Gamers: "we didn't like veilguard because of sloppy aesthetic and narrative direction." EA execs: Hm, so what you're saying is, there's no market for single player narrative driven titles? Make more live service third person shooters and sports games?" Swen Vincke: "what are you guys smoking"
@@WamdiSunka if i was speaking euphemistically from a presumably right wing slant, i promise you, swen vincke and bg3 would not be the positive example i used. game's about as fruity as they come, and also a masterpiece.
Nothing, they don't care because single-player narrative-driven titles sell only once and that's it. Corporations like EA don't want temporary-money, they want constant-streams of money forever.
Money buys great marketing which can sell crap games forever. Just look at the production investment in even the in-game adverts for Call Of Duty, they've gone and dressed up real models and done photo shoots in fantastical clothing and hardware. They must be making money hand over fist! But they're doing the FIFA thing where they sell literally the same core code year after year after year
@@ArariaKAgelessTraveller Money is required to make games, but only because people require money for work. If people preferred payment in livestock, then livestock would be required to make games. Because it's PEOPLE who make the products a business sells, not financing.
@@ThePlayerOfGames some people just never learn about how these games are made yet they still buy that “new” installment every single time and just give them more money in hopes that it will get better but it never does I have told my friends about the fifa thing and they agree yet buy the releases every time get bored then turn to the new cod when it comes out and every time I usually buy the cods for the story anyway on deal but they have gotten worse by the releases and my friend that plays cod I told them to not give them any more money yet a unicorn skin came out and he said he bought it cause it was funny I told him that he hates fortnite yet he buys these skins like it’s Fortnite it’s hypocritical and he yelled at me for giving him financial advice
@@NeonXXP One of the saddest parts IMO, they struck gold with it and the first few years had amazing support. Nowadays they just recycle the same content and events endlessly, and in a panic can't figure out if they need to cater to the more experienced players (which constitute most of the playerbase by now) or newer/more casual players. But the whole thing seems to be ran by some skeleton crew nowadays and we can see the writing on the wall if it keeps going on like this.
Here here on that. I love Apex! Played since season one, average rank plat with a few diamond rankings sprinkled in but... fuck the last 2 or 3 seasons just been handled so poorly I am not playing anymore nor paying.
Imagine. The 2 company the most into the whole "you should be comfortable not owning your games" are about to not be companies anymore. Who would have thunk.
@@MaddJakd Butchered? How many years has it been since MS aquired Activision? If you were to say bethesda, I would understand, though they were shit waay before Starefield. Fallout 76 was the last straw for me , so when they released that dumpsterfire of a game. I was not surprised.
@daemiax I mean, when that many studios end up getting killed simply because MS suddenly realizes they spent too much, including many working on stuff folk actually were hyped for, its definitely not good. Honestly, Activision seemed like the lesser of 3 evils lol.
Blizzard, Ubisoft, EA, Sony, a lot of big players are feeling the heat. Shit is finally catching up to them. VALVE has done nothing and yet they are still winning. Valve not becoming a public company like all these other big players is their saving grace.
Valve knows they literally can't lose here. If AAA gaming goes away, yeah, Valve will lose a ton of money because the overall size of the audience will probably shrink, but as long as they can get a 30 percent cut of whatever's left, that's more than enough to keep the lights on. And let's face it, not _all_ or even most of the casuals will just up and quit gaming. If anything, they'll get curious about other stuff they can play and graduate to becoming actual enthusiasts.
Valve getting sued left and right for their anti-competitive/monopolistic practices, what the hell are you talking about lmao. Steam fanboys are easily the most delusional people on Earth. There's a recent video about it on this very channel in fact!
It helps that Valve is privately owned and not on the stock market. It means that Valve isn't beholden to the endless growth that Wall Street demands. Abolish the stock market.
@@SimuLord The audience doesn't shrink, it moves to different titles, which also are on Steam, as everything is on Steam. Valve cannot lose with the way they are set up currently.
Honestly my interest in Dragon Age: Veilguard plummeted when I heard they weren't importing any of our choices from past games, then died when I heard how they justified it... Ouch.
Inquisition already pulled the trigger on Dragon Age as a viable franchise when the end of Inquisition completely INVALIDATED every choice you made in every prior game.
The character choices was the deciding factor for you? Lol. For the rest of us it is the obnoxious political and social narratives they want to beat into us
Hopefully the Trump admin will begin fining any American gaming companies where DEI has replaced competence. Edit since yt won't allow replies for some reason: @joanofsharc maybe it isn't so bad they all leaned into it at the same time, we might not have another term of Orange man had they not upset so many people all at once
@@id2k. EA was awful 10-15 years ago, before they started falsely pandering to people. stop blaming minorities for rich execs making bad choices. we hate these companies too
@@id2k. those games were already bad. they were already cutting corners, firing senior devs, other devs leaving due to working conditions. the diversity stuff was a recent hail mary at trying to make more sales off of people like me, but most of us didn't buy it. we hate these companies too.
Keep in mind who the "market correction" is going to hurt. The workers that did all the work suffer, while the people at the top just sail off in their golden parachutes happy as a clam before diving into some other industry and screwing that one up next. No lessons will be learned, because they accomplished their objective, which is to kill that golden goose and extract all the gold inside. Not a single one of these CEOs actually care about games or whether the game industry survives. THEY'LL walk away with a mountain of cash ready to jump into another company, and that's all that matters.
I actually don't care very much about the games "industry" i.e. big companies due to the gaming market having so many brilliant easily-1000-hour games made by 1-10 people and we have a lot more on the way. The best games "industry" companies are the ones with curtailed dev-counts like iD and Valve who keep on chugging along.
The cheat sheet is: -Care about your developers and their projects -Have sane expectations for their projects -Don't be greedy Its almost like all of these are very reasonable and frankly expected
Instructions unclear: I think you said: -milk gamers for every cent they have -blame them when they inevitably react negatively EA, Ubisoft and co (probably)
From a solo dev, move people onto new projects before the current one ships. Prototype, and go wide - no layoffs. Once you have 2-3 possibilities, estimate the scope and pick a project.
Just noticed that EA dropped zero effort Sims & Sims 2 "Legacy Collections" on Steam, no achievements, no graphical improvements, just overpriced 20+ year old games being rereleased. Desperate much ?
@@EunoiaAnrkyuk the fact that most of the people who bought it still have some issues runining the game, speaks volume of how EA is just a shitty company who milk their fanbase cuz they can. Re-release for newer OS, but didn't even solved the problem in the first place smh
There were clear graphical improvements to the Sims 1 in terms of textures. I bought and installed both last night. But they did not fix the neighbourhood view, that EA intro, or the UI scaling. Actual gameplay looks great and loads fast and clean, but they just ignored a couple of things that would have so easily made it look clean and modern. 🤦
The thing is the line CANNOT GO UP ANYMORE, player spending in video games, adjusted for inflation, has been pretty stagnant for decades. We're just getting fewer and fewer games as each one demands more from us, and offers less in return. The sheer shocking incompetent management from EA when it comes to it's single player games does make a lot more sense when you mentioned just how small a part of the numbers they actually comprise.
If that! At best it's flat. At worse (for --leaches-- boards of directors and investors): dropping. When was the last AAA or high end AA game that was: new and had hype, vs a slow crawling drunken train wreck? Lets see: Robocop, Dragons age, GTA 6*(when ever that happens) and... what else? the next chapter to FF7: re-imaged: a nearly decade old game coming out in massive chunks (or just play the kind of dated looking 2 dollar one with echos mod) possible indiana jones, but I for one can't think of much else. I was more stoked to find out there's a few bad ass saturn emulators that reached massive milestones, PCSX2 did some kick ass back end work to get rediculously compatible: and that opened up a huge back library OG games (some that aged shockingly well)... when I have more fun with, I don't know say: downwell, that was made by a few people for beer money. Than call of ducky number 993818238812255 the market is fucked. How the hell did we go fram NFL Hitz, MK 2, WC 2 (then Warcraft online that became WoW: and that initialy set guiness records): to: practically sleeping through NFL game with a few foster shifts number 992391222? When Mutantfootball league made by a AA studio, is a little more fun than madden 2024, shits fucked.
I’m still salty about TitanFall and Dead Space so much I’ve actively talked to the guys who run my 401k, no buying stocks in EA or other companies like Ubisoft (I remember Unity). You can’t just not buy their games, you gotta go out of your way to make sure they never see a cent of you money.
The problem is that people love spending money on skins and loot a lot more than an actual game. I read somewhere that a single item in call of duty or WoW or something… sold more money than all of StarCraft
@@Mmmmmk247 StarCraft 2, but you're right. It was a wow skin by memory. The sad part is that we (as a whole) trained these companies to think like this. And while I doubt their a many watching his video who bare personal responsibility, as Steve from Gamers Nexus said "if you are watching this, you are almost certainly an enthusiast and the enthusiast community is a small part of the overall market." I will say however that enthusiasts are often the canary in the coal mine so to speak and the industry would probably do well to pay more attention to us. Then again, by the time the problems have reached the surface those making the decisions are probably moved on or will get a golden parachute for their troubles, so I guess it is what it is.
Seeing the companies that damaged gaming for years finally get their comeuppance brings a smile to my face - that quickly turns to a frown as I realize it won't be the executives who led the companies astray that will get the short end of the stick, but the developers just doing their best...
TBH we've been saying for years that putting all your money into smaller and smaller numbers of games with higher and higher budgets means stagnation. What does EA actually put out any more? Battlefield: Another One? Sports Game: Another One? They murdered anything that wasn't mass market generic shit, just like Ubisoft.
Also want to point out that the sims community is quite unhappy as well. If they continue to put out new packs that break the game, continue to not fix bugs from old packs that break the game, continue to ignore what the player base is looking for, then that pillar will be crumbling as well.
no, only the loudest complainers. the sims community has never been a fantastic trove of happiness even when sims 1 was popular 😅 been playing since 2 and no joke simmers just whinge about everything and are never happy at this point. they whinged with 2 and carried on with 3 and you cannot even say you like 4 without getting torn apart. they haven't changed and the few positives in the community are burried by all the BS. over half the community has sucked long before sims 4 in terms of being complainers.
Yeah, as a Sims player definitely wasn't impressed when I heard they have no plans for making Sims 5. They could make an infinitely better game with the technology they have now and revive the fanbase... And still have players buying Sims 4 and its packs (because it would obviously have a lot more content to start). But they just want to keep milking players with half-assed packs until they eventually kill the franchise. It's crazy that the Sims is one of their biggest moneymakers, but they're more invested in pumping out expensive, poor quality packs, over spending a little bit money and time making much better packs with much better reviews, which would end up making them more revenue (because people would consistently buy). Because of their track record, I know I and a lot of other players will read and watch reviews before even considering buying a pack.
@@meikahidenoriI don't hate Sims 4, but I think it's completely ridiculous to call it just "whinging". EA is extremely predatory in their behaviour to the gamebase and clearly just see dollar signs over quality.
This has been a long time coming, the writing was on the wall and EA had years and earful of feedback to course correct. At this point its just sheer neglect and incompetence. I hope it continues bc im enjoying every second of it.
I love the free market! You f*ck up and you get dumped by the wayside. Then someone new comes in and offers things you were lacking. That's how it should be. Enough of these megacorps who can continue to sell garbage products with no consequences.
100% Agreed, yet that’s how america wants a capitalist system to work and why things are so bad now 🙃. Number must go up at all times, must always appease the shareholders for short term gains :)
You can grow as fast as a population of customers grows, but that assumes you never have any attrition with your existing customer base. And when a market shows potential, you can bet your last dollar (or Ubisoft's last dollar HEY-O) that you're not maintaining your market share against all the new entrants.
