Plague_Injected
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Gotta wonder how much that fake religious protest stunt to promote Dante's Inferno cost them, for no effect...
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EA: we spend 66-75% of a Game's Budget on marketing
- Thread starter defiant007
- Start date
so C&C3 doesnt have any type of bullshit at all on it? I'm not willing to do anything further than entering a cd key for OFFLINE authentication.
Plague_Injected
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I think C&C3 has SecuROM with the CD check but there are no install limits or anything like that.
Yep. SecuROM without the BS.
MEPC was the first EA game to use online activation and I believe every game they released until Spore had it. Spore was the last one. They were watching the outcry and I'm sure they were looking at the effect that outcry had versus the benefits of stopping zero day piracy versus the fact that SecuROM 7 cracks happen day zero or day one at the latest.
Plague_Injected
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I think EA heard the civil lawsuit more than the outcry from the average gamer or forum user.
Canadian in Berlin
Gawd
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theres a wonderful middleground between "f*ckall" and more than 50% of the budget...
ikarinokami
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aamm wrong. lets see the sims keeps EA afloat and along with madden pays for all the others games. the last need for speed may have sucked but it sold very very well.
edifyingkarma
[H]ard|Gawd
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Yep thats the way i feel about it too
What their 'creative officer' is saying seems to contradict their record. According to last quarter's 10-Q (page 37-38), they spent twice as much on R&D as on marketing. They also made a killing on Wii games, so the stance on casual vs hardcore gamers makes financial sense.
Operating expenses:
first numer = quarter ending june 09, second = june 08
in $millions
Marketing and sales 164 128
General and administrative 66 84
Research and development 312 356
Acquired in-process technology — 2
Amortization of intangibles 12 15
Restructuring charges 14 20
Total operating expenses 568 605
Operating expenses:
first numer = quarter ending june 09, second = june 08
in $millions
Marketing and sales 164 128
General and administrative 66 84
Research and development 312 356
Acquired in-process technology — 2
Amortization of intangibles 12 15
Restructuring charges 14 20
Total operating expenses 568 605
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I never said either of those two series sucked nor did I say they were unprofitable, I said they were being milked which is true. They keep repackaging the same game over and over and slapping a new date or number on it and calling it good. Previous companies that have done this has shown that it will only last them for so long before other companies will improve upon them and swipe the carpet out from under them.
EA has some awesome IP's and they are finally starting to branch out into other avenues which is what is going to save them in the long run, not the sims or madden. What is the old adage about putting all your eggs into one basket...
Marketing sells games, whether you want to acknowledge it or not. No, this doesn't mean a bad game marketed well will be a hit. However, a great game marketed poorly will be a flop. Even if a game is great, that isn't enough to get people to buy it when there's tons of other titles also out there. This is especially true with new ips.
ikarinokami
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EA is milking madden, but every year its the biggest selling title, they would be an inept bussniess if they didn't. it's one thing to milk and no one buys and quite another to milk and make alot of money.
As for the sims i don't agree it's milking, the very nature of the game makes it impossible to be ever be complete. And no one is forcing anyone to buy the expansion, people buy them because they want to. while madden does eat alot of adverizing budget, the sims do not. Sims much like crack sells itself.
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That would have kept me from buying it but I was reading down the list of securom games, and I hadn't had any until I got to THQ, damn you company of heroes! Well since my computer already is infected I guess its no problem. I did get some laughs at how many games have securom that nobody would ever want to play nevermind pirate.
The SecuROM disc check doesn't install anything on your computer. SecuROM has been around for something like a decade. It has been used in quite a large number of games. With SafeDisc dead and gone SecuROM is really the best option for disc checking now.
YeuEmMaiMai
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good games don't need marketing..........word of mouth > all
Beyond Good and Evil got terrific critical reviews and got terrible sales due to poor marketing. It happens often, you can just google underappreciated games. Heck, hardforum has plenty of gamers who follow this sort of thing. There are a lot of great games that don't sell well.
Word of mouth is nice, but it only spreads among people who talk about games. There's plenty of guys who just play games on the side and don't have many gamer friends. The only way these people will know about upcoming games is if the upcoming games make themselves known to them. People won't buy what they don't know exists.
Like many others, I too associate the EA brand with a lack of quality assurance(and other assorted "evils"), but hey, they're here to make money and they're making it hand over fist. If their marketing-heavy approach is what's helping them outsell the competition, then they'll keep doing it.
ikarinokami
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freespace 2, system shock 2, clive barker's the undying, sacrafice, disagree with you, the pc is littered with hall of fame games that bomb because no marketing,
knothead34
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you dont need to spend a whole lot on crazy marketing if the game is good it will get around by word of mouth and that costs nothing. some ads in the popular magazines and some info on a website pretty much all you need.
ikarinokami
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again i refer you to system shock 2, tron 2.0, sacrafice, freespace 2. good games with no marketing usally fail economically plain and simple.
