11 ms·

How EA Lost Its Soul

49 points by mikeryan52 11y ago

temuze 11y ago
I admire iteration - the idea that you make a basketball game and you keep making it better makes sense to me. Eventually, it'll be as good as it can be, right? When you're out of improvements, you can just update it every year with better graphics and updated rosters. In another other industry, that mentality makes sense. In the video game industry, it doesn't. Video games are so tied to emotion that you really need to strive to create something new, to induce something novel in your customers. I think the best example of this was the release of NBA Live 10 vs NBA 2K10. Since 1995, NBA Live was the basketball game. They (in my opinion), crushed the 2K series. For years, it was a really polished game and sales were pretty consistent. They continuously improved on the menus and on the actual basketball games. Then, something changed around 2010. Suddenly, EVERYONE preferred NBA2K over NBA Live. Here's a good article about that: http://bleacherreport.com/articles/416482-nba-live-10-or-nba-2k10 http://bleacherreport.com/articles/416482-nba-live-10-or-nba... In my opinion, EA kept optimizing for local maxima. When 2K10 started experimenting more with simulating the business side of NBA teams with Association Mode, more people were hooked. The metagame became way more fun. And My Player mode was great too. EDIT: I think there's a lot of parallels between the video game industry and the film industry. The companies that stay on top (Disney, Nintendo, Blizzard, Valve etc.) are fiercely protective of their brand and never release something they think is just okay. The "people will forget about our mediocre games" mentality is very, very off in industries so tied to emotion.
- smacktoward 11y ago
  > The companies that stay on top (Disney, Nintendo, Blizzard, Valve etc.) are fiercely protective of their brand and never release something they think is just okay. I'd argue this is not true of Disney, who churn out endless zero-budget, cookie-cutter direct-to-video sequels and spinoffs from their big theatrical hits (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Disney_direct-to-video_animated_films https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Disney_direct-to-vide...) in order to milk them for every cent they can. Disney does this because they're an easy way to squeeze a few more bucks out of the parents of kids who are obsessed with a particular Disney property, not because they are stories that demand to be told.
  - Aqwis 11y ago
    I think you will find that most of those movies are several years old or more. A while back, new management in Disney changed the company's strategy to focus less on churning out a bunch of direct-to-video sequels to make some easy bucks. Several that were in production at the time and close to release were actually canceled.
    - smacktoward 11y ago
      That's good to hear! Maybe there's hope for them yet.
  - troygoode 11y ago
    There was a period where they were infamous for this, yes, but it was one of the first things Bob Iger & John Lasseter stopped (in ~2007) when they took the top jobs. http://jimhillmedia.com/editor_in_chief1/b/jim_hill/archive/2007/06/21/say-so-long-to-direct-to-video-sequels-disneytoon-studios-tunes-out-sharon-morrill.aspx http://jimhillmedia.com/editor_in_chief1/b/jim_hill/archive/...
varelse 11y ago
I consulted for a couple weeks at EA about 10 years ago. On one of those days, I got 2 VPs and a director into a half-hour talk in a break area about how much they loved the game Starflight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight Starflight's a great game. And we were all having a great time reminiscing over it when I made the mistake of saying "Why not do an update? You all seem to love this game." Their response was that space games and RPGs are both dead genres. We all parted a few minutes later as I had apparently killed the mood.
- anon3_ 11y ago
  > Their response was that space games and RPGs are both dead genres. We all parted a few minutes later as I had apparently killed the mood. Do you mean you were fired / you quit? Or was that the conversation?
  - seanflyon 11y ago
    The conversation ended.
- anon3_ 11y ago
  > Their response was that space games and RPGs are both dead genres. We all parted a few minutes later as I had apparently killed the mood. Do you mean you were fired / you quit? Or was that the conversation?
- TillE 11y ago
  It's really funny how many "dead" genres have been revived thanks mainly to Steam and Kickstarter. Or how Minecraft would have certainly been laughed out of the room by any major publisher. Most of these games will not make obscene profits. But it should be really clear by now that it makes sense to invest in and sell a variety of games, not just mass-appeal action games.
  - socceroos 11y ago
    It's the bent to 'now profits' that ends up killing them. They can't see the forest for the trees.
Sleaker 11y ago
