[johnprestonevans]

I dont want to start a thread to bash Madden. I like it, but lets face it, the game is not up to par where it should be. I think the biggest issue with the game is the focus and vision of the development team at EA. I know they have the talent to put out great games. So why is Madden falling behind other sports games? It's a fact of life that developers are pushing out sequels year after year and trying to upsell or improve on their current products. Enter the Madden franchise. A once all powerful sports game that seems to have lost its way after being phased by the 2K5 train. Since 2006 there has been no competition. While im sure is a big part of the problem, thats not what i want to discuss specifically. I would like to open up a forum to talk about the vision and focus of the development team and how their top-down leadership – or lack thereof – has negatively affected the quality of the game, and subsequently hurt their bottom line. Madden sales are down. Year after year their numbers are flailing. Sure they still do big business, because they are “Madden”, but they are not dominating the sports game world like they used to.

Why? I think its a simple problem that may not have a simple answer. Focus. When looking back at Madden’s mantra’s or taglines over the past few years you can see how all over the place this team has been.

09 - “The First Sports Game that Adapts To You”. - this is when they tried to implement “Jedi Madden” to teach you how to play and automatically adjust the difficulty setting accordingly. Didn’t work.
10 - “Everything You See On Sunday.” - going back to basics and getting the gameplay right and getting rid of all the extra crap they’ve been throwing in. Make it about FOOTBALL.
11 - “Simpler. Quicker. Deeper.” - making it accessible to casual players and don’t understand football and don’t have time to play full games.

I don’t blame the guys programming the game necessarily, but I feel like the executives at the very top do not understand what constitutes a great sports game anymore. They are trying to be the everything-to-everyone game. What does this year’s tagline even mean? Simpler, Quicker and Deeper???? Isnt that an oxymoron? It just sounds like its trying to be casual. What happened to the Everything You See on Sunday mantra? That is what we want.
Obviously EA wants people to stop thinking about and comparing Madden to 2K5, but here we are 6 years later and they still haven't taken the proper steps in the presentation and gameplay to do so. My argument is that if they could STICK to a vision over a number of years (like a 3 year plan) instead of jumping ship and going in a different direction every year, they would be putting out a much better product these days.

Look at what NHL is doing. They have a 3 year plan to fully implement a new physics engine. This year is about checking...next year is something else...and the year after it all comes together. Excellent. I think we can understand that it takes time to get things right. I accept that and i'm excited to see NHL continue to improved and polish its game. But Madden is more like this marketing juggernaut that does whatever it takes – makes false promises and goes casual...then hardcore...then casual...back and forth to try and get their sales up. I'm sure that at some point the executives came to the team with the demographics and numbers and mandated that Madden has to be made more accessible to people that don’t understand football so we can sell it to them.

I feel this is hurts Madden’s quality because people who don’t like football are not going to buy Madden anyway! Fix your game and polish it up for the people that actually love playing it. Their complete lack of presentation upgrades and discontinued push to "Everything We See on Sunday" this season is bewildering to me.

Does marketing and sales get in the way of good development? Your thoughts on Madden and this issue as a whole?