What seems insane to me is FIFA has been hemorrhaging QUALITY for years. Why would you risk your biggest cash cow, tightening the belt on development, cutting features, making utterly terrible games. Sure, 95% of the playerbase want their football no matter the quality, but any competition, any instability in the market and your entire business is threatened. Spend that bit of extra cash making a great game every year and you don't have this problem, they may even have kept the FIFA license.
Lol, it's not as if FIFA looked at their games and pulled the license because they weren't good enough. The only thing FIFA cares about is money. FIFA demanded a license fee in the region of 200mil iirc, EA decided that they didn't need it (it's just for the name, licensing for clubs/players is handled separately).
In one hand we are talking to rise the pricing games to 100 euros because the develop cost blablabla and in the other hand we have this same companies having 7 billions profit. Stop the greed
Lets not forget upper management raking in triple digit millions in salary and bonusses. If that got slashed by just two thirds, the margins would look SO much better.
We gotta change how we talk about layoffs. Companies arn't hit with layoffs, they indulge in them. Companies like to say they where hit by layoffs cause it makes it sound like something that happened to them, rather than a choice they actively made.
That's a geat point. Simultaneously, they WILL actually be hit by layoffs in a way that they don't seem to be understanding, in the sense that getting rid of their talent because they think they can exploit less experienced developpers means a huge brain drain and a loss in community, as well.
To know the decline of quality sports video games is to know the decline of the industry as a whole. I’m glad that even the casual gaming audience that plays stuff like EA FC, Madden, etc are starting to spend less on EA’s go-to way of screwing over players.
I don't even understand EA's model for sports video games. Why was (since they lost the rights) FIFA and others not just a yearly DLC/game-pass? It seems like a model of game destined for it.
@@smalltime0 ok, so the business model is to get every cent out of gamers. To do this you team up with the rights holders (eg NFL and the teams). So you sign exclusive deals with them so nobody else can compete against you which keeps development costs down. To make sure they need to buy the latest one for roster updates and to play with their friends. Bonus points if you take away features and add in old ones every year. Edit: "to make sure" instead of "Much sure"
@@smalltime0 FIFA rights don't really matter. That's just a game and the rights to make a world cup game every 4 years. The real value is with the big leagues and the players and clubs in those leagues. Sidenote: one good business strategy is to have exclusive rights that don't expire at the same time. This means that any new competitor would only have access to some of the rights if they entered the market. For example maybe you have an exclusive deal with La Liga (the top Spanish league) that expires in 2025 while at the same time having exclusive deals with Real Madrid and Barcelona that expire in 2026 and 2027 respectively. This means that any game that got the rights from La Liga to include them in their games would have to release their game without their biggest two clubs. This has the bonus effect of making it harder for individual clubs and leagues to negotiate separate deals as you could offer significantly less for non exclusive deals. Sorry for the wall of text. I couldn't think of a shorter way of saying it.
I can't remember who did it, but I think it was Angry Joe who did a side by side of NFL 2K (last seen on the PS2) and EA's Madden a decade later and the then current Madden game was found lacking in a boat load of areas, even on the newer hardware and over 10 years of development.
The problem is that somewhere along the way the idea of "making money" got lost. For publicly trading companies the line "must go up" (that's what the investors - owners - demand) - but if a line goes up it means that either the company is expected to grow OR it's a bubble and the line going up is market's mistake, so to speak (which usually means that it will be corrected at some point). In a healthy economy most major companies would be so-called dividend stocks (where you buy the shares expecting to earn money from your share of company's profits). Meanwhile in reality the biggest corporations of our time may well not even pay dividends at all and you're supposed to earn money through raising valuation... which is a startup model, essentially. In most extreme cases the company doesn't even have a plan for becoming profitable at some identifiable point in the future - though this model did diminish as the interest rates went up and venture capital money became a bit less accessible.
It's the direct result of how dividends are taxed. For centuries the deal was you as an investor made money when the company made a profit and retuned that profit to you as a dividend. Now that's a terrible plan, tax-wise, so no one wants to do it. Instead, companies want to grow forever, because that's taxed in a very favorable way. When the tax laws changed in the 20th century, corporate governance was fundamentally broken and stable profits became a small niche of real estate and utility companies.
Not when the share purchase price requires profits to go up to be justified. You can clearly see it in this example: as soon as EA started looking like what you advocate, ie just a profitable company with stagnant growth, the share price dropped because no one can justify pricing in growth anymore. I'm not sure why that's hard to grasp. We might not like the outcomes, but the math and the incentives are very clear and straightforward.
@@SkorjOlafsen This guy gets it. The real levers and change is as ever: taxes and regulations. This is something the government could review, but neither left/right of centre parties want to do it. Neither does the current far right guy in charge.
Not a surprise. EA started a games company, then got sold by its founder in the 90's. It became primarily a distributor with a predatory edge. It would buy up companies that could make good games by using the data it gained as a distributor of the games from those companies. This gave the rise to EA as a company that would bite off the proverbial heads of those companies and turn them into zombie departments that cranked out games of popular franchises or just shelving the titles in their portfolio without activity. (I call this phase 1 of the company development) Phase two started with the success of the Sims where they learned that they could milk a game with cheap expansions. This was a sales breakthrough back in those days and set EA on a far, far darker pathway. They still made some good games in that era and even when the internet online era came on. They dabbled in micro transactions and mobile games that were basically shaft that extorted for money. (Which marks the end of phase two). Phase three is the phase that finally created the downward spiral. Most of the talent left the company or left the second their studios were bought in the zero's. They failed to create good enough new games and their tainted brand compounds this. EA simply can't keep up with triple A titles and is not in indie level play either (they never were). So they have A or double A titles at most that simply don't cover cost. With the death of their soccer games they lost a lot of their main profit. They have been rumored to want to be bought by the big guys for a while now (MS, Sony etc. etc.)- The real value of EA is not their developers, its their portfolio that has racked up a lot of game franchises over the years. Titles such as Alice, Battlefield, Burnout, The Sims, FC/Fifa, Dungeon Keeper, Mass effect, Command & Conquer, Dragon Age, Syndicate, Populous, Desert Strike, Wing Commander and many more. Some might be licensed games such as Star Wars (Wing Commander might also be there) but they still have lots of titles. The rest? They got developers but I am not certain how big that would be.
The crazy thing about Phase 2 is that EA also demonstrated that business models that nobody else had the capital to try without massive risk can work in gaming, and for companies that aren't EA, it created the possibility for amazing experiences. I call it the "hobby shop model" because I'm old enough to remember model railroading, but you could just as easily call it the Sims model. Sell a basegame to build a userbase and make it nearly infinitely scalable through expansion DLC the same way you can get a simple railroad loop Lionel set for Christmas but the Lionel company (and third-party vendors) really made their money by getting people to spend their disposable income on scenery, track, rolling stock, and other stuff for their layout. Sound familiar? And not just The Sims, pretty much any popular hobbyist game with "Simulator" in the title...
What they mostly fail to realise is that it's PEOPLE, CREATIVE PEOPLE who make the good games, not miscellaneous robot staff. And every time they buy a company and cut corners, they loose the thing they bought in the first place.
In short, sports gamers-arguably the pinnacle of trash gaming-enabled EA to monopolize our favorite titles, ultimately ruining the experience for everyone else.
I do find it silly how many people are pinning this entirely on dragon age when EA is bleeding everywhere. Feels like all the big companies are starting to feel the heat recently. Nintendo’s the only one I haven’t heard too much trouble from, but they’re pretty secretive to begin with.
Nintendo as far as ive seen hasnt stopped making the games they always made like EA has where many of their big single player franchises are essentially dead
Unless something changed recently, I believe the investment side of Nintendo does so consistently well that their videogames and consoles would have to do historically bad to affect their bottom line.
Whats weird is they keep saying 3million now. But internal emails leaked show they were projecting upwards of 10million. So they did 15percent of top projection. They just keep saying 50percent trying to save their stock price
I think 3 million was their adjusted projection after the negative reaction to the trailer. 3mil was probably their worse case scenario. It just so happened that Veiguard flopped harder than they could have ever predicted.
The Sims franchise is in trouble too - they JUST announced recently - like within the last month - there will be no Sims 5. EA is shooting themselves in the foot left and right here.
It might be the right call though, especially that they now have competition in the genre and I don't know how much more they can innovate the game other than graphics. You have players like me who loves 1-3 and think 4 is a soulless DLC money-grab, I have zero faith in a sims 5 game. Then you have the people who like sims 4, would they be happy basically starting over after spending hundreds of dollars on content?
@@strawberrired I prefer Sims 4. Sims 3 is so laggy sadly. I hate the lack of worlds just as much as everybody else but unless they somehow can fix the issue with AI calcs killing frame rate idk. Think they could still open up nearby lots though so maybe you only need to calculate 1/4 of each world or smth.
“Its a game. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it” -Shawn Layden (former Sony chairman) This is what happens when the majority listens. Your companies slowly bleed out.
In a timeline where employees are no longer allowed to make public statements there would be fewer of such discussions but the resulting games would still be the same. The discussions are just a symptom.
Veilguard killed the Dragonage franchise. I couldn't stomach buying it after seeing the gameplay and cutscenes showing off its terrible writing. it wasn't a Dragonage game, It was a god of war/guardians of the galaxy combination. I don't think I will have the desire to buy anything with Dragonage in the title anymore.
Yeah, the dreadful death of a franchise. After sinking a ship it is hard to get people to order new tickets for the next ride. Even franchises like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings are on the verge of kissing the titanic right now.
It really seems like some of the people working on it didn't want to tell a Dragonage story, they wanted to tell their story and use the DA IP to get people to listen to it.
Frankly, I think somebody (if they wanted) could actually revive it BECAUSE the flop was so spectacular. If the game was just thoroughly meh, a forgettable piece of under-delivered promises, it would be a more definitive franchise killer, in my opinion. A flop this hard, accompanied by the controversy, makes it less hopeless, really, because it creates a realistic avenue of - essentially - de-canonizing DA:tV and making a "Dragon Age 4 that you actually wanted and deserve", trying to play on DA:O nostalgia AND the anger towards DA:tV. I'm not very optimistic, though. EA would need to sell the title first (and they do have some hoarder tendencies so it wouldn't be as cheap as it should in its current state) and whoever picks it up would be taking quite a bit of risk. So while I see revival as quite achievable, I doubt we'll see somebody try.
I think you are WAY to optimistic on college football. It may be the biggest thing in america ever, but it has literally no market at all outside america. Fifa does just that. Fifa can sell globaly, anything american Football simply can not.
To be fair there is a small but steadily growing fan base for the NFL developing in Europe, so there may be more of a market than none at all. Still peanuts compared to fifa obv.
American football has a market in countries like Australia, the UK and Germany. They're not big markets for the game but they are there. Of course that said, on the world stage the world game is king.
@@somethinglikethat2176 As a german: No you dont have us as a merket. NFL is nothing more but a fringe sport here, i know at least 7 sports with bigger active fanscenes (Football proper, Handball, Basketball, Biathlon, Ice Hockey, Motorsports (mainly F1) Track and Field). That you sold out a stadium in a country with 80 million people doesnt make us the market you think we are.
For me, Veilguard was a disappointment because the aesthetic just didn't feel like it belonged in the dragon age world. And even more, there wasn't nearly enough party banter for me to grow attached to my companions.
By party banter, you mean the annoying political condescension towards the player. And I'm talking about a specific ugly horned fiend that I WISHED was not part of the story because of how insufferable she was.
Honestly EA sputtering out would be better for Dragon Age and Mass Effect. The More Pressure that's on them, the more likely they are to try to sell what they perceive are dead end investments like DA and ME, thus more likely that we can get these IPs into the hands of dev studios that actually give a shit about the games they're making.
