[LorenzoDC]

Quote: Originally Posted by ch46647

It should be glaringly obvious to everyone that EA has drastically shifted focus to next-gen development. Whether that come to fruition or not, Madden 25 on PS3/XBOX 360 has gotten very minimal upgrades. Also, the hype train that EA typically gets going for Madden/NCAA is literally non-existent this year. Bring on Next-Gen, and June 10th cant get here fast enough.

I've been beginning to suspect this, but I'm not as sure as you. But they have needed to do a lot of prep for nextgen. They did double the size of the dev team when this new crew came in, and they must have done it to prepare for nextgen.

From a business point of view, any innovative stuff they do on current gen is lost if they can't scale it to nextgen. Anything new they do has to be forward compatible and scalable to Ignite, a big investment they made for not just football but other sports games. The database structure for Ignite is probably quite different from current gen, so I think the overall strategy is this:

1. Put out a credible, meaningful improvement on current gen to improve over last year's game. Run Free seems like small ball to me but they clearly wanted it to be better received than it was when announced.
2. Don't go overboard marketing next gen too early because it could dampen sales in August for current gen. Tease enough next gen at e3 to get people curious but don't let the current gen people think that making a current gen purchase will be a waste or just a roster update.
3. Maximize sales in August/September in current gen.
4. After that, pivot to talking about deeper improvements and at least one more major feature/improvement for next gen, to entice people to make the investment in the next gen hardware for the holiday season. Next gen technology will really need/want a few popular brand games to help boost holiday hardware sales and probably Madden figures highly in that mix. Expect joint promotions from EA with Sony and Microsoft come Thanksgiving.

The Madden team has the unique situation this year of putting out two new but related products in one year. They can't do both to the ultimate level but their future will ride on next gen M25, no on current gen's last release. So I would expect them to tease but hide some info about next gen until the first month of current gen sales are done.

Hopefully the hardware will be reliable when it first comes out. I'm always suspicious of Microsoft especially when it rolls out any new operating system or device (the Surface tablet has been a bad release for a lot of reasons).

I'm taking a very wait and see approach this year.