging on. They’re essentially making the game blind. Now the majority of this is actually the fault of Bioware’s upper management and not EA, so even in the game’s current, condition EA aren’t gonna budge on the release date. They scraped together all they possibly can in the few short months left and on the 22nd of February, anthem launches. Turns out it’s even worse than andromeda. One of the biggest problems is on ps4 playing anthem sometimes causes its entire operating system to crash. Then there’s the loading screens, in some cases they take longer than actual missions. As we’ve,come to expect by now the game is also very buggy, besides that the game also lacks content, it’s a looter shooter, but the loot is a bit broken. The story’s half-assed and two-thirds of the end game are recycled from previous levels. Some players also notice that the game they received was a bit different to what EA advertised.

A few years ago that’s because development hadn’t even started at that point. Nonetheless the game goes on to be the us’s fifth best-selling game in 2019. The main caveat was that the people that did buy it, were not big fans. As a result it lost a significant portion of its player base in the first couple of months. Bioware is currently planning to rebuild the game from the ground up. but nonetheless Electronic Arts march on, unfiltered by the masses of hate they received on a daily basis. What seems like a never-ending mission to bankrupt every studio under them. Although EA has made a few reparations and the hate train has died down as a result. It’s only a matter of time until the conductor steps back on board and those wheels start spinning again.