Highest Selling Madden since 2013

[CM Hooe]

Quote: Originally Posted by jfsolo

People can use it if they want but let's be honest, Metacritic User Reviews are the most intellectually dishonest rating platform there is. A professional reviewer who accepted a suitcase full of money would still have more integrity than those reviewers. If you're giving Madden a 1 or a 2 you can say that that is just your "opinion", but that is straight out a fraudulent analysis.

Agreed, user reviews on Metacritic have obvious problems and are pretty easily dismissed.

User reviews on Metacritic often get "review bombed" whenever there is any publicized grievance with a game. For example, Madden gets review bombed every year due to the exclusivity deal, regardless of the quality of the game. This year, NBA 2K19 is getting review bombed by people who have never played the game due to blowback over MTX. Hell, Horizon: Zero Dawn got review bombed by overzealous Zelda fans because Sony had the gall to release a quality game during the same launch window as Breath Of The Wild.

Thanks to review bombing, Metacritic user reviews are pretty much irrelevant.

[saintrules]

Quote: Originally Posted by Junior Moe

For me, Madden isn't a 60$ game anymore. The stuff I enjoy in a sports game aren't emphasized in the title.

This sums everything up for me.

I'm not going to sit and call Madden a bad game, but it's a bad game for it's price point. There's a massive lack of attention to detail in multiple areas, not to mention game breaking or experience ruining bugs.

At the end of the day, we all know the Madden dev team is capable of much more, but they made the conscious decision to not put more into a game that requires us to dish out the current standard price for video game titles.

To me, that's zero integrity.

[CM Hooe]

Quote: Originally Posted by Vanilla_Gorilla

But what competition does Madden have in the Football gaming category? Football can be described as it's own market. Is there any other football game that can compete with Madden? No because EA has a monopoly on the world's largest football output, the NFL.

Off the top of my head: Axis Football, Maximum Football, and Mutant Football League all released during the same late summer / early fall launch window as Madden, they are all gridiron football video games, so they are by definition direct competition for Madden.

The NFL and NFLPA are free to license its intellectual property as they please. Other companies not having these licenses have demonstrably not stopped them from releasing football games. This isn't a discussion, and there is no wiggle room. That those games exist immediately ends the "monopoly" argument. Any further use of the word in discussion of Madden is incorrect at best and agenda-motivated at worst.

Quote:

Not talking about Madden exclusively here. EA has some shady business practices regarding MTX. I feel as if it's only a matter of time before they corrupt Madden entirely. The new player upgrade system(which I do like btw) gave me that feeling that "There's gonna be MTX here". The sports gaming industry as a whole is becoming corrupted by MTX and corporate greed.

We'll see. Unless and until they do, let's focus on what's actually in or out of Madden in specific. We agree that Star Wars Battlefront II certainly took things too far and EA was right to walk that back, and the entire industry is walking back loot boxes significantly in response to widespread criticism (Shadow of Mordor is another notable example). Again, I'm watching closely.

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Real-Player Motion...maybe. That's a hard maybe. If it wasn't such a skeleton of a system, then I'd say it wasn't overblown but the game's own AI couldn't even adjust to it at release. That's a problem. As for scheme fits, can you really say that has a dramatic impact on the game? Really? The ONLY thing it's useful for right now is the XP bonus. You can't have differing types of WR or RB's, can't have differing types of MLB for 3-4 defenses, can barely have differing OL. It's extremely barebones.

The CPU did have problems using RPM at launch and those have been addressed in a title update. There are still some kinks to work out to that end, but it's clearly getting better, and further I choose to not waste my time fretting about about bugs which no longer exist. Regardless, the impact of RPM on user control has always been undeniably obvious.

Scheme fits has a very visible and easily understandable impact on the meta of team-building and player progression this year, and arguably too much IMO. If your players aren't scheme fits, they won't progress nearly as fast as those who are because their total XP earn rate in training is halved or worse. That circumstance changes how you should optimize the back end of your roster and practice squad. The practice squad in particular is now basically worthless if you aren't carrying scheme fit players.

Quote:

5) Metacritic User Reviews: PS4 - 2.5/10 Xbox One - 3.7/10 PC - 2.7/10 Don't forget, the guy who reviewed Madden 19 on IGN hadn't even played a Madden game before.

Addressed user reviews in an above post. They are irrelevant. Further, Metacritic has no means verify that a user submitting a review has played the game, and I believe we agree that reviewers who haven't played the game shouldn't be trusted.

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Do I need to bring up blatant coverage issues? Player warping? The absolutely broken blocking(I'll give a slight pass here since blocking has always been an issue. But it's just awful this year)? Difficulty in scrambling? PA animation issues? If I give you 8 games of full gameplay from the games I've played, you'll see bug after bug after bug.