Are you sure about that because I'm pretty sure I have seen a SecuROM folder on a system lately, not sure if it was mine but definitely saw one. And furthermore if it doesn't install anything then why is there a SecuROM removal tool?
YeuEmMaiMai
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Descent 1 2 and 3
Doom (all of them)
UT (except for 3)
Lego Series
Pop Cap games
I would say a lack of demos hurts more than anything else............
Ok, it shouldn't install for anything other than games the need activation. Then again, that was with older versions. Don't pay too much attention to what version 7 does with files. Unlike a lot of people I'm not insane and think that its out to kill my computer.
Lego whatever games sell many times better on consoles and are advertised. Pop Cap places adds around the internet. Doom and UT come from a day when the gaming community was pretty small so word of mouth worked. Now days it really doesn't.
Yeah, and it was much better back when every clown who could afford an emachines wasn't mucking up the pc gaming community as a whole.
That isn't an argument I want to get into. I don't really keep rose tinted vision of the past. Will just cause a big fight.
Dead Space is a good example of piss poor post release support.
There were issues with controls and vsync, but not a single fucking patch.
Nice work EA, just waste your time, money and effort on the wrong things. Very typical but not suprising
That's pretty disgusting about World of Goo. Goes to show it doesn't matter how much you charge for a quality game, if there is a free option available (although illegal) your destined to fail.
Case in point are those recent "free breakfast promotions at Denny's" they had recently. Even though the meals range from $3-6, when they present the customer with a free option you have crowds/lines and people demanding they are entitled to the free breakfast.
Currently there is no penalty for pirating, only for paying consumers having to put up with this BS. On the console side pirating exists, but on the xbox 360 they have an option that's not available on the PC. That option is banning the console from live.
Case in point is I had 2 friends with cracked xboxes. Both had the funds to buy the console, but lacked the reasoning to buy games at $60 because that's way to expensive. However using that same thought they also felt entitled they should own/play every game under the sun. That lasted a few months and they tried to get my other friends onboard as it was "so" awesome. Nobody participated because of the threat of a console ban and we all enjoy playing online. Sure enough both people dropped offline on xbox live for 30+ days and last time I spoke to them they had to criticize microsoft and developers charging way to much money for games. I asked "So both of you had your console banned, right?" They answered "Yes, but that's not the point...". So this constant banning does give a consequence to Xbox users that does not exist on the PC. The same two indiduals returned to PC gaming, and now criticize the xbox 360.
Piracy does have double edge sword as people already mentioned. Outside of revenue, the other side is for games with poor sales (due to quality) they just blame piracy and not the quality of a game. If people not only voted by not buying the game, and also not pirate the game, maybe these developers that had poor product would get the picture.
Most people I know that believe $60 is too expensive, are the same people that need a game on release day and must own every one (example 3+ titles per month). These are the same people that migrate to pirating because they can't afford to keep up at this rate. Problem is then that becomes the standard and why ever return to buying one game and just playing that one, when you can get multiple for nothing.
I only buy 1 game every 2-3 months, and for me it's a good investment. I'm very selective and look for reviews and feedback on the forums before putting down my cash. I'm very glad I did as it minimizes my investment on junk software.
I own both a Xbox 360 and a PC, but I'm buying Xbox 360 releases more often due to post support concerns. I have noticed a shift in support, or lack there of, in the past few years from PC to console. I recall the day when you get a patch on release day and for several months post release on the PC. Now your lucky to get day one, and that's not to say they are better quality, it's they stopped supporting the game once they printed the CD!
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Considering vSync messing with controls was the only major problem the game had I'd say its not a huge injustice that it wasn't patched. Games with far worse problems are never fixed.
While you have a lot of good points I just have one thing to say: Only idiots get banned from Live. If your friends weren't idiots they wouldn't have been banned.
jeremyshaw
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Piracy: the excuse companies now make for crap games
Then: well it used to be bad marketing... so EA is definately covering that base!
Then: well it used to be bad marketing... so EA is definately covering that base!
Yea, they are not the sharpest tools in the shed. However, doing the same idiotic behaviors (ie downloading leaked/cracked games) on the PC has no visual reprocussions to them.
Hate to say it, but unless people start seeing RIAA type threats from developers, the cycle will continue.
Back on topic:
I'm sure I'm not the only one that see's EA titles and thinks twice before purchasing. This was not the case 7 years ago. I'm still playing Medal of Honor Allied Assault on a regular basis, but outside of that most EA games are install, play for few hours, and place back in the case. I agree with others if they invested more into the game, vs marketting, they may get somewhere. Sports games I could see a yearly release, but for most others I would rather have a quality game and a possible expansion pack a year after.
Instead the norm appears to be release an incomplete game, have day one DLC that should have been bundled in the first place, and your lucky to get post support. A year later you get what would be considered an expansion pack in previous years, but now full price, with day one DLC, and rinse and repeat.
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Yeah. My old 360 was modded and it was never banned, still isn't banned actually. I didn't mod it to play burned games though, it was modded due to the DVD drive needing to be replaced.
BladeVenom
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You can say that about any game currently released.