Pondering EA's Move Towards Hardcore

The site GigaOM is picking up its games coverage again, and kicks off with an article speculating on just what EA was thinking when it purchased BioWare and Pandemic. On the face of it, the move doesn't make much sense. BioWare is a great development house, but from EA's perspective their games are 'small potatoes'. "So why did they spend so much? The acquisition includes several titles for the Wii and DS already in development, and those may have breakout potential. There's tremendous gamer buzz around BioWare's upcoming RPG Mass Effect, but in all likelihood, it'll do similar numbers to the studio's million-plus-selling Knights of the Old Republic -- a hit, but not a huge one. There are rumors that BioWare is developing a 'Star Wars'-themed MMO, but if that's what inspired the purchase, the mystery only deepens: Sony Online's (SNE) MMO Star Wars Galaxies was a disappointment in relation to cost and anticipation, and that was released at the height of the buzz over a movie franchise that's since become old news."

Innovation

[rickett81]

Many of EAs games are reworks of the same game with a new feature or 2 added: madden and the sims come to mind. Perhaps this is a way for EA to jumpstart some innovation - by buying people who are already innovative.

Re:SWG flopped because....

[WCMI92]

SWG (before the NGE) was a great game, it was just grossly mismanaged and buggy. When your developers are wasting more than half their resources on backroom top secret mass game revamps (NGE) that take away far more than they add the game isn't going to get fixed, it's going to get worse.

I played SWG through all that, from when we had over 300,000 players who were begging for them to FIX THE BUGS down to where it is now, 30,000 players begging for the game that we had previously back. Oh, and it's still just as buggy as ever.

SWG failed because of SOE, and I will tell you that I despise SOE for stealing my game, and watching them circle the toilet like some turd on it's way down gives me some satisfaction.

The Bioware MMO team is led by the former SWG lead producer and lead developer, Rich Vogel and Gordon Walton, who both quit SOE shortly before or after the first of 2005's twin atrocities, the CU (which we knew as the Combat Downgrade).

Re:Lack of own creativity, maybe?

[analog_line]

Uh, killed off Command & Conquer?

I wasn't aware that Command & Conquer: Generals plus expansion, and Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars didn't have the Command & Conquer label on them! Whether you liked Generals or not (I sure did, and I don't like the previous Westwood efforts much at all, aside from the original RTS, Dune 2, which I enjoyed) they most certainly didn't kill it off. They took it in a direction you didn't like, that's not the same thing. Coming out with a C&C3 expansion isn't exactly killing it off, either. Nothing's really stopping you from playing Red Alert 2 and Tiberian Sun until the cows come home. They're perfectly servicable games even still. You might even want to check out C&C3. I just got it this week, and it's definitely a throwback to Tiberian Sun/Red Alert gameplay. Not that it's a good thing in MY view, but they certainly haven't shit the bed. I wouldn't ever have bought it if they hadn't brought out Generals and BFME 1&2 in between, games I still play (or would, if Generals didn't constantly mismatch after a certain amount of time installed, BFME 2 I still play quite a lot).