@@wendynerd1199I hope so, but I believe they are more interested in building their own IP's. It would be a huge undertaking to unfuck the damage that's already been done (at least with dragon age).
@@videogamerlexis I'd be interested to see what Nacon would do with Dragon Age, tbh. They published Greedfall 2 after digging Spiders out of their own rot, and I know it's been a hot minute since Styx Shards of Darkness came out, but come on. I could see THAT vibe working quite well for a DA resurrection.
@ The timeline says -20.07% "past month", it does not say 29 days, it says January 29 which I assume was the date at which the screenshot was taken. There are no disclaimers that says they're either counting from December 29 or from January 1. Regardless, it's irrelevant because I can only see and comment based on what the video shows me at the time and at that time, it showed me -20% and yet he said 15% Funny how you come in a day later and talk about 5% which neither of us mentioned... Like, what?
@@Grumpy_ol_Gamer I think you're making a clutter in your head... Their stock did not go down 15% in one day. If you look at the graph it shows the major drop is lasting for 3 days from January 21st to January 23rd which is a 3-day span where you can divide that 15% by those 3 days, 5% a day for 3 days is 15%. But I don't care much for what happens over the course of one day, I look at the months and EA has had bigger monthly drops than 20% before. September-October 2018 EA dropped 25% in one month, but they got back up again. I agree with Bellular that this is their largest daily drop, but monthly speaking this ain't their worst.
And here I am, super duper glad Bioware didn't make Baldur's Gate 3. Don't get me wrong, I and II were utter joys in my youth (I'm old, you see) and utterly fantastic, but god damn, imagine missing out on BG3 as it is today. Try filtering that game through an Anthem/DAVg lens.
Wierd. I had the opposite experience with Baldur's Gate III. I loved the first two because they were very deep, amazibg games but were real time instead of turn-based like most others of that style. I've tried to get into multiple turn-based games, but almost none did it for me. When I heard Baldur's Gate III was turn-based, I was out. So if another studio had developed as real time like the old ones, I'd probably have bought it.
@@cc0767 the studio of Theseus. I did hear that EA was trying to bring back the big guns for ME5. I wonder if they will be allowed the same creative freedom as they had before EA took over. Somehow I doubt it.
@@tenpoundburrito The real-time in BG1 and 2 was optional at best (space bar). And what is closer to D&D... real-time combat or turn based... Don't even answer that. But it's the writing though. Try to imagine BG3 with its excellent characters and plot and compare that to the shite people Dragon Age 2024 produced.
Saying Veilguard had "unfair expectations" is ridiculous and laughable. Almost 10 years development, multiple hundreds of millions invested, with a franchise that historically makes gangbuster sales. I said before- and I'll say again- 3 million was NOT their expectation because 3 million is insanely low. That doesn't break even on development. If anything the demand should have been HIGHER.
@ Exactly. They did expect similar numbers to Inquisition. I do remember that statement of them too. Telling the investors now they only expected 3 million copies is a plain lie. Especially if you know, they need at least to sell 5.7 million copies for full price to break even.
@@XBluDiamondX Development hell is not what killed Veilguard. Bad writing, unfun repetitive gameplay, corridor maps, lack of any feeling of control destroyed Veilguard. Basically Bioware failing to do what they used to be known for.
EA's been riding the same old (ever so slightly updated) crap with FIFA for year and years, so if that audience is finally getting tired of the same old thing - then EA's going to be hurting for sure.
@@Eleriol84never understood why people bought sports games like FIFA, NBA and WWE year after year. To a lesser degree, FPS like CoD and Battlefield as well. Does the gameplay even change that much every iteration? Else you're just playing the same game over and over I really need some help understanding the logic behind these games being churned out so regularly
@@musketeer2727 because they create the illusion of being part of a community. Of playing the lastest with your friends. Of having the lastest roster update. Of being part of the meta. For an example, I was playing Halo 3 with a bunch of people on my friends list and a few randoms. Anyway, we're chating away and I mentioned that I'm way more into Gears of War but I just bought Halo 3 because I knew everyone would be playing it. A good number of people agreed and long story short we decided to play Gears after the match was over. I understand where people who are big into competitive online sports gaming (and FPS) are coming from.
@@musketeer2727 my friend play Fifa a lot and the only reason he get the newer versions is for the roster of players, everyone who is into football want to play with the most accurate version of their favorite teams, people dont play Fifa because they like Fifa, they play it because they are fans of the sport, same with NBA or Madden. My friend didnt bought the last Fifa tho, he said it was ass.
Dragon age the veilguard was just an awful game. The series is supposed to be an RPG, but suffers from much worse writing and little player agency compared to the previous entries. When people criticized it the devs retaliated with personal attacks against the players. Just doesn't work.
These people will only find out due to struggling. BS can only exist in a bubble for so long, until it’s for all to see. Also from marketing prospective, Dragon Veilguard did much worse than meeting 50% of expectations. Considering if they’re using the least “factually” bad thing to appease stockholders.
"Engaged" is such a weasel word. It's exactly the same BS Bethesda pulled with Starfield when they counted people who tried it on Gamepass as exactly equivalent to people who paid $70 for it (including those who refunded it.)
5:45 Remember, Failguard has been exactly 70% on Steam since like day 1 despite the fact recent reviews are always "mixed" at around 60%. Same with "critic" websites. Failguard has kept a stable 70% rating EVERYWHERE, because they delete reviews to make it so.
I'm going to tinfoil hat some things. I think what we're witnessing is that gaming has gone from a golden age of talent where it was a niche industry full of people passionate about making games, to a time where "game developer" is just another job you have in order to keep the lights on, and the business is dominated by companies who only care about the finances. But the upside of this is that the technology and tooling now exists so that those passionate developers and/or small teams can make decent quality games that focus on the things that matter rather than predatory business practises that squeeze the most money out of gamers. I would much rather take a punt on an indie game these days than a AAA.
For the Sims players, EA's reckless disregard of a player base is no surprise. For years, they've been abusing the Sims 4 players with their expansion packs, stuff packs, and other features that should have already been implemented in the game.
@@DarkDestroyerHDxYeh, I actually were on EA side in the decision to rejecting the FIFA license. FIFA is more greedy and corrupt ttan EA and they requested $1 billion for a 4 year license (basically $250 million/year) up from the previous $150 million/year. Initial intent was to at least double the previous license fee.
@@m84winzi FIFA is absolutely one of the few organisations more greedy than EA, and definitely more corrupt, but in this case EA was the greedier one. They thought that the value of the brand, which is what FIFA brings to the table and has created and invested in, wasn't worth a relatively small amount in a vastly profitable cash cow. Turns out they were wrong and that handing over a bigger slice of the pay would have made them more money. From FIFA's perspective, they've seen EA increasingly large piles of money from FIFA's brand and wanted a share in that growth too. It's not that unreasonable tbh. If anything the way in which this has played out and how the FC games have underperformed has shown that FIFA may have been being conservative with what they thought the brand was worth given that EA shed $800m a year in profit not $250m.
FINALLY. The first person who actually says the correct thing. The stock went down because selling gambling to kids was down. Not because Bioware failed to deliver a good game again. Have been shaking my head at all the bad takes for the past week.
Just some useful context: the DA team has had a chunk of turnover since the original games I liked came out. For example, the creative director from Dragon Age origins joined a studio that just released their first game: Eternal Strands.
Remove all the veteran writers from Bioware to cut costs because they get paid the most. The writing in Biowares game is absolutely terrible and the game sells well. WOW who could have POSSIBLY seen this coming?!
Not going to lie, I was more than a bit exasperated by all the channels that made it sound like Veilguard was the big reason EA stocks went down when it was a rounding error when compared to FC 25.
Yeah FC 25 has been a disaster. It's so bad they've been selling it for $20 and less on the console stores and Steam lately. Someone gifted it to me over the holidays; I played for about two hours before going back to FC 24 (which I got free with a PS+ subscription).
That's Triple AAA scene and due to incompetent leadership thanks to prioritizing greed over quality products. Indie scene and AA developers are doing very well for themselves.
The decline tends to start when the businesses go from private-owned to public-owned. When you need to appease shareholders, staying solvent is no longer enough, you need to constantly make more and more money. Which kills the risk-taking needed in business.
@@stefanradebach2889 Even indie devs are starting to show some cracks in the foundation-Hyperlight Breaker had a downright Cyberpunk-level launch disaster into Early Access and the Celeste devs just canceled their follow-up game.
Square hasn't made projections for their last four games. It's not just Western devs struggling. The cost to make a video game is too high for many big devs to make their money back anymore which is why indies are starting to become more prevalent again.
Thank you SO much for pointing out that for most normal people, company names like EA and Konami are basically invisible! I try to get this across to a LOT of people in the gaming culture, but no, Fallout is NOT a cultural touchstone (at least not before the TV series, and even them, Amazon Prime is a bit more niche than Netflix). Nobody outside gaming circles has any clue what a Sebembermoth is, or why he's obsessed with Clouds. That person you bored to death with details about the game on the bus? Sure they know, but you didn't personally talk to every single person did you? This is why for all the sales of Final Fantasy games, it doesn't come CLOSE to the sales of Feetball of whatever flavor, or the latest issue of Call of Shooty. We live in a particularly large information silo, and while video games are more popular than they've ever been, most people only casually touch them. You know what game my family knows the name of most? Jackbox. THAT is the most well known instant brand recognition they have. They don't have a clue what even Skyrim is, that eternal cockroach of gaming? Just blank stares. They know Mario. They know Sonic. They know The Pikachu. But, they don't even know who LINK is. I recommend looking up videos of people showing average people "on the street" pictures of various Smash Bros characters. It'll be very eye opening when you see them look at Link and say "elf guy? Lord of the Rings?" Basically, if there isn't a smash hit blockbuster movie about it, and it isn't covering every single store shelf in merchandise around the holidays, they have no clue. I do think it's pretty amusing that younger players of the Madden series just think it's a word for "big chaotic event", or even just "just the thing they named the games", and have no clue it's named after an actual person.
Note that DA Origins sold 3 million units (we'll average that to roughly $150-$180 million in revenue) and probably had a dev budget in the mid tens of millions. That means it likely cleared $100 million in profit. Not counting DLC. Veilguard had "engaged" 1.5 million players... Which includes the free trial of the game from the EA App... So sales revenue was likely well under $100 million. The dev budget was almost certainly in the hundreds of millions, meaning the game likely lost EA tens to hundreds of millions. Saying it underperformed might imply that it merely wasn't profitable enough... That's not what happened here. I guess "pulling a Barv" wasn't the answer. 😂 But yeah, paired with EA Sports starting to weaken after years of delivering nearly no innovation, it's no surprise their stock tanked.
I guess the people responsible for the direction of DA:tV (including, as the least important but nonetheless annoying decision, putting "the" in the title, contradicting the established naming convention) have some push-ups to do to apologize to their higher-ups.
Who would have guessed that making games to pursue infinite growth instead of for fun, or heck even just deliver a quality and functional product, would bring a slope after a peak
To quote Stirling "They don't just want money, they want all the money. Profit isn't enough, it has to be more profit than last year, ever year, forever" And to get there EA has been making more and more sequels. More specifically, formulaic slop appealing to "everyone" rather than the actual audience.
Ladies and Gentleman, let this be the day we all know, if the idiots of EA does not change their ways, it will dip down WAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY more XDDDDDDDDDDDD
@@id2k. oh the both getting a headstart, GOOD THING bethesda was bought by Microsoft or they would be hopping that ballon too XD still hate that they still let the lying soab Howard and KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID Pagliario on board
I have to disagree, without their monopoly EA sports games are kinda just low-quality shovelware. If Konami can actually make a semi-competent FIFA game there is a VERY real possibility that EA FC could go entirely belly up unless they massively overhaul the game. Which they won't, because effort costs money and requires talent, meanwhile EA Sports refuses to invest money into their products and has no talent remaining because paying talented people also costs money.