I'm not seeing where EA lost it's soul simply because it made the correct business decision to not go with the CEOs idea of 3DO. It was a bad decision especially given Sony's upcoming entry. The fact that the then-CEO decided to make an offshoot company instead of miring EA with trying to go into the hardware field was probably one of the better ones to keep EA functioning well. However, despite EA not backing their CEO's offshoot company, I don't see how that signifies that they lost their soul. I think people would attribute it more to the move to yearly releases, consuming studios for their IPs, etc. Rather than choosing to not promote a specific piece of hardware. Like I really want to like 3DO and it's open spec ideas, but holding a grudge over not getting exclusives just makes me think less of the guy.
jefe78 11y ago
Working there a while ago was quite interesting. The corporate structure is incredibly heavy on management and lacks communication. You could have more managers than you knew and it wasn't unusual to be told to work on something else by someone you'd never met, which put you at odds with your known managers...
- DonHopkins 11y ago
  VPs who program can be very disruptive! When I was working on The Sims 1, Luc Barthelet [1] was the VP who was closely shepherding the project, and he just loves to code his ideas up in Mathematica. (He later became executive director at Wolfram|Alpha.) He would come over to my desk and show me some cool character animation trick he'd coded up in Mathematica, and suggest I implement it. He had it reading in the Sims character animation files that I was exporting from 3D Studio Max, blending them together, drawing stick figures, and exporting web pages with animated gifs. It's quite impressive what he can do with Mathematica, and of course I felt compelled to take some of his suggestions to heart and work on implementing them in the game. But of course that pissed my direct manager off to no end, who insisted that Luc stop putting things on my plate without going through him first. Luc's quite an animated character himself! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc_Barthelet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc_Barthelet
tacos 11y ago
I'm not sure how an article about Trip Hawkins could possibly take this tone. Trip's approach to business is legendarily eccentric/arsty/wacky -- for better and for worse. A business mastermind he was not. A man with a clear vision for "Electronic Arts the Game Company" in 1982? No way. For starters, it was not yet called Electronic Arts. And secondarily, it did not author much (if any) game software for years. For sake of brevity I will quote this gem from the back of the Deluxe Paint II manual, published in 1987: "About our company: We're an association of electronic artists who share a common goal. We want to fulfill the potential of personal computing. That's a tall order. But with enough imagination and enthusiasm, we think there's a good chance for success. Our products, like this one, are evidence of our intent. If you'd like a product brochure, send $1.00 and a self-addressed, stamped envelope to: Electronic Arts Catalog Request, 1820 Gateway Drive, San Mateo, CA 94404." That is truly delightful and a great reminder of the tone of the early Valley. It is also a sign of weak management, lack of vision, and in many ways a cry for help coming from a five year-old company.
- chipotle_coyote 11y ago
  I know they incorporated under a different name (Amazin' Software), but they changed it in 1983 -- only a year later. I'm not sure they ever released anything before the name change. They came out of the gate in 1983 with Archon, M.U.L.E., Pinball Construction Set and One on One, all of which were not only games but arguably historically significant. I agree that Hawkins wasn't a great businessman, but I think you're a bit off on both how quickly EA became EA and how invested they were in entertainment software from the start.
  - tacos 11y ago
    Those were published (not written in house) and not even exclusively published -- often USA only. EA shifted its razor focus to games much later, in the process alienating many of their core engineers who were all about the "making tools for Electronic Artists" mission. Pretending this was some grande vision from day one misses the most interesting part of the story, and arguably the exact moment EA "lost their soul." (Hate that phrase, but I'll play it since the author used it.)
tvawnz 11y ago
Why does no one just put all the words in a row like a book or a newspaper or something anymore? Does anyone actually enjoy this "experience" where you have to wade through a maze of obnoxious pictures and logic puzzles and shit? Is the general assumption that, now that we've made it to the internet we can forget our big boy book-reading skills and go back to pop-up picture books? Why is there all this ADHD frame-shifty-scripty "chapter-one" and "look-at-this-shitty-cover-page-where-you-can't-scroll-right-or-down-and-spacebar-isn't-taking-me-to-the-words-and-neither-is-reader-mode-so-now-you-get-to-play-"find-the-fucking-button"-which-is-camoflaged-next-to-the-social-media-faggotry-because-surprise-motherfucker-it's-a-slideshow-but-not-really"?
- benihana 11y ago
  It feels like they saw the Bloomberg piece "What is code" then decided to do that but more that than that.
- RGamma 11y ago
  Try it with uMatrix and a policy like mine: https://i.imgur.com/TMzeWu2.png https://i.imgur.com/TMzeWu2.png (and yes, these links actually do something) The web becomes a lot calmer without scripts (and you start to notice how little regard many sites have for proper web markup).
  - tvawnz 11y ago
    Thanks for the tip.
- booruguru 11y ago