Having completed almost a full season of games on my own now, I've noticed obvious player warping pre-snap when breaking the huddle and I agree that user control responsiveness when scrambling could be improved. Your other complaints I either haven't noticed whatsoever or if those problems do exist they aren't obvious enough to impede my enjoyment of the game. If that makes me a casual in your eyes, so be it; I'm still happy playing Madden 19 and I refuse to be miserable about it.

Quote:

Again, as others have said to this, how incremental have those been added in? How long has the community been calling for those? Your standards for Madden are far too low, and that's perfectly okay, but for the rest of us, we want a game worth $60 year after year.

Again, I purchased a product and I am happy with my purchase. I refuse to be miserable about it.

You know what I do with games I don't like and don't change over several cycles? I ignore them. For example, WWE 2K has the same stranglehold over licensed professional wrestling video games. However, I no longer enjoy that game for a multitude of reasons. On that account, I don't pay it much if any attention; I check in and see if they fixed my complaints, and if they haven't I move on. I certainly don't go online to message boards for 14 years airing my grievances with the product when every year it fails to meet my clearly-misplaced expectations.

[CM Hooe]

Quote: Originally Posted by saintrules

At the end of the day, we all know the Madden dev team is capable of much more, but they made the conscious decision to not put more into a game that requires us to dish out the current standard price for video game titles. To me, that's zero integrity.

Ah, a classic lazy devs post.

I challenge you to spend a day at the Tiburon office during crunch and tell me afterwards that the devs, designers, artists, and testers there have "zero integrity".

[roadman]

I didn't realize the developers made all the business decisions of what goes in the game or not every year.

Darn, all these years, I thought it was the people above them, their bosses, that made these decisions.

I'll need to re-visit my thinking on all this now.

[sinthros]

So many people here that serve as additional roadblocks to the problem. So many who are simply 'happy' with what we have, instead of thinking of what we SHOULD have after 30 years of Madden. People comparing Madden, a triple A title, to indie football games and calling that legitimate competition, instead of advocating for legitimate triple A competition between EA and 2k (or another dev) like there used to be; which, not coincidentally, was the greatest period for football games. It's such a shame. We deserve better as a community but people like this make it a lot harder to get what we actually want in a football game when these people literally just defend EA (in terms of their handling of Madden) at every turn. Every excuse, every justification, everything.
I've never understood people who defend big business. It doesn't serve to help ANYONE except for the business (EA) itself. It makes no sense.
I've never thought the devs themselves don't want to make a good football game, I'm sure they do. They're hardworking people. I know that.
But that doesn't mean they haven't greatly underachieved.
And we, as a community, need to be able to acknowledge that.
Instead of just saying "Oh, well, I enjoy the game personally, so if you don't it doesn't matter, EA did fine!"

[Junior Moe]

Quote: Originally Posted by saintrules

This sums everything up for me. I'm not going to sit and call Madden a bad game, but it's a bad game for it's price point. There's a massive lack of attention to detail in multiple areas, not to mention game breaking or experience ruining bugs. At the end of the day, we all know the Madden dev team is capable of much more, but they made the conscious decision to not put more into a game that requires us to dish out the current standard price for video game titles. To me, that's zero integrity.

Yep. Madden has a lot of parallels with Live, imo. Exception being that Madden is a significantly better football sim than Live is basketball and it does offer more value (I know people hate Longshot but I like it and it does add value to the title and franchise mode is at least playable) in terms of offline stuff. Other than that though I see them both in the same space.

Madden is an ok football game. Nothing special, but solid. I don't like to get into what devs are capable of or "suits" or any of that kind of stuff. I simply judge the end product and weigh what it's worth to me. The devs and "suits" for Spiderman could be the most incompetent greedy people to ever walk the earth, I know that game is amazing! Lol. That's all I see.

[roadman]

The landscape of NFL video gaming isn't changing anytime soon. The NFL and EA have a business relationship that has lasted 14 years. People have wanted competition 14 years ago by writing petitions, not purchasing the game, etc... and nothing has changed in that respect and I don't see it changing in the future. The NFL makes more $ from one game company vs 4 gaming companies.

Again, I stated in my last post, the developers, like Clint specifically, do not make the final business decisions of what goes in or out of Madden. Marketing and the bosses above them all have a hand in the final decision making. So, for me, it's difficult to say that Clint has personally underachieved when he doesn't program or make the final decisions on what goes into the game.

I'm happy about the game because I have sliders that I use that make the game a more realistic game, but there is a good deal of room for improvement that is need with the game as well.

I hope people can respect that, even though they might disagree, just as much as I respect everyone else's opinion.