The problem is traditionally licenced shovelware out sells non licenced quality. One thing Konami and FIFA will have to do is use FIFA tournaments like the World Cup, Confederations Cup, FIFA Club World Cup, ect to have a product for every year or to make a subscription viable.
I’m a predominantly FC player; and now their stock has tanked it, they’re doing positive things in FC, I personally hope everyone sees through their pathetic attempts to claw back player engagement now they need money and they go bust
What are your thoughts on FC 25? I received it as a gift for Christmas, and played about two hours before going back to FC 24. I like playing with sim conditions, and the sim settings for 25 are just broken, even setting custom sliders doesn't help the problem (I think custom sliders mess with their "sim" settings and screw everything up).
Re: The sims, with real competition coming out this year plus EA's continued enshitification of the franchise (releasing broke ass, buggy content and then maybe patching it a year or two down the line), constant broken live service events/battle passes, and now, releasing The Sims 1 and 2 in a broken unplayable mess, that's another pillar I wouldn't personally want to lean on right now.
They're, for some inexplicable reason, having to learn two hard lessons. 1: you tell your employees what to do, not the other way around 2: you can make garbage, but you can't make customers pay you for it.
I very rarely buy AAA games anymore. The product, although visually astonishing, is often gutted with compromises to the intense corporate interest of the publisher. Micro transactions, content cut for DLC, Live Services that aren’t that great. I’d much rather buy games from developers that don’t have to sacrifice creative vision and execution in the name of squeezing out a few more dollars. So many of my favorite games in recent years haven’t been flashy AAA games, they’ve been little indie projects with a heart and soul to them. Corporate interests, in my opinion, destroyed AAA. I just hope that Indie Developers can resist the temptation to sell out to Private Equity and such so that we don’t end up creating a new generation of awful corporate games companies…
Was going to comment about this. There are still dividend companies out there, quite a lot actually. But those ONLY occur in saturated markets. I would expect in the coming years to see companies such as Ubisoft convert to dividends where “line goes up” is no longer really feasible
Something you didn't mention Inzoi the life sim by krafton is coming out in early access in a few months. It has the potential to distrupt EA's dominance in life sim games which has 80+ million players
so far I haven't seen a reason to jump ship for it. everything I enjoy the sims games for Inzoi sorely lacks. I'm glad realism players will love it but that bores the ever loving crapola out of me. I play to live the fantasy life as a Vampire, Werewolf or Alien living a life and all the other wack shenanigans that comes with it. no other games do that the way the sims franchise does and so far all the sims killers that's supposed to be coming don't even bother with this side of the community - only the realism players who complain regardless of what features you give them because it's never enough or how they expected it. if Whatever teams are still working on sims play their cards right & keep adding to the weirder wacker side? they'll still be worthy competition
My heart bleeds for companies like EA and Ubisoft, it really does. Who would have thought that delivering ultra anti-consumer monetisation wrapped up in highly ideologically challenged, UTTER DROSS games would have eventually been their downfall. They're falling off the cliff because investors have lost faith in the AAA gaming market, that's all. Fairly easy to see. Also, Dragon Age is a huge IP with many, many fans that have been waiting a long time. The sales targets weren't wild. If the new mass effect game turns out to be amazing i wouldn't be surprised if it cracked 10 million sales after 6 months. Veilguard was so bad no one wanted it, even the people that wanted it.
3:54 This is the problem. If there's one thing they should be good at, THEY SHOULD BE GOOD AT MAKING GAMES. Playing the market can only take you so far when the consumer doesn't like your product.
For the American audience, FIFA is such a big part of the branding that I didn't know what he was talking about when he mentioned FC. And I am a lifelong gamer, with many EA titles played . I wasnt even aware that they'd lost the license.
Honestly, i think this is good for the industry. The game industry being less dominated by companies with such reliable revenue they are dictated purely by investor demands is a bad thing. I'd say this is bad news for Koomani but, I thought they forgot about video games for pachinko machines so there isn't much to ruin.
Yup, it could be really good for the industry indeed. And hand on heart - who really cares about the greedy publisher? It's the brilliant studios with passionate talent and their projects we care about. Not the suits whipping them to maximize profit in betrayal of the fundamental creative vision before shutting them down, even if the game is a financial success. Let them go, no one cares if these people are successful or not.
Blaming some marketing firm for the Veilguard trailer’s impact on the game’s reception is a bit unfair. As bad as it was, it 100% is representative of the tone of the actual game.
"That includes people playing on the EA play subscription".... not quite the full story. It also doesn't include resale of console disks which was high. Shop returns of the game to 2nd hand bins was large because the game was bad. There is a reason it's 1.5m players and not 1m+ sales. Secondary sales from regretted purchases hurt margins hard.
Who whouldve thought designing games to generate maximum profit rather than a balance between maximizing profit while also spending a bit of money to keep players happy would drive players away
The Mass Effect Legendary Edition really feels like an indirect apology from EA, I mean its on sale for as little as 7€. 3 Games. Remastered. All DLCs. And thats from EA?! Other publishers milk the shit out of old games and low effort "remasters".
They are milking it. They have kept having discounts and this is to scrape the last bit of money they can from those who wouldn't buy it when it was 50/66/75/80% off.
@michaelh878 In my world milking is Nintendo keeping mediocre games, or even worse mediocre ports of 15 year old mediocre games, at full price for years. If "milking" means 90% discounts then yeah baby, milk me dry.
This actually could've been them padding revenue to lessen the impact from Veilguard. They needed to artificially boost the numbers and use vague language ("engagements") to mask the fact that Veilguard essentially pulled a Titanic. Effectively burning other IPs to keep the investors warm.
@@MunyuShizumi I guess people who wanted to buy the Legendary Edition would have done so by now anyway. I got in via PS+, but since I cancelled my subscription I bought it on PC this time. I doubt a 7€ title makes much of a difference.
Honestly I think being public is the main systemic issue here - and in other industries as well. You can be a company making decent profits every year but somehow if you change to a company making annual losses but showing "number go up" on the charts you are better? I mean why is Roblox a better bet than EA? They've consistently made losses their entire public existance. The stock market was a stupid idea.
If you hate the fact that trans people exist, you'll get to miss out on a fun game. (PS--I'm old enough to remember people hating origins. And 2. And Inquisition.)
@gnomeDruid there are glaring other massive issues with the game. I for one can't stand how they desecrated the lore. It's good for the gaming industry this slop flopped
@ same story with alot of other games. Vampire the Masquerade for example. The original had queer people in it, gamers like to conveniently forget that part.
I believe the "3 million" target number for DAV was most likely after the producers realized there was quite a bit of backlash and started playing "catch up." I don't think it would be a stretch to say BioWare was looking for upwards of 10 million copies of DAV sold, with 5-10 in the first 3 months given the success of the previous games.
Gamers: "we didn't like veilguard because of sloppy aesthetic and narrative direction."
EA execs: Hm, so what you're saying is, there's no market for single player narrative driven titles? Make more live service third person shooters and sports games?"
Swen Vincke: "what are you guys smoking"
@@Mel0D They don't even do BR's or sports games right
Sloppy aesthetic and narrative direction is pretty much a euphemism at this point.
Gamers: "We want Spore"
EA: Who would ever want such a game?
A certain Roblox game called Creatures of Sonaria: 💰😶
@@WamdiSunka if i was speaking euphemistically from a presumably right wing slant, i promise you, swen vincke and bg3 would not be the positive example i used.
game's about as fruity as they come, and also a masterpiece.
Nothing, they don't care because single-player narrative-driven titles sell only once and that's it. Corporations like EA don't want temporary-money, they want constant-streams of money forever.
The CEOs still don't understand that good games make money but money doesn't make good games.
@@ShibuyaRollCall money does takes part at making good game thought, among many factors
I think what op I saying is that they literally think/thought they’re too big to fail. 😅
Money buys great marketing which can sell crap games forever. Just look at the production investment in even the in-game adverts for Call Of Duty, they've gone and dressed up real models and done photo shoots in fantastical clothing and hardware.
They must be making money hand over fist! But they're doing the FIFA thing where they sell literally the same core code year after year after year
@@ArariaKAgelessTraveller Money is required to make games, but only because people require money for work.
If people preferred payment in livestock, then livestock would be required to make games. Because it's PEOPLE who make the products a business sells, not financing.
@@ThePlayerOfGames some people just never learn about how these games are made yet they still buy that “new” installment every single time and just give them more money in hopes that it will get better but it never does I have told my friends about the fifa thing and they agree yet buy the releases every time get bored then turn to the new cod when it comes out and every time I usually buy the cods for the story anyway on deal but they have gotten worse by the releases and my friend that plays cod I told them to not give them any more money yet a unicorn skin came out and he said he bought it cause it was funny I told him that he hates fortnite yet he buys these skins like it’s Fortnite it’s hypocritical and he yelled at me for giving him financial advice
EA milked the Apex Legends cash cow to death rather than give players what they have been begging for. I am not sorry for them at all.
Their last Battlefield also underperformed.
You mean no Titanfall 3? The game that everybody wanted?
@Kishin-yh7qv not sure why they can't do both? The heroes in Apex are so ugly btw, why not make them normal looking?
@@NeonXXP One of the saddest parts IMO, they struck gold with it and the first few years had amazing support. Nowadays they just recycle the same content and events endlessly, and in a panic can't figure out if they need to cater to the more experienced players (which constitute most of the playerbase by now) or newer/more casual players.
But the whole thing seems to be ran by some skeleton crew nowadays and we can see the writing on the wall if it keeps going on like this.
Here here on that. I love Apex! Played since season one, average rank plat with a few diamond rankings sprinkled in but... fuck the last 2 or 3 seasons just been handled so poorly I am not playing anymore nor paying.
Imagine. The 2 company the most into the whole "you should be comfortable not owning your games" are about to not be companies anymore. Who would have thunk.
Microsoft butchered the ancient baby that was Activision.
The other 2 had to join their brother in the grave at some point 😂
I guess they should be comfortable not owning any earnings now...
@@MaddJakd However Microsoft did an amazing thing with the Age of Empires series.
The definitive editions are great and the playerbase is stable.
@@MaddJakd Butchered? How many years has it been since MS aquired Activision?
If you were to say bethesda, I would understand, though they were shit waay before Starefield. Fallout 76 was the last straw for me , so when they released that dumpsterfire of a game. I was not surprised.
@daemiax I mean, when that many studios end up getting killed simply because MS suddenly realizes they spent too much, including many working on stuff folk actually were hyped for, its definitely not good.
Honestly, Activision seemed like the lesser of 3 evils lol.
Blizzard, Ubisoft, EA, Sony, a lot of big players are feeling the heat. Shit is finally catching up to them. VALVE has done nothing and yet they are still winning. Valve not becoming a public company like all these other big players is their saving grace.
Publicly traded games companies were definitely a mistake, I hope that other developers take note.
Valve knows they literally can't lose here. If AAA gaming goes away, yeah, Valve will lose a ton of money because the overall size of the audience will probably shrink, but as long as they can get a 30 percent cut of whatever's left, that's more than enough to keep the lights on. And let's face it, not _all_ or even most of the casuals will just up and quit gaming. If anything, they'll get curious about other stuff they can play and graduate to becoming actual enthusiasts.
Valve getting sued left and right for their anti-competitive/monopolistic practices, what the hell are you talking about lmao. Steam fanboys are easily the most delusional people on Earth. There's a recent video about it on this very channel in fact!
It helps that Valve is privately owned and not on the stock market. It means that Valve isn't beholden to the endless growth that Wall Street demands.
Abolish the stock market.
