[blackceasar]

Dear Sean O'Brien,

Look man, I don't know what goes on behind those closed doors at EA sports. None of us here do. We don't know if you have a lack of the RIGHT talent there, a lack of resources, a lack of time, or a combination of all three. We don't know if the root of how sub-par Live 14 is maybe due to the fat cat VP's who have joined the ranks of EA over the years with their Harvard MBA's that just look at overhead, bottom lines, the stock ticker, and the quarterly investor dividend reports. We here don't know any of that. We here don't care either. Why don't we care? Most fan's don't care how you guys or any company goes about putting out a QUALITY title, as long as you do it. Heck most of us don't even care if the title gets delayed a bit to make it actually worth 60.00.

So I've read your talking points letter about 30 times now, (no, really I have). You see I work in the marketing business. For MAJOR brands that I can't speak of here. I know about all the tricks, tactics, smoke screens, Jedi Mind tricks and what not marketers use on consumers not only to get them to buy a product, but also when things go south and damage control has to be done. 99% of the time it's disingenuous. I could see you sitting in a room with a bunch of fat cat board members who only view your company as place for them to get a nice salary and fat bonuses, not as a place to make a good product that people will spend their hard earned money on. I could see you having to run your letter by them first. I could see it up on a big PowerPoint being projected onto a screen there, and everyone is mulling it over, weighing in, telling you to change this sentence, or leave that our, or "make sure you mention this and that".

You see, if this had been 2003 when social media really had not been born yet..no Facebook, no Twitter, no Reddit, and nowhere near the message boards we have today I don't think this letter would have even happened. You see this is what you need to understand about this day and age of social media, and I tell this to the VP's of the brands that I work on... "YOUR BRAND IS NO LONGER JUST YOUR BRAND... IT'S THE PUBLIC'S BRAND". Social media allows people to now have almost just a big of a voice as your do, if not bigger when it comes to the company you work for,and the products you want us to buy.

So had I been sitting in that board room with you and all those stuffy old men who look at EA as just a paycheck, this would have been my suggestion....

I would not have shipped the game. Before you and your investors gasp, let me finish, because I'm trying to work this for the fans AND for your company's bottom line. I would have given the game away for free OR at cost. I would not have shipped it to stores, to keep YOUR cost down. I would have slapped a 9.99 or 19.99 price tag on it and made it DOWNLOAD ONLY. Heck if it only cost 4.99 per copy I would have set it at that price. I would have put out a different open letter that explained WHY Live 14 was an online only purchase. It would have read something like this...

[BOLD] Dear fans of our Live Franchise, and new fans we hope to win over. It's been a rough FEW years for the Live franchise and our team here. We all got into this game making business because we wanted to make awesome things, for awesome people (you guys) and be paid to do it. It in fact is truly a dream job. But because we realize gaming companies both large and small are nothing without it's fans we are going to do something different for the re-launch of our Live Franchise. Because we are now into a new generation of systems we feel like we are truly rebooting the franchise and we need you guys to be a major player in all of that so Live can be the best basketball game on the market every year for this next generation of awesome systems. With that said, we would like to announce that our first effort coming back will only be available via download. Some of you guys might not like this, but we want to keep costs down so we can pass the savings over to you. So this year, you can buy the game online for 14.99. We are doing this because we want to get our game in as many hands as possible so you guys can give us solid feedback to help us set the tone moving forward.

So you want to know how the feedback system is going to work? At the end of every game of Live 14, it will open up a survey for you to rate certain aspects of the game. Don't worry you can turn this feature off, but having this in our actual game this year will allow us to not only get feedback from people we know that are actually playing the game, but we can also see how long they have been playing it based off the feedback they are giving us.

I know some of you were expecting our first effort back into basketball to feel like we've been back for some time but we feel this year and TRULY with your help, we can all get there TOGETHER for our Live Franchise for many years to come.

Thank you for sticking with us.

Sincerely,

Sean O'Brien
EA Sports [/BOLD]