EVE General Discussion

You misunderstand.

NO ONE plays eve for free. If someone buys a PLEX, soome one else has paid cash for it. All plexes on the market are player generated (even when CCP seed some they liquidate assets from banned accounts to do so).

Also, seriously leave WOW out of the conversation, you comparing apples and oranges and making yourself look a fool.

More properly, you should say that plenty of people play EVE for free, but CCP doesn't give away any accounts for free.

PS "Someone else pays" is what free means.

I think Ace Uoweme have no idea how plex actually works (or he is the most stubborn troll I have seen this week )

Posting just because I can in a big thread! I'm sure the community will show their feelings loudly if Sean starts taking it in the wrong direction, but then perhaps he won't touch EVE that much...

Eh, not really. Most of this is the internet hate-machine circlejerk in full swing. EA has made a few missteps, most notably with Origin and Bullfrog, but most of their other acquisitions were of companies that had more or less done themselves in and were going to go under w/o EA's dollar. Perhaps the games those companies subsequently made didn't live up to expectation, but saying that EA "killed" them is a huge stretch.

Maxis is a classic example. Everyone loves to put the death of Maxis at EA's feet, but the fact is Maxis pre-EA had pretty much one success story: SimCity, and they blew all that money making a TON of games that went absolutely nowhere and were abysmal failures like SimCopter and Sim Safari and Streets of Sim City. EA bought them, and what did we get? The Sims, one of the longest-running and most financially successful franchises in gaming history.

Say what you will but without EA, Maxis would have been dust in the wind.

Another good one is "EA killed Pandemic!" which is total bunk. Pandemic killed Pandemic. They had nowhere else to go.

A massive part of the reason EA acquisitions tend to go south is that people get all self-important and stage massive walk-outs after an acquisition. This is exactly what happened at Maxis, for example. EA was actually more than willing to let Maxis go on doing what they were doing on their own without too much oversight, but a ton of employees got all holier-than-thou and walked out instead, so EA had to come in and shore up the walls. And guess what? When 60%+ of your talent walks out the door, no matter WHO is at the helm, you're not going to have the same company after the fact that you did before. People tend to place far too much emphasis on management when it comes to game studios. Games get made in the trenches, by designers, artists and engineers. CEO's and executive directors don't make games. They set high-level strategy goals, but it's the grunts that crank out the gold (or the ****) so frankly a big part of why EA has such a ****** reputation for acquisitions is that people simply don't stay on the job.

Everyone always cries and moans "Oh, EA exerts so much influence after they buy companies" like, yeah, no ****, Sherlock. You don't save a sinking ship by slapping the Captain on the back, giving him a cigar and saying "Keep up the good work!"

EA has had some questionable practices, and certainly isn't a shining beacon on the hill of good game design principles, but they're also not the Devil Incarnate that the internet likes to make them out to be. They're generally just doing their best to follow markets and make money and they have put a lot of developers, designers and artists to work who would have otherwise had nowhere to go.

As much as people here hate me posting about Blizzard but I have another example, and this is a documentary of how they got to be today. From literally 2 guys meeting at college to start the empire and paying the game dev bills even with overextended credit cards...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHz2ky-jng8

They were nothing at the beginning. Literally just some guys with a dream. But they hunkered down, rolled with the punches and set to make a great game.

Their success later on came to the marketing (which is how and why WoW is today -- you get people in the door and keep them in the store). With the volume of players almost anything is possible.

And that's the driving point. More people = more money = the power of word of mouth advertising. So it's not just one guy playing, he's bringing in his friends and even family (not one guy multiboxing). Then they tell their friends...now do you see how it's done?

The fact his title is VP suggests to me he will be involved to some degree in all their products.

SWTOR was an enormously abysmal failure because EA and not my uncle, turned Bioware into a pale shadow of their former selves. The company who created Baldur's Gate 2 is now some lowly "clerk-passing-papers" that just delivers pathetic product (Dragon age 2 anyone?) after pathetic product. Their new developers are some of the most clueless ever hired (see Shadow forum for some respected elder who are quitting, and they beaten any developer at their own theorycraft).

Also, this huge F2P success does not explain why on Makeb I had 6 instances with 200 people... and now they are 2-3 instances with 31. Great great result. Even making it F2P, even reviewing the F2P restrictions to make them easier to swallow, SWTOR lost half+ playerbase again.

Come and repopulate my shard (ToFN) with your words if you can.

...

Nope. Your original Sims game is Maxis because EA let them keep the brand and logo. EA acquired them when they were still working on SimCity 2000.