@@SimuLord The audience doesn't shrink, it moves to different titles, which also are on Steam, as everything is on Steam. Valve cannot lose with the way they are set up currently.
Honestly my interest in Dragon Age: Veilguard plummeted when I heard they weren't importing any of our choices from past games, then died when I heard how they justified it... Ouch.
That is Canon thats the hurtfull part,
PLEASE DECANON VEILGUARD PLEASE!!!
It was so immoral how they waited for only a few weeks before launch to admit it too. Scum company
Inquisition already pulled the trigger on Dragon Age as a viable franchise when the end of Inquisition completely INVALIDATED every choice you made in every prior game.
@@GeorgeMonet do you mean the end of Inquisiton or the end of Trespasser?
The character choices was the deciding factor for you? Lol. For the rest of us it is the obnoxious political and social narratives they want to beat into us
A market correction in the games industry can't come any sooner!
Hopefully the Trump admin will begin fining any American gaming companies where DEI has replaced competence.
Edit since yt won't allow replies for some reason: @joanofsharc maybe it isn't so bad they all leaned into it at the same time, we might not have another term of Orange man had they not upset so many people all at once
@@id2k. EA was awful 10-15 years ago, before they started falsely pandering to people. stop blaming minorities for rich execs making bad choices. we hate these companies too
@@id2k. those games were already bad. they were already cutting corners, firing senior devs, other devs leaving due to working conditions. the diversity stuff was a recent hail mary at trying to make more sales off of people like me, but most of us didn't buy it. we hate these companies too.
Keep in mind who the "market correction" is going to hurt. The workers that did all the work suffer, while the people at the top just sail off in their golden parachutes happy as a clam before diving into some other industry and screwing that one up next. No lessons will be learned, because they accomplished their objective, which is to kill that golden goose and extract all the gold inside. Not a single one of these CEOs actually care about games or whether the game industry survives. THEY'LL walk away with a mountain of cash ready to jump into another company, and that's all that matters.
I actually don't care very much about the games "industry" i.e. big companies due to the gaming market having so many brilliant easily-1000-hour games made by 1-10 people and we have a lot more on the way.
The best games "industry" companies are the ones with curtailed dev-counts like iD and Valve who keep on chugging along.
The cheat sheet is:
-Care about your developers and their projects
-Have sane expectations for their projects
-Don't be greedy
Its almost like all of these are very reasonable and frankly expected
You forgot also making good games
Instructions unclear: I think you said:
-milk gamers for every cent they have
-blame them when they inevitably react negatively
EA, Ubisoft and co (probably)
Those three things go against ALL CORPORATE VALUES lol infinite growth. Infinite line go up.
From a solo dev, move people onto new projects before the current one ships. Prototype, and go wide - no layoffs. Once you have 2-3 possibilities, estimate the scope and pick a project.
So basically, dont go public.
Just noticed that EA dropped zero effort Sims & Sims 2 "Legacy Collections" on Steam, no achievements, no graphical improvements, just overpriced 20+ year old games being rereleased. Desperate much ?
@@EunoiaAnrkyuk the fact that most of the people who bought it still have some issues runining the game, speaks volume of how EA is just a shitty company who milk their fanbase cuz they can. Re-release for newer OS, but didn't even solved the problem in the first place smh
Meanwhile GOG released Dino Crisis 1 & 2 with updated resolutions, bug fixes and better joypad support. 🧐
@@Ander01SE
Maybe the know pre-00's EA catalog will be on their site soon enough, no better time to poach customers from Origin.
There were clear graphical improvements to the Sims 1 in terms of textures. I bought and installed both last night. But they did not fix the neighbourhood view, that EA intro, or the UI scaling. Actual gameplay looks great and loads fast and clean, but they just ignored a couple of things that would have so easily made it look clean and modern. 🤦
They gave it away for free on Origin years ago to.
The thing is the line CANNOT GO UP ANYMORE, player spending in video games, adjusted for inflation, has been pretty stagnant for decades. We're just getting fewer and fewer games as each one demands more from us, and offers less in return.
The sheer shocking incompetent management from EA when it comes to it's single player games does make a lot more sense when you mentioned just how small a part of the numbers they actually comprise.
If that! At best it's flat. At worse (for --leaches-- boards of directors and investors): dropping. When was the last AAA or high end AA game that was: new and had hype, vs a slow crawling drunken train wreck? Lets see: Robocop, Dragons age, GTA 6*(when ever that happens) and... what else? the next chapter to FF7: re-imaged: a nearly decade old game coming out in massive chunks (or just play the kind of dated looking 2 dollar one with echos mod) possible indiana jones, but I for one can't think of much else. I was more stoked to find out there's a few bad ass saturn emulators that reached massive milestones, PCSX2 did some kick ass back end work to get rediculously compatible: and that opened up a huge back library OG games (some that aged shockingly well)... when I have more fun with, I don't know say: downwell, that was made by a few people for beer money. Than call of ducky number 993818238812255 the market is fucked. How the hell did we go fram NFL Hitz, MK 2, WC 2 (then Warcraft online that became WoW: and that initialy set guiness records): to: practically sleeping through NFL game with a few foster shifts number 992391222? When Mutantfootball league made by a AA studio, is a little more fun than madden 2024, shits fucked.
I’m still salty about TitanFall and Dead Space so much I’ve actively talked to the guys who run my 401k, no buying stocks in EA or other companies like Ubisoft (I remember Unity). You can’t just not buy their games, you gotta go out of your way to make sure they never see a cent of you money.
Another reason to be mad with EA is how they acted with the Alice Series. Search up "Alice Asylum" and look at that games development or lack thereof
@@DA7274 I sincerely admire your pettiness as a fellow Dead Space fan
The problem is that people love spending money on skins and loot a lot more than an actual game. I read somewhere that a single item in call of duty or WoW or something… sold more money than all of StarCraft
@@Mmmmmk247 StarCraft 2, but you're right. It was a wow skin by memory.
The sad part is that we (as a whole) trained these companies to think like this. And while I doubt their a many watching his video who bare personal responsibility, as Steve from Gamers Nexus said "if you are watching this, you are almost certainly an enthusiast and the enthusiast community is a small part of the overall market."
I will say however that enthusiasts are often the canary in the coal mine so to speak and the industry would probably do well to pay more attention to us. Then again, by the time the problems have reached the surface those making the decisions are probably moved on or will get a golden parachute for their troubles, so I guess it is what it is.
what happened with dead space?
Seeing the companies that damaged gaming for years finally get their comeuppance brings a smile to my face - that quickly turns to a frown as I realize it won't be the executives who led the companies astray that will get the short end of the stick, but the developers just doing their best...
TBH we've been saying for years that putting all your money into smaller and smaller numbers of games with higher and higher budgets means stagnation. What does EA actually put out any more? Battlefield: Another One? Sports Game: Another One? They murdered anything that wasn't mass market generic shit, just like Ubisoft.
RIP, Dead Space.
@@truecaliber1995Rip Maxis and Westwood
Um, excuse me, but you forgot 15 more $40 Sims Expansions packs featuring 98% bugs and 2% content. How very dare!
@@wendynerd1199 Remember that thing in the previous Sims game? Just buy the DLC again!
@@ImBoredToo I still hate them for that, they killed westwood and ruins C&C.
Also want to point out that the sims community is quite unhappy as well. If they continue to put out new packs that break the game, continue to not fix bugs from old packs that break the game, continue to ignore what the player base is looking for, then that pillar will be crumbling as well.
no, only the loudest complainers. the sims community has never been a fantastic trove of happiness even when sims 1 was popular 😅 been playing since 2 and no joke simmers just whinge about everything and are never happy at this point. they whinged with 2 and carried on with 3 and you cannot even say you like 4 without getting torn apart. they haven't changed and the few positives in the community are burried by all the BS. over half the community has sucked long before sims 4 in terms of being complainers.
Yeah, as a Sims player definitely wasn't impressed when I heard they have no plans for making Sims 5. They could make an infinitely better game with the technology they have now and revive the fanbase... And still have players buying Sims 4 and its packs (because it would obviously have a lot more content to start). But they just want to keep milking players with half-assed packs until they eventually kill the franchise.
It's crazy that the Sims is one of their biggest moneymakers, but they're more invested in pumping out expensive, poor quality packs, over spending a little bit money and time making much better packs with much better reviews, which would end up making them more revenue (because people would consistently buy). Because of their track record, I know I and a lot of other players will read and watch reviews before even considering buying a pack.
@@meikahidenoriI don't hate Sims 4, but I think it's completely ridiculous to call it just "whinging". EA is extremely predatory in their behaviour to the gamebase and clearly just see dollar signs over quality.
This has been a long time coming, the writing was on the wall and EA had years and earful of feedback to course correct. At this point its just sheer neglect and incompetence. I hope it continues bc im enjoying every second of it.
It's more entertaining than anything they've released since the first Dragon Age game.
its like watching a grown man cry
Honestly I was so surprised they even made the Dead Space remake and that it was great, it gave me hope EA might have changed I was wrong
I love the free market! You f*ck up and you get dumped by the wayside. Then someone new comes in and offers things you were lacking. That's how it should be. Enough of these megacorps who can continue to sell garbage products with no consequences.
2:45 "This is not to say that EA is running out of money and are screwed..." Yeah but we can dream, Bellular. We can dream.
Constant growth is mathematically impossible. Even a child should be able to see that.
@@StormsparkPegasus wrong. Constant growth is easy because of constant inflation.
Haha, tell that to Wall Street
100% Agreed, yet that’s how america wants a capitalist system to work and why things are so bad now 🙃. Number must go up at all times, must always appease the shareholders for short term gains :)
Pleb take
You can grow as fast as a population of customers grows, but that assumes you never have any attrition with your existing customer base. And when a market shows potential, you can bet your last dollar (or Ubisoft's last dollar HEY-O) that you're not maintaining your market share against all the new entrants.
What seems insane to me is FIFA has been hemorrhaging QUALITY for years. Why would you risk your biggest cash cow, tightening the belt on development, cutting features, making utterly terrible games. Sure, 95% of the playerbase want their football no matter the quality, but any competition, any instability in the market and your entire business is threatened. Spend that bit of extra cash making a great game every year and you don't have this problem, they may even have kept the FIFA license.
Lol, it's not as if FIFA looked at their games and pulled the license because they weren't good enough. The only thing FIFA cares about is money. FIFA demanded a license fee in the region of 200mil iirc, EA decided that they didn't need it (it's just for the name, licensing for clubs/players is handled separately).
In one hand we are talking to rise the pricing games to 100 euros because the develop cost blablabla and in the other hand we have this same companies having 7 billions profit. Stop the greed
Lets not forget upper management raking in triple digit millions in salary and bonusses. If that got slashed by just two thirds, the margins would look SO much better.
Yeah if the numbers have to improve every year at what point is it just too much on the consumer. It literally just has to crash eventually.
I rather support indie devs on patreon.
@@JoseLopez-ej9ir People will 100% buy games at that price. Only a small minority will have the willpower to say no to that.
Greed? Lol, like you're not greedy. You don't even understand.
We gotta change how we talk about layoffs. Companies arn't hit with layoffs, they indulge in them. Companies like to say they where hit by layoffs cause it makes it sound like something that happened to them, rather than a choice they actively made.
That's a geat point. Simultaneously, they WILL actually be hit by layoffs in a way that they don't seem to be understanding, in the sense that getting rid of their talent because they think they can exploit less experienced developpers means a huge brain drain and a loss in community, as well.
To know the decline of quality sports video games is to know the decline of the industry as a whole. I’m glad that even the casual gaming audience that plays stuff like EA FC, Madden, etc are starting to spend less on EA’s go-to way of screwing over players.
I don't even understand EA's model for sports video games.
