This is why competition is so important for sports genres - because a lot of their user base only play sports games, or at least mainly play sports games, so competition is more or less the only source of pressure. It's a completely different market to normal gaming. Even if you have the only MMOFPS game in existence, you're still competing with every game your main user base might also like to play, because people can only play one game at a time. For a MMOFPS, that's probably anything in RTS, FPS and RPG genres. People aren't going to play your crappy FPS because it's the only one that allows hundreds of gamers to play it online at once - it still needs to be a very good game to succeed, because people will make do elsewhere.
EA can claim they're not going to relax with the license all they want, but even if they are running at 110%, it is still going to be a bastardized market for the gamer because there is
never a case where no competition is leaving the people better off. If EA work just as hard all alone as they do under pressure - that's great for them - but for the gamer, it still eliminates choice, not to mention that if EA are running at 110%, then competition would need to run at 111% or better to compete.
Which leads me to my final thought - you'll see it in the next gen soccer games, and probably any other sports genre with competition as well - if the NFL license was not exclusive, right now we'd be playing in real physics engines or at least far more advanced than what we see with Madden 360. I'm 100% convinced of this. The reason i'm convinced of this is because, when you have a console launch, it almost reverses the effect that I mentioned above - all the other genres aren't really directly competing with each other, because people will buy RPG's and FPS's etc just because they're launch titles and there's not much available at the time, but if you launch with two NFL games, the market is as competitive as ever, if not far more competitive as first impressions are important to build your userbase on the next console. IMO, this means both 2K and EA would have needed to make very advanced engines - maybe not to sell the game now, but to make sure the game will still be competitive for years to come. At least, 2K would have
needed a very impressive engine to wow people, while EA would have either followed suite, or gone at their own pace like they are with Madden 360 now, relying on their brand name to sell. Even if EA did the latter, at least we'd have one company trying.
10-20-2006, 05:29 AM
