We're unhappy with a years-long string of mediocre (or worse) football games produced under a monopoly. Every year, EA makes promises that are either greatly exaggerated or just flat-out lies, they leave the same bugs and glitches in year after year, and they fail to fix fundamental gameplay issues. Who should we be angry at, if not EA?
What?!? NCAA sells at the same $60 MSRP as every other video game, including other EA sports titles like Madden. If the sale price is the same, and the production budget is actually smaller, then NCAA is working on a LARGER profit margin than other titles, because EA would be making more on each game sold. It may make less total profit than Madden because it doesn't sell as many copies, but the margins per copy aren't necessarily smaller.
This is true, and is a very large part of the problem. This is why we are angry with EA--they cut back on QC to save money and increase their profit margins, resulting in shipping a broken game every year that the consumers pay $60 to become beta testers for, then we wait months for patches that may or may not fix issues that make the game genuinely unplayable (like the current freezing issue or corrupt dynasty saves). All so EA can make another dollar or two on each game sold. And we're not supposed to be angry about this?
EA chose to take the exclusive licenses, EA outbid any other competitors to get those licenses, and EA negotiated the resulting deals. At each step, EA made its own bed, but now it's forcing consumers to lie in it. EA didn't have to pay for these licenses. EA could have refused to pay for exclusive and insisted on paying less for an open license. EA made a business decision to gamble on exclusivity, but it's consumers who are now paying for their losing bet.
I'm sick of hearing this argument about NCAA. It's just not true. Every single year, the NCAA game sells close to a million copies, which is an absolute "hit" for any game publisher. Last year's worthless entry sold over 700,000 copies in just its first two weeks! (see
http://content.usatoday.com/communit...1#.UBFd5KNAa7E). NCAA football is a very strong seller every year. Sure, its sales are dwarfed by Madden, which is a mega-hit and sells about 2.5 million copies each year, but any game with NCAA's sales numbers is still a successful game. And with the amount of development overlap and resource sharing between NCAA and Madden, plus the lack of actual innovation in this series for the past 5 years or so, NCAA should be an extremely profitable game. And it would sell more copies and be even more profitable if EA would at least give us a playable game out of the box each year; I'm sure their sales numbers have been hurt over time by once-dedicated fans like myself who have stopped buying the game because it's more frustration than fun every year.
But there is definitely a big enough installed fan base for NCAA to make a ton of money. If EA stopped making the game, some other company would certainly step in, get a license, and start making its own college game. There may be a year or two without any game while the new company develops its first entry, but eventually we would have another game. The sales are too strong each year for every developer to simply ignore this market. Personally, I'd be happy to wait a couple of years to get a brand new, fresh take on college football rather than continue to suffer EA's stale, broken game being the only choice every year.
07-25-2012, 06:53 PM
