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[Column] General: The EA-Disney Deal
BillMurphy
Former Managing EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 4,565
We're offering our thoughts on why EA's deal with Disney to be the exclusive developer of Star Wars games may not be all that bad. Hear us out and share your thoughts in the comments!
Instead of licensing individual titles to different developers, much as LucasArts did in the past, we recently learned that Disney has opted to work an exclusive multi-year deal with Electronic Arts to develop Star Wars titles for “core audiences” across a variety of platforms. As one might imagine, this wasn’t received well by the vast gaming populace. After all, EA has the prestigious honor of ‘winning’ Consumerist’s “Worst Company in America” two years running now. I could spend a couple of paragraphs discussing EA’s myriad bungles from recent history or even the less-fun “just ship it” days, but why bother? You all know the story already.
Read more of Michael Bitton's The EA-Disney Deal.
Try to be excellent to everyone you meet. You never know what someone else has seen or endured.
Comments
21 year MMO veteran
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Lover of The Witcher & CD Projekt Red
The strikes Bioware has with most gamers came after they became part of EA lol... most gamers don't consider Bioware well Bioware anymore. It's EA and has delivered sup par games in the EA tradition.
EA was possibly the worste choice, sure every one of the big dogs out there has had its issues but none have pissed off gamers more than EA. With all the exclusives EA has (And mess up) the last thing any of us need is for them to get ahold of even more IP's to destroy and keep out of the hands of developers that could have made something decent out of it.
We will see, but I have a hard time understanding why anyone would feel that a company that has won the golden Poo award two years straight was the best choice.
Sim City fiasco
SWTOR
Dragon Age 2
FIFA 13 on Wii
And thats just the tip of the iceberg. EA is despised by a great number of gamers, few EA supporters (Unpaid ones anyways) remain. The constant and ever increasing cash grabs, the addition of cash shops in single player games, the excessive and sometimes intruisive DRM, the lack of inovation, the constant buying and destruction of good developers and IPs, how can this be any good for anyone? Sure Disney gets the EA marketing power but lets be honest, Activision has them beat in Marketing power hands down so it doesn't even make sense from a business perspective.
All in all I think EA was the bottom of the barrel as far as the potential choices here lol.
Unless this is a publicity move and EA lowballed other developers in the hopes this deal would get them back some popularity I don't see how they were a logical choice.
Well I hope EA can actually turn things around , however they are known for turning out dismal games to only shut them down. I guess I might not be playing any star wars games for a very long time.
A new Star Wars MMO is likely? Please thats ridiculous ... besides that MMOs take many years of development and many many millions which nobody in their right mind will invest again after SWTOR, the only thing that might happen is some more Mobile/Web-based browser game but EA won't ever make a real Star Wars MMO again, I am sure of it.
PS: And the story of KOTOR is done for good or worse... but I am sure we will see some stand in RPGs for the new movie timeframe.
I used to love EA and own most of their games that predate the millenium. For over a decade the quality of both their games and service has dwindled to a point of no return. Nowadays I steer clear of all their products, to me they are no more than money hungry wolfs..
Am I the only one who remembers both their glory days AND the day they were named 'the worst company' ?
They need to clean up their act and dsliver proper products. Until then all my hope for a good SW title has died.
STOOPID
When someone does something so utterly moronic that it kills your brain cells at the very thought of it.
I remember those days. When you saw that EA logo on a box, you knew you were getting a high quality product. Now it's hit or miss, really. I love the Dead Space games, and enjoy the new Simcity despite its problems. On the other hand, we have the complete ruination of the Mass Effect & Dragon Age series, the shift of Dead Space to pure action instead of action-horror, the increasing adoption of pay to win DLC, the shooter version of Syndicate (Seriously? Fire the marketing guy who thought THAT would do well), and the destruction of some of the greatest game development studios of all time (Bullfrog, Westwood, Pandemic, Bioware, Origin, etc.)
Oh yeah, and they killed Ultima, one of the most revolutionary series of CRPGs ever created, and home to the greatest CRPGs ever crafted by mortal men (Ultima 7 Parts 1 and 2).
I'm going to keep an open mind about anything they produce before predicting doom, but I'm not getting my hopes up either.
Also, I agree with the quoted poster in that EA obviously paid you to write this piece. I've read actual advertisements which make this piece look about as subtle as a train wreck on a boat by comparison.
It's a sad day indeed when a family is too afraid of reprisals to publicly thank somebody for saving their lives.