Why was (since they lost the rights) FIFA and others not just a yearly DLC/game-pass? It seems like a model of game destined for it.
@@smalltime0 ok, so the business model is to get every cent out of gamers. To do this you team up with the rights holders (eg NFL and the teams). So you sign exclusive deals with them so nobody else can compete against you which keeps development costs down. To make sure they need to buy the latest one for roster updates and to play with their friends. Bonus points if you take away features and add in old ones every year.
Edit: "to make sure" instead of "Much sure"
@@smalltime0 FIFA rights don't really matter. That's just a game and the rights to make a world cup game every 4 years.
The real value is with the big leagues and the players and clubs in those leagues.
Sidenote: one good business strategy is to have exclusive rights that don't expire at the same time. This means that any new competitor would only have access to some of the rights if they entered the market. For example maybe you have an exclusive deal with La Liga (the top Spanish league) that expires in 2025 while at the same time having exclusive deals with Real Madrid and Barcelona that expire in 2026 and 2027 respectively. This means that any game that got the rights from La Liga to include them in their games would have to release their game without their biggest two clubs.
This has the bonus effect of making it harder for individual clubs and leagues to negotiate separate deals as you could offer significantly less for non exclusive deals.
Sorry for the wall of text. I couldn't think of a shorter way of saying it.
I can't remember who did it, but I think it was Angry Joe who did a side by side of NFL 2K (last seen on the PS2) and EA's Madden a decade later and the then current Madden game was found lacking in a boat load of areas, even on the newer hardware and over 10 years of development.
@@somethinglikethat2176 That’s probably Soft Drink TV
Infinite growth model is so F'n stupid. "Did you make money more than you spent, yes or no?". That should be all that matters.
The problem is that somewhere along the way the idea of "making money" got lost. For publicly trading companies the line "must go up" (that's what the investors - owners - demand) - but if a line goes up it means that either the company is expected to grow OR it's a bubble and the line going up is market's mistake, so to speak (which usually means that it will be corrected at some point).
In a healthy economy most major companies would be so-called dividend stocks (where you buy the shares expecting to earn money from your share of company's profits). Meanwhile in reality the biggest corporations of our time may well not even pay dividends at all and you're supposed to earn money through raising valuation... which is a startup model, essentially.
In most extreme cases the company doesn't even have a plan for becoming profitable at some identifiable point in the future - though this model did diminish as the interest rates went up and venture capital money became a bit less accessible.
It's the direct result of how dividends are taxed. For centuries the deal was you as an investor made money when the company made a profit and retuned that profit to you as a dividend. Now that's a terrible plan, tax-wise, so no one wants to do it. Instead, companies want to grow forever, because that's taxed in a very favorable way. When the tax laws changed in the 20th century, corporate governance was fundamentally broken and stable profits became a small niche of real estate and utility companies.
Not when the share purchase price requires profits to go up to be justified. You can clearly see it in this example: as soon as EA started looking like what you advocate, ie just a profitable company with stagnant growth, the share price dropped because no one can justify pricing in growth anymore. I'm not sure why that's hard to grasp. We might not like the outcomes, but the math and the incentives are very clear and straightforward.
@@SkorjOlafsen This guy gets it. The real levers and change is as ever: taxes and regulations.
This is something the government could review, but neither left/right of centre parties want to do it. Neither does the current far right guy in charge.
Not a surprise. EA started a games company, then got sold by its founder in the 90's. It became primarily a distributor with a predatory edge. It would buy up companies that could make good games by using the data it gained as a distributor of the games from those companies. This gave the rise to EA as a company that would bite off the proverbial heads of those companies and turn them into zombie departments that cranked out games of popular franchises or just shelving the titles in their portfolio without activity. (I call this phase 1 of the company development)
Phase two started with the success of the Sims where they learned that they could milk a game with cheap expansions. This was a sales breakthrough back in those days and set EA on a far, far darker pathway. They still made some good games in that era and even when the internet online era came on. They dabbled in micro transactions and mobile games that were basically shaft that extorted for money. (Which marks the end of phase two).
Phase three is the phase that finally created the downward spiral. Most of the talent left the company or left the second their studios were bought in the zero's. They failed to create good enough new games and their tainted brand compounds this. EA simply can't keep up with triple A titles and is not in indie level play either (they never were). So they have A or double A titles at most that simply don't cover cost. With the death of their soccer games they lost a lot of their main profit.
They have been rumored to want to be bought by the big guys for a while now (MS, Sony etc. etc.)- The real value of EA is not their developers, its their portfolio that has racked up a lot of game franchises over the years. Titles such as Alice, Battlefield, Burnout, The Sims, FC/Fifa, Dungeon Keeper, Mass effect, Command & Conquer, Dragon Age, Syndicate, Populous, Desert Strike, Wing Commander and many more. Some might be licensed games such as Star Wars (Wing Commander might also be there) but they still have lots of titles. The rest? They got developers but I am not certain how big that would be.
The crazy thing about Phase 2 is that EA also demonstrated that business models that nobody else had the capital to try without massive risk can work in gaming, and for companies that aren't EA, it created the possibility for amazing experiences.
I call it the "hobby shop model" because I'm old enough to remember model railroading, but you could just as easily call it the Sims model. Sell a basegame to build a userbase and make it nearly infinitely scalable through expansion DLC the same way you can get a simple railroad loop Lionel set for Christmas but the Lionel company (and third-party vendors) really made their money by getting people to spend their disposable income on scenery, track, rolling stock, and other stuff for their layout. Sound familiar? And not just The Sims, pretty much any popular hobbyist game with "Simulator" in the title...
What they mostly fail to realise is that it's PEOPLE, CREATIVE PEOPLE who make the good games, not miscellaneous robot staff. And every time they buy a company and cut corners, they loose the thing they bought in the first place.
In short, sports gamers-arguably the pinnacle of trash gaming-enabled EA to monopolize our favorite titles, ultimately ruining the experience for everyone else.
I do find it silly how many people are pinning this entirely on dragon age when EA is bleeding everywhere. Feels like all the big companies are starting to feel the heat recently. Nintendo’s the only one I haven’t heard too much trouble from, but they’re pretty secretive to begin with.
Nintendo as far as ive seen hasnt stopped making the games they always made like EA has where many of their big single player franchises are essentially dead
Unless something changed recently, I believe the investment side of Nintendo does so consistently well that their videogames and consoles would have to do historically bad to affect their bottom line.
Valve seem fine too, being a private company they aren't vulnerable to the will and whims of investors.
Nintendo actually did get in to trouble with the Switch 2 reveal. The company is not happy with how people really didn't care much for the trailer.
I dont get why someone else had to make Palworld, Nintendo you dropped the ball. Snooze you lose
Whats weird is they keep saying 3million now. But internal emails leaked show they were projecting upwards of 10million. So they did 15percent of top projection. They just keep saying 50percent trying to save their stock price
I think 3 million was their adjusted projection after the negative reaction to the trailer. 3mil was probably their worse case scenario. It just so happened that Veiguard flopped harder than they could have ever predicted.
That correct 10 million was the first announcment. But yah after that it is gone downhill
The Sims franchise is in trouble too - they JUST announced recently - like within the last month - there will be no Sims 5. EA is shooting themselves in the foot left and right here.
It might be the right call though, especially that they now have competition in the genre and I don't know how much more they can innovate the game other than graphics. You have players like me who loves 1-3 and think 4 is a soulless DLC money-grab, I have zero faith in a sims 5 game. Then you have the people who like sims 4, would they be happy basically starting over after spending hundreds of dollars on content?
Thousands of dollars*
Really? Sheesh
@@strawberrired 5 could easily be Sims 3.5 and people would be happy.
@@strawberrired I prefer Sims 4. Sims 3 is so laggy sadly. I hate the lack of worlds just as much as everybody else but unless they somehow can fix the issue with AI calcs killing frame rate idk.
Think they could still open up nearby lots though so maybe you only need to calculate 1/4 of each world or smth.
An oversimplified summary; Video game company discovers there are only so many people, with so much money.
“Its a game. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it” -Shawn Layden (former Sony chairman)
This is what happens when the majority listens. Your companies slowly bleed out.
Slowly is a bit of an understatement... more like violently hemorrhaging.
In a timeline where employees are no longer allowed to make public statements there would be fewer of such discussions but the resulting games would still be the same. The discussions are just a symptom.
Veilguard killed the Dragonage franchise. I couldn't stomach buying it after seeing the gameplay and cutscenes showing off its terrible writing. it wasn't a Dragonage game, It was a god of war/guardians of the galaxy combination. I don't think I will have the desire to buy anything with Dragonage in the title anymore.
Yeah, the dreadful death of a franchise. After sinking a ship it is hard to get people to order new tickets for the next ride. Even franchises like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings are on the verge of kissing the titanic right now.
It really seems like some of the people working on it didn't want to tell a Dragonage story, they wanted to tell their story and use the DA IP to get people to listen to it.
I still can't believe that product came out of a company of working adults. What a fucking mess
Frankly, I think somebody (if they wanted) could actually revive it BECAUSE the flop was so spectacular.
If the game was just thoroughly meh, a forgettable piece of under-delivered promises, it would be a more definitive franchise killer, in my opinion. A flop this hard, accompanied by the controversy, makes it less hopeless, really, because it creates a realistic avenue of - essentially - de-canonizing DA:tV and making a "Dragon Age 4 that you actually wanted and deserve", trying to play on DA:O nostalgia AND the anger towards DA:tV.
I'm not very optimistic, though. EA would need to sell the title first (and they do have some hoarder tendencies so it wouldn't be as cheap as it should in its current state) and whoever picks it up would be taking quite a bit of risk. So while I see revival as quite achievable, I doubt we'll see somebody try.
I think you are WAY to optimistic on college football. It may be the biggest thing in america ever, but it has literally no market at all outside america.
Fifa does just that. Fifa can sell globaly, anything american Football simply can not.
To be fair there is a small but steadily growing fan base for the NFL developing in Europe, so there may be more of a market than none at all. Still peanuts compared to fifa obv.
American football has a market in countries like Australia, the UK and Germany. They're not big markets for the game but they are there.
Of course that said, on the world stage the world game is king.
@@somethinglikethat2176 Hey there. Australian here. NFL and Madden does not have any market in Australia.
Outside of America, nobody cares about high school/college sports, except for people directly involved in them.
Same with American football.
@@somethinglikethat2176 As a german:
No you dont have us as a merket.
NFL is nothing more but a fringe sport here, i know at least 7 sports with bigger active fanscenes (Football proper, Handball, Basketball, Biathlon, Ice Hockey, Motorsports (mainly F1) Track and Field).
That you sold out a stadium in a country with 80 million people doesnt make us the market you think we are.
For me, Veilguard was a disappointment because the aesthetic just didn't feel like it belonged in the dragon age world. And even more, there wasn't nearly enough party banter for me to grow attached to my companions.
By party banter, you mean the annoying political condescension towards the player. And I'm talking about a specific ugly horned fiend that I WISHED was not part of the story because of how insufferable she was.
Honestly EA sputtering out would be better for Dragon Age and Mass Effect. The More Pressure that's on them, the more likely they are to try to sell what they perceive are dead end investments like DA and ME, thus more likely that we can get these IPs into the hands of dev studios that actually give a shit about the games they're making.
*Crosses fingers for a Larian buyout*
Take BioWare out of EA (And take EA's culture out of BioWare), and I think we'd get a much different end result...
@@wendynerd1199I hope so, but I believe they are more interested in building their own IP's. It would be a huge undertaking to unfuck the damage that's already been done (at least with dragon age).