  I'd like to read this article on my Kindle. Is there any way I can consolidate those pages?
- fenomas 11y ago
  > Does anyone actually enjoy this "experience" where you have to wade through a maze of obnoxious pictures and logic puzzles and shit? Yes. I thought it was beautifully presented and nicely paced, and well worth my time. Also: a single "Continue" button at the bottom of each page is "logic puzzles and shit"? Three tiny logos hidden in the title bar are "social media faggotry"? Seriously?
shostack 11y ago
I don't know how much I can blame EA as a driving force in the industry, vs. the industry as a whole and the nature of corporations and publicly traded companies. Games got into a slump for a while because the average AAA title was stuck at a $50 price tag, yet years of inflation and increased production costs were hitting revenue and margin hard. While prices gradually started creeping up, DLC/IAP/microtransactions were really all that was left to them to find new ways of maximizing revenue and shareholder value. When you are legally mandated to do what is right for shareholders, is it really your fault that you have to optimize for what makes the most money vs. what is right for your customers, especially when the two are not always perfectly aligned? As an avid gamer I remember way back in the day when we first started getting a whiff of microtransactions becoming a "thing." I knew it was going to be the new reality and fought it tooth and nail. To date I've only made a small handful of microtransactions to support games I truly love that have tried to do the right thing for their users. That said, they really have brought out the worst in gaming companies and while gaming has finally "hit the masses" with mobile gaming, there has definitely been a drop in the average game's quality in the gold rush. The reality is though that whales drive gaming, and microtransactions facilitate whales spending massively more on games than the "buy it once" model. So game developers optimize towards that, and unfortunately that tends to skew towards addictive treadmill models that have to make the game less fun to maximize revenue. At least with old school expansions and such, they had to actually make the game awesome and enjoyable to get people to buy more content for it.
- darkmighty 11y ago
  > When you are legally mandated to do what is right for shareholders I don't know of any CEO (successfully) legally persecuted for 'not maximizing shareholder value', or having a more 'long term strategy'. The most that can happen afaik is getting fired, which is scary enough. In the end what I got from the article is that the initial vision of EA largely succeeded: to replicate the music industry and Hollywood with a steady big budget revenue stream. The only problem is the glaring misnomer: the correct term would be the unsavory 'Electronic Mass Media' instead of 'Electronic Arts'. The sad fact about the shareholder revenue maximization in this industry is that people are happy to be fed dog food, and producers are happy to make tons of money off of it. They shrug off the moral dilemma and say "we're just making what people want!". This situation is reproduced verbatim across mass media -- the largest revenue share is absorbed by content that is simply not good at all. If you look at music, I would say at least 80% of the top revenue generators out there produce music that is objectively worse than centuries old music. Take this for example: [1], how can one not say it is altogether a better, more energetic, more expressive, more moving piece of art than the vast majority of what is produced? Yet people seldom listen to it. Who makes money off of copyright-free Mozart works? Of course, there are exceptions, but the situation overall is an unhappy conjunction of the vast majority of people being satisfied with repetitive industrialized hits, lame jokes with explosions, and the sports game or first person shooter of the year -- while the industry is satisfied with flooding the market and the media with this rehash-able mass produced content. With no good consumer content discovery and reviewing tools, I believe that's a stable status quo for the majority of the population. That's the role platforms like Steam with indie games (or Spotify with indie music, or Netflix with original productions) can perform: the consumers can seek directly quality, and marketers don't have the ability to distort this too much. With good discovery consumers should be able seek more engrossing experiences and share opinions directly, hopefully without bias towards what's brand new (although I confess that one is hard to get rid of). In this kind of marketplace producers can also target more specific markets, making what they enjoy and find beautiful (and still able to make good revenue off that niche) instead of aiming for generic mass market titles. Of course, it could simply be that a large fraction of the population irremediably wants to just shut off their brains outside their jobs, but I don't want to believe that, at least not without unmistakable evidence. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISBNqJZVrXM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISBNqJZVrXM
DonHopkins 11y ago
How many other people were never hired by EA, but resigned from EA? (That is, you were hired by a company that EA bought, then you resigned from EA later. Getting fired counts too! ;)