Gdemami -
Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
There's only 3 star wars games I ever liked. The original Kotor, Battlefront 2, and SWG. I would love to see a Kotor 3. And Battlefront 3 would be awesome with Frostbite engine behind it
Edit: oh 4 starwars games, the pod racing game on the N64 was pretty awesome too lol.
Edit 2: lol 5 starwars games, the original force unleashed was good too, I forgot all about it lol. the rest of the starwars games were kinda meh to total cruddiness,
"According to the announcement, EA "will develop and publish new Star Wars titles for a core gaming audience, spanning all interactive platforms and the most popular game genres, while Disney will retain certain rights to develop new titles within the mobile, social, tablet and online game categories."
http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/05/06/ea-acquires-star-wars-game-license
What does that even mean?
Every game will be online one way or another in few years
No Mobas for EA ,no StarCraft competition either,no online shooters etc ?
So, did ESO have a successful launch? Yes, yes it did.By Ryan Getchell on April 02, 2014.
**On the radar: http://www.cyberpunk.net/ **
Looking at: The Repopulation
Preordering: None
Playing: Random Games
Also known as Sentient Beings.
Here's the problem. We know what EA does with exclusive deals. Compare Madden and NCAA Football with EA's NHL and Football/soccer titles. The Hockey and Soccer games get substantial improvements year after year. The 'murican football games, for which EA has exclusive rights to player names, have stagnated with each year barely adding enough to not qualify as a mere roster update.
Yeah Dice can make a good shooter. The question is, will EA give them the funding and time they would have if Dice had to compete with Valve or Activision in the Star Wars shooter market?
Also, why are you talking about MMOs? Every news story I read when this broke stated that the licensing deal didn't cover online games, along with mobile and tablet stuff. Was this misreported?
"In the end, they’ve all got a bevy of unfortunate business decisions and practices under their belt, and this means you’d be likely to see the cash-grab crap titles come out of any one of them, but if I had to “pick my poison”, the EA deal looks like the best option to me."
Well said. Hopefully gamers/lamers are a bit more savy prior to the release of any of these types of games, and just ignore them. I doubt that will ever happen, but it's always a possibility.
Thanks for the information. It was a good read.
http://www.entropiapartners.com/?r=22415
I will give the OP credit that he makes some good points on the issue. However, SWTOR still is suffering from severe bugs and flawed mechanics due to EA and their greedy impatient ways.
Unless SWTOR somehow manages to pull it's charred and mangled code from the fire of similar SWG-ish doom, I see no reason to believe EA won't trash any future Star Wars titles in a similar fashion.
Yes it is really good to give the worst company in the world, that completly ignore the costumers and destroy game company after game company turning them into shallow husks, and destroying good game licences and turning them into moneygrabbing shadows.... more proof that they are doing the right thing! That is EXACTLY what they need, to know they should continue exactly as planned, it really pays off.
I agree fully. the logic is flawless.
And I ask the same question. How much did they pay you for this commersial? I guess you are filthy rich now?
"This is not a game to be tossed aside lightly.
It should be thrown with great force"
RIP, hopes for SWG 2.0
RIP, new X-Wing vs Tie Fighter or JTL 2
Excellent read. I am not a big fan of EA, but then again they can't continue to get it wrong and make money. They have some of the deepest pockets in the business, so that means funding will be far less of an issue. Look at how Blizzard mucked up Diablo III. Every publisher has it's problems. Let us hope that EA will provide some great star wars entertainment in the future.
Hopefully they will grasp what was wrong with SWTOR and not repeat their mistakes.
EA make most of their money on the console market where people don't really care about the problems EA make simply because they never heard about it.
These are people who simply don't look for information about the company they are about to make more powerful by buying one of their games.
My sister is one of these people who don't really care what companies do. She just accept it and do their bidding like a fool.
My sister is the majority sadly.
Good read but I still think EA was probably the worse choice Disney could have made.
EA sell over prices games missing tons of content that they then sell as DLC, basically charging the customer twice for the game or sometimes even more.
As for good star wars games
Dark Forces series + jedi knight games
Xwing + exp pack
Xwing v Tie Fighter
Xwing Alliance
Rebel Assault 1 + 2
Star Wars Galaxies
Knights of the old republic
Empire At War
Rebellion/Supremacy
After SWG things just got bad.. and i don't see them getting any better with EA.. anyway I hope Im wrong.