Who would have the money to buy it out though? Virtually all studios are under some publisher
@@videogamerlexis I'd be interested to see what Nacon would do with Dragon Age, tbh. They published Greedfall 2 after digging Spiders out of their own rot, and I know it's been a hot minute since Styx Shards of Darkness came out, but come on. I could see THAT vibe working quite well for a DA resurrection.
0:20 Dropping 15%? I thought the graph showed a 20.07% drop...
@@z1mt0n1x2 the timeline is one month, so it lost 5% over the other 29 days
@ The timeline says -20.07% "past month", it does not say 29 days, it says January 29 which I assume was the date at which the screenshot was taken.
There are no disclaimers that says they're either counting from December 29 or from January 1.
Regardless, it's irrelevant because I can only see and comment based on what the video shows me at the time and at that time, it showed me -20% and yet he said 15%
Funny how you come in a day later and talk about 5% which neither of us mentioned... Like, what?
@@z1mt0n1x2 20% down in one month, 15% down in one day, it’s simple math
@@Grumpy_ol_Gamer I think you're making a clutter in your head...
Their stock did not go down 15% in one day. If you look at the graph it shows the major drop is lasting for 3 days from January 21st to January 23rd which is a 3-day span where you can divide that 15% by those 3 days, 5% a day for 3 days is 15%.
But I don't care much for what happens over the course of one day, I look at the months and EA has had bigger monthly drops than 20% before. September-October 2018 EA dropped 25% in one month, but they got back up again. I agree with Bellular that this is their largest daily drop, but monthly speaking this ain't their worst.
142.35 on 22nd, 118.58 on 23rd which is 16.7% drop
And here I am, super duper glad Bioware didn't make Baldur's Gate 3. Don't get me wrong, I and II were utter joys in my youth (I'm old, you see) and utterly fantastic, but god damn, imagine missing out on BG3 as it is today. Try filtering that game through an Anthem/DAVg lens.
I'd rather think about Joplin made through a Larian lens.
Bioware is just a name. Its the people who had passion and talent who made great games. Now its a different set of people at Bioware.
Wierd. I had the opposite experience with Baldur's Gate III. I loved the first two because they were very deep, amazibg games but were real time instead of turn-based like most others of that style.
I've tried to get into multiple turn-based games, but almost none did it for me.
When I heard Baldur's Gate III was turn-based, I was out. So if another studio had developed as real time like the old ones, I'd probably have bought it.
@@cc0767 the studio of Theseus. I did hear that EA was trying to bring back the big guns for ME5. I wonder if they will be allowed the same creative freedom as they had before EA took over. Somehow I doubt it.
@@tenpoundburrito The real-time in BG1 and 2 was optional at best (space bar). And what is closer to D&D... real-time combat or turn based... Don't even answer that.
But it's the writing though. Try to imagine BG3 with its excellent characters and plot and compare that to the shite people Dragon Age 2024 produced.
We should start calling "Investors"... "Opportunists". It's a much more suitable name.
Oh no! Live service money printers with predatory mechanics are going to go? Oh well, never mind.
"What new short-term, monetary gain gimmic will I invest in now??" 🤑
Saying Veilguard had "unfair expectations" is ridiculous and laughable. Almost 10 years development, multiple hundreds of millions invested, with a franchise that historically makes gangbuster sales. I said before- and I'll say again- 3 million was NOT their expectation because 3 million is insanely low. That doesn't break even on development. If anything the demand should have been HIGHER.
DEI killed "The Failguard". And atrocious, malicious "storytelling". He will never ever admit that.
@aahzmandiaz2767 Nah. 10 years of development hell is what killed it. I rarely see games in such a predicament be successful.
10 million was the first number they dropped a year ago before the Trailer and all
@ Exactly. They did expect similar numbers to Inquisition. I do remember that statement of them too.
Telling the investors now they only expected 3 million copies is a plain lie. Especially if you know, they need at least to sell 5.7 million copies for full price to break even.
@@XBluDiamondX Development hell is not what killed Veilguard. Bad writing, unfun repetitive gameplay, corridor maps, lack of any feeling of control destroyed Veilguard. Basically Bioware failing to do what they used to be known for.
EA's been riding the same old (ever so slightly updated) crap with FIFA for year and years, so if that audience is finally getting tired of the same old thing - then EA's going to be hurting for sure.
Minor upgrades every year and having to restart your ultimate team grind every time? How it lasted this long i just dont understand
@@Eleriol84never understood why people bought sports games like FIFA, NBA and WWE year after year. To a lesser degree, FPS like CoD and Battlefield as well. Does the gameplay even change that much every iteration? Else you're just playing the same game over and over
I really need some help understanding the logic behind these games being churned out so regularly
@@musketeer2727 because they create the illusion of being part of a community. Of playing the lastest with your friends. Of having the lastest roster update. Of being part of the meta.
For an example, I was playing Halo 3 with a bunch of people on my friends list and a few randoms. Anyway, we're chating away and I mentioned that I'm way more into Gears of War but I just bought Halo 3 because I knew everyone would be playing it. A good number of people agreed and long story short we decided to play Gears after the match was over.
I understand where people who are big into competitive online sports gaming (and FPS) are coming from.
@@musketeer2727 my friend play Fifa a lot and the only reason he get the newer versions is for the roster of players, everyone who is into football want to play with the most accurate version of their favorite teams, people dont play Fifa because they like Fifa, they play it because they are fans of the sport, same with NBA or Madden.
My friend didnt bought the last Fifa tho, he said it was ass.
Dragon age the veilguard was just an awful game. The series is supposed to be an RPG, but suffers from much worse writing and little player agency compared to the previous entries.
When people criticized it the devs retaliated with personal attacks against the players. Just doesn't work.
These people will only find out due to struggling. BS can only exist in a bubble for so long, until it’s for all to see.
Also from marketing prospective, Dragon Veilguard did much worse than meeting 50% of expectations. Considering if they’re using the least “factually” bad thing to appease stockholders.
Right. Does "engaged" count pre-orderers who canceled?
"Engaged" is such a weasel word. It's exactly the same BS Bethesda pulled with Starfield when they counted people who tried it on Gamepass as exactly equivalent to people who paid $70 for it (including those who refunded it.)
5:45 Remember, Failguard has been exactly 70% on Steam since like day 1 despite the fact recent reviews are always "mixed" at around 60%. Same with "critic" websites.
Failguard has kept a stable 70% rating EVERYWHERE, because they delete reviews to make it so.
They were a better company making better games when those games were lovingly crafted single player experiences.
I'm going to tinfoil hat some things.
I think what we're witnessing is that gaming has gone from a golden age of talent where it was a niche industry full of people passionate about making games, to a time where "game developer" is just another job you have in order to keep the lights on, and the business is dominated by companies who only care about the finances.
But the upside of this is that the technology and tooling now exists so that those passionate developers and/or small teams can make decent quality games that focus on the things that matter rather than predatory business practises that squeeze the most money out of gamers.
I would much rather take a punt on an indie game these days than a AAA.
Oh boi, first Ubisoft, now EA. I want them to get even more humbled.
For the Sims players, EA's reckless disregard of a player base is no surprise. For years, they've been abusing the Sims 4 players with their expansion packs, stuff packs, and other features that should have already been implemented in the game.
i didnt realize ea lost the fifa license and had to delist every single fifa game they ever made that must have hurt them hard
@@billyhatcher643 it was their choice. I think they had to pay around 300 million usd per year.
@@DarkDestroyerHDxYeh, I actually were on EA side in the decision to rejecting the FIFA license.
FIFA is more greedy and corrupt ttan EA and they requested $1 billion for a 4 year license (basically $250 million/year) up from the previous $150 million/year. Initial intent was to at least double the previous license fee.
@@m84winzi fr. The only organisation that were capable of being more greedy than EA was FIFA.
Would they lose much from old FIFA titles? I thought almost all of the sales would be in the first few months.
@@m84winzi FIFA is absolutely one of the few organisations more greedy than EA, and definitely more corrupt, but in this case EA was the greedier one. They thought that the value of the brand, which is what FIFA brings to the table and has created and invested in, wasn't worth a relatively small amount in a vastly profitable cash cow. Turns out they were wrong and that handing over a bigger slice of the pay would have made them more money. From FIFA's perspective, they've seen EA increasingly large piles of money from FIFA's brand and wanted a share in that growth too. It's not that unreasonable tbh. If anything the way in which this has played out and how the FC games have underperformed has shown that FIFA may have been being conservative with what they thought the brand was worth given that EA shed $800m a year in profit not $250m.
FINALLY. The first person who actually says the correct thing. The stock went down because selling gambling to kids was down. Not because Bioware failed to deliver a good game again. Have been shaking my head at all the bad takes for the past week.
Just some useful context: the DA team has had a chunk of turnover since the original games I liked came out. For example, the creative director from Dragon Age origins joined a studio that just released their first game: Eternal Strands.
They also completely scrapped the entire project they had originally. Look up "Project Joplin".
Remove all the veteran writers from Bioware to cut costs because they get paid the most. The writing in Biowares game is absolutely terrible and the game sells well. WOW who could have POSSIBLY seen this coming?!
Ma! Ma! EA fell down an elevator shaft, Ma! Call an ambulance!
LOL don't call the ambulance. You didn't see anything.
"Keep walking, you didn't see anything. Just keep walking..." 🙌
@@chwenhoou get the machine gun instead
An ambulance is too big to drop down an elevator shaft...
We have entered the 'find out' era.
Not going to lie, I was more than a bit exasperated by all the channels that made it sound like Veilguard was the big reason EA stocks went down when it was a rounding error when compared to FC 25.
Yeah FC 25 has been a disaster. It's so bad they've been selling it for $20 and less on the console stores and Steam lately. Someone gifted it to me over the holidays; I played for about two hours before going back to FC 24 (which I got free with a PS+ subscription).
At some point, corporations become too big to succeed.
Man western game devs are a never ending clown show of mediocrity aren't they?
That's Triple AAA scene and due to incompetent leadership thanks to prioritizing greed over quality products.
Indie scene and AA developers are doing very well for themselves.
The decline tends to start when the businesses go from private-owned to public-owned. When you need to appease shareholders, staying solvent is no longer enough, you need to constantly make more and more money. Which kills the risk-taking needed in business.
@@stefanradebach2889 Even indie devs are starting to show some cracks in the foundation-Hyperlight Breaker had a downright Cyberpunk-level launch disaster into Early Access and the Celeste devs just canceled their follow-up game.
@@SimuLord project cancellations happen all the time, man. Indies arent publically traded.
Square hasn't made projections for their last four games. It's not just Western devs struggling. The cost to make a video game is too high for many big devs to make their money back anymore which is why indies are starting to become more prevalent again.
You say Veilguard was crushed by "unrealistic expectations" when most criticism is about how it compares unfavorably to a 15 year old game.
Thank you SO much for pointing out that for most normal people, company names like EA and Konami are basically invisible! I try to get this across to a LOT of people in the gaming culture, but no, Fallout is NOT a cultural touchstone (at least not before the TV series, and even them, Amazon Prime is a bit more niche than Netflix). Nobody outside gaming circles has any clue what a Sebembermoth is, or why he's obsessed with Clouds.
That person you bored to death with details about the game on the bus? Sure they know, but you didn't personally talk to every single person did you? This is why for all the sales of Final Fantasy games, it doesn't come CLOSE to the sales of Feetball of whatever flavor, or the latest issue of Call of Shooty. We live in a particularly large information silo, and while video games are more popular than they've ever been, most people only casually touch them. You know what game my family knows the name of most? Jackbox. THAT is the most well known instant brand recognition they have. They don't have a clue what even Skyrim is, that eternal cockroach of gaming? Just blank stares.
