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Originally Posted by spankdatazz22 |
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I'm out of the convo; the discussion has gotten completely away from the subject of the thread (unintentionally). But if I remember correctly, NFL Blitz was quite the hit in arcades and the earlier consoles back in the day and was EXTREMELY popular. Isn't NFL Street simply a hip-hopped, urbanized, (use your own adjective) version of Blitz?
Secondly, IMO the Sears/KMart merger is a different beast than what we've been discussing. I think that merger was born out of necessity - Walmart looms large in that industry. Same with the recent telecommunications mergers; it starts a domino effect where other companies are forced to join of their own free will or be gobbled up/put out of business. EA has no peer in the videogaming world. I read a report where it said if you take the top ten videogame companies, EA is larger than the rest of the top ten COMBINED. Their aquisitions of Ubisoft, Criterion, etc. isn't from necessity; it's more like they can just because they can.
Ultimately, it gets back to us as consumers. It's our money they're after, yet it seems that as a group we seem more than willing to sit idly by while we're shuffled from one partner to another, acting as if we have no say in the matter. We do, but it's just that collectively we act as if we don't (have a choice but to sit back and "take it"). Perhaps what has transpired was going to happen eventually; it just took the first domino to fall. I just find it surprising that as a group in this particular situation, people are pretty passive in dealing with the issue. It's like people want to cross their fingers and hope things won't be all that bad. Oh well, I've been playing Madden more in hopes of being a little more understanding. I'm working on perfecting the Studda Step and the Strafe catch so that I'll be unstoppable.
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Deep within your post, you hit my number one fear of these exclusivity deals. I can see artificially high prices with little to no improvement year to year from both companies.
My problem with the KMart/Sears merger was KMart coming out of bankruptcy and buying a rather large company within less than a year. Many people lost their retirement funds over that, and now can't even get in the act because the price is so high. Yet, there hasn't been any public outcry. But, yes, you are right about the reason being a necessity to compete with WalMart.
02-04-2005, 10:19 PM