They know Mario. They know Sonic. They know The Pikachu. But, they don't even know who LINK is. I recommend looking up videos of people showing average people "on the street" pictures of various Smash Bros characters. It'll be very eye opening when you see them look at Link and say "elf guy? Lord of the Rings?" Basically, if there isn't a smash hit blockbuster movie about it, and it isn't covering every single store shelf in merchandise around the holidays, they have no clue.
I do think it's pretty amusing that younger players of the Madden series just think it's a word for "big chaotic event", or even just "just the thing they named the games", and have no clue it's named after an actual person.
@Dark_Jaguar Essentially, never underestimate the ignorance of the general public.
(Ignorance here being the actual definition, rather than a slight.)
Whatever is left of Maxis is laying back and watching EA burn like “should’ve taken the offer for Spore 2020”
They tried to lean on the Apex pillar a bit too heavy and now it's crumbling.
Note that DA Origins sold 3 million units (we'll average that to roughly $150-$180 million in revenue) and probably had a dev budget in the mid tens of millions. That means it likely cleared $100 million in profit. Not counting DLC.
Veilguard had "engaged" 1.5 million players... Which includes the free trial of the game from the EA App... So sales revenue was likely well under $100 million. The dev budget was almost certainly in the hundreds of millions, meaning the game likely lost EA tens to hundreds of millions. Saying it underperformed might imply that it merely wasn't profitable enough... That's not what happened here.
I guess "pulling a Barv" wasn't the answer. 😂
But yeah, paired with EA Sports starting to weaken after years of delivering nearly no innovation, it's no surprise their stock tanked.
I guess the people responsible for the direction of DA:tV (including, as the least important but nonetheless annoying decision, putting "the" in the title, contradicting the established naming convention) have some push-ups to do to apologize to their higher-ups.
Man the bots are on fire today with their comments!
I wonder who on earth is running all of them?
@@jackgardner8726 rich people with an agenda
They gotta sell that fans or they go under like EA!
Darn those pesky net runners
Shut it bot
8:46 maybe they should work on dealing with bugs that have been around for generations in Madden and just make the next game stable
Who would have guessed that making games to pursue infinite growth instead of for fun, or heck even just deliver a quality and functional product, would bring a slope after a peak
To quote Stirling "They don't just want money, they want all the money. Profit isn't enough, it has to be more profit than last year, ever year, forever"
And to get there EA has been making more and more sequels. More specifically, formulaic slop appealing to "everyone" rather than the actual audience.
That stock price number went down faster than the speedometer after the driver saw a cop car.
People will just think "FIFA is back!" and just buy Konami's FIFA. 😆 🤣 😂
Ladies and Gentleman, let this be the day we all know, if the idiots of EA does not change their ways, it will dip down WAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY more XDDDDDDDDDDDD
Gonna compete with ubisoft soon.
@@id2k. oh the both getting a headstart, GOOD THING bethesda was bought by Microsoft or they would be hopping that ballon too XD still hate that they still let the lying soab Howard and KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID Pagliario on board
Few things give me as much joy as seeing greedy companies that only care about short-term profit get what they had coming.
I have to disagree, without their monopoly EA sports games are kinda just low-quality shovelware.
If Konami can actually make a semi-competent FIFA game there is a VERY real possibility that EA FC could go entirely belly up unless they massively overhaul the game. Which they won't, because effort costs money and requires talent, meanwhile EA Sports refuses to invest money into their products and has no talent remaining because paying talented people also costs money.
The problem is traditionally licenced shovelware out sells non licenced quality.
One thing Konami and FIFA will have to do is use FIFA tournaments like the World Cup, Confederations Cup, FIFA Club World Cup, ect to have a product for every year or to make a subscription viable.
Reason number 99 why Live Service needs to die as a genre.
I’m a predominantly FC player; and now their stock has tanked it, they’re doing positive things in FC, I personally hope everyone sees through their pathetic attempts to claw back player engagement now they need money and they go bust
What are your thoughts on FC 25? I received it as a gift for Christmas, and played about two hours before going back to FC 24. I like playing with sim conditions, and the sim settings for 25 are just broken, even setting custom sliders doesn't help the problem (I think custom sliders mess with their "sim" settings and screw everything up).
Re: The sims, with real competition coming out this year plus EA's continued enshitification of the franchise (releasing broke ass, buggy content and then maybe patching it a year or two down the line), constant broken live service events/battle passes, and now, releasing The Sims 1 and 2 in a broken unplayable mess, that's another pillar I wouldn't personally want to lean on right now.
They're, for some inexplicable reason, having to learn two hard lessons.
1: you tell your employees what to do, not the other way around
2: you can make garbage, but you can't make customers pay you for it.
That DAV trailer was so off-putting that it went from a day 1 purchase to wait-for-a-sale purchase
That's the first time I've seen even a bit of it. It's horrendous, especially when compared with the real DA games trailers.
well this explains the real reason they're selling us working copies of sims 1 and 2 and all packs for them for the first time in like a decade
so 25 years of the sims wouldn't have anything to do with it... right?😂
I very rarely buy AAA games anymore. The product, although visually astonishing, is often gutted with compromises to the intense corporate interest of the publisher. Micro transactions, content cut for DLC, Live Services that aren’t that great.
I’d much rather buy games from developers that don’t have to sacrifice creative vision and execution in the name of squeezing out a few more dollars. So many of my favorite games in recent years haven’t been flashy AAA games, they’ve been little indie projects with a heart and soul to them.
Corporate interests, in my opinion, destroyed AAA. I just hope that Indie Developers can resist the temptation to sell out to Private Equity and such so that we don’t end up creating a new generation of awful corporate games companies…
EA won the race to the bottom, well done lads.
That would be Ubisoft.
3:21 anyone else remember dividend's? sigh ... a better time lol
Was going to comment about this. There are still dividend companies out there, quite a lot actually. But those ONLY occur in saturated markets. I would expect in the coming years to see companies such as Ubisoft convert to dividends where “line goes up” is no longer really feasible
For how many years have gamers hated on EA???? Veilguard was just the nail in the coffin
Whilst i dont wish Harm to any1, i truly hope EA will go broke over veilguard ( it wont due to massive financial reserves )
That’s what’s wrong with most of these big companies, they depend on consistent growth to actually turn a profit but nothing can grow indefinitely.
Something you didn't mention Inzoi the life sim by krafton is coming out in early access in a few months. It has the potential to distrupt EA's dominance in life sim games which has 80+ million players
so far I haven't seen a reason to jump ship for it. everything I enjoy the sims games for Inzoi sorely lacks. I'm glad realism players will love it but that bores the ever loving crapola out of me. I play to live the fantasy life as a Vampire, Werewolf or Alien living a life and all the other wack shenanigans that comes with it. no other games do that the way the sims franchise does and so far all the sims killers that's supposed to be coming don't even bother with this side of the community - only the realism players who complain regardless of what features you give them because it's never enough or how they expected it. if Whatever teams are still working on sims play their cards right & keep adding to the weirder wacker side? they'll still be worthy competition
Honestly it won't catch a large part of sims players due to not having the wackiness element that made sims what it is now
Ubisoft and EA competing for title of most mediocre gaming company is more intense than expected coming into 2025
My heart bleeds for companies like EA and Ubisoft, it really does. Who would have thought that delivering ultra anti-consumer monetisation wrapped up in highly ideologically challenged, UTTER DROSS games would have eventually been their downfall.
They're falling off the cliff because investors have lost faith in the AAA gaming market, that's all. Fairly easy to see.
Also, Dragon Age is a huge IP with many, many fans that have been waiting a long time. The sales targets weren't wild. If the new mass effect game turns out to be amazing i wouldn't be surprised if it cracked 10 million sales after 6 months. Veilguard was so bad no one wanted it, even the people that wanted it.
3:54 This is the problem. If there's one thing they should be good at, THEY SHOULD BE GOOD AT MAKING GAMES. Playing the market can only take you so far when the consumer doesn't like your product.
I love hitting these videos early just to see the view count and likes skyrocket during the length of the video :)
For the American audience, FIFA is such a big part of the branding that I didn't know what he was talking about when he mentioned FC. And I am a lifelong gamer, with many EA titles played . I wasnt even aware that they'd lost the license.
LOLZ, EA lost 6 Ubisofts in one day and still expects to make over 7 Ubisofts for the fiscal year.
they can't even satisfy The Sims Franchise players so...
Honestly, i think this is good for the industry. The game industry being less dominated by companies with such reliable revenue they are dictated purely by investor demands is a bad thing.
I'd say this is bad news for Koomani but, I thought they forgot about video games for pachinko machines so there isn't much to ruin.
Yup, it could be really good for the industry indeed. And hand on heart - who really cares about the greedy publisher? It's the brilliant studios with passionate talent and their projects we care about. Not the suits whipping them to maximize profit in betrayal of the fundamental creative vision before shutting them down, even if the game is a financial success. Let them go, no one cares if these people are successful or not.
Blaming some marketing firm for the Veilguard trailer’s impact on the game’s reception is a bit unfair. As bad as it was, it 100% is representative of the tone of the actual game.
"That includes people playing on the EA play subscription".... not quite the full story. It also doesn't include resale of console disks which was high. Shop returns of the game to 2nd hand bins was large because the game was bad. There is a reason it's 1.5m players and not 1m+ sales. Secondary sales from regretted purchases hurt margins hard.
A bit disingenuous to name every reason except the real reason the game flopped.
Who whouldve thought designing games to generate maximum profit rather than a balance between maximizing profit while also spending a bit of money to keep players happy would drive players away
The Mass Effect Legendary Edition really feels like an indirect apology from EA, I mean its on sale for as little as 7€. 3 Games. Remastered. All DLCs. And thats from EA?! Other publishers milk the shit out of old games and low effort "remasters".
They are milking it. They have kept having discounts and this is to scrape the last bit of money they can from those who wouldn't buy it when it was 50/66/75/80% off.
@michaelh878 In my world milking is Nintendo keeping mediocre games, or even worse mediocre ports of 15 year old mediocre games, at full price for years.
If "milking" means 90% discounts then yeah baby, milk me dry.
This actually could've been them padding revenue to lessen the impact from Veilguard. They needed to artificially boost the numbers and use vague language ("engagements") to mask the fact that Veilguard essentially pulled a Titanic. Effectively burning other IPs to keep the investors warm.
@@MunyuShizumi I guess people who wanted to buy the Legendary Edition would have done so by now anyway. I got in via PS+, but since I cancelled my subscription I bought it on PC this time. I doubt a 7€ title makes much of a difference.
Honestly I think being public is the main systemic issue here - and in other industries as well. You can be a company making decent profits every year but somehow if you change to a company making annual losses but showing "number go up" on the charts you are better? I mean why is Roblox a better bet than EA? They've consistently made losses their entire public existance. The stock market was a stupid idea.
The Dragon Age failure in 1 word: Taash.
1:56 the people covering games on RUclips don’t understand why the game was sold so fast 😅
going public is a death sentence
Was gonna buy veilguard then i heard all the negative stuff, will buy it when its 90% off. Man if only the remastered origins
If you hate the fact that trans people exist, you'll get to miss out on a fun game. (PS--I'm old enough to remember people hating origins. And 2. And Inquisition.)
@@gnomeDruid same. people blame "wokeism" for these sequels being bad. if Origins came out today these morons would boycott it
@gnomeDruid there are glaring other massive issues with the game. I for one can't stand how they desecrated the lore. It's good for the gaming industry this slop flopped
@@joanofsharc the cope is absurd in this comment
@ same story with alot of other games. Vampire the Masquerade for example. The original had queer people in it, gamers like to conveniently forget that part.
I believe the "3 million" target number for DAV was most likely after the producers realized there was quite a bit of backlash and started playing "catch up." I don't think it would be a stretch to say BioWare was looking for upwards of 10 million copies of DAV sold, with 5-10 in the first 3 months given the success of the previous games.