49 points by mikeryan52 11y ago

I admire iteration - the idea that you make a basketball game and you keep making it better makes sense to me. Eventually, it'll be as good as it can be, right? When you're out of improvements, you can just update it every year with better graphics and updated rosters. In another other industry, that mentality makes sense. In the video game industry, it doesn't. Video games are so tied to emotion that you really need to strive to create something new, to induce something novel in your customers. I think the best example of this was the release of NBA Live 10 vs NBA 2K10. Since 1995, NBA Live was the basketball game. They (in my opinion), crushed the 2K series. For years, it was a really polished game and sales were pretty consistent. They continuously improved on the menus and on the actual basketball games. Then, something changed around 2010. Suddenly, EVERYONE preferred NBA2K over NBA Live. Here's a good article about that: http://bleacherreport.com/articles/416482-nba-live-10-or-nba-2k10 http://bleacherreport.com/articles/416482-nba-live-10-or-nba... In my opinion, EA kept optimizing for local maxima. When 2K10 started experimenting more with simulating the business side of NBA teams with Association Mode, more people were hooked. The metagame became way more fun. And My Player mode was great too. EDIT: I think there's a lot of parallels between the video game industry and the film industry. The companies that stay on top (Disney, Nintendo, Blizzard, Valve etc.) are fiercely protective of their brand and never release something they think is just okay. The "people will forget about our mediocre games" mentality is very, very off in industries so tied to emotion.

smacktoward 11y ago
> The companies that stay on top (Disney, Nintendo, Blizzard, Valve etc.) are fiercely protective of their brand and never release something they think is just okay. I'd argue this is not true of Disney, who churn out endless zero-budget, cookie-cutter direct-to-video sequels and spinoffs from their big theatrical hits (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Disney_direct-to-video_animated_films https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Disney_direct-to-vide...) in order to milk them for every cent they can. Disney does this because they're an easy way to squeeze a few more bucks out of the parents of kids who are obsessed with a particular Disney property, not because they are stories that demand to be told.
- Aqwis 11y ago
  I think you will find that most of those movies are several years old or more. A while back, new management in Disney changed the company's strategy to focus less on churning out a bunch of direct-to-video sequels to make some easy bucks. Several that were in production at the time and close to release were actually canceled.
  - smacktoward 11y ago
    That's good to hear! Maybe there's hope for them yet.
- troygoode 11y ago
  There was a period where they were infamous for this, yes, but it was one of the first things Bob Iger & John Lasseter stopped (in ~2007) when they took the top jobs. http://jimhillmedia.com/editor_in_chief1/b/jim_hill/archive/2007/06/21/say-so-long-to-direct-to-video-sequels-disneytoon-studios-tunes-out-sharon-morrill.aspx http://jimhillmedia.com/editor_in_chief1/b/jim_hill/archive/...

varelse 11y ago

I consulted for a couple weeks at EA about 10 years ago. On one of those days, I got 2 VPs and a director into a half-hour talk in a break area about how much they loved the game Starflight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight Starflight's a great game. And we were all having a great time reminiscing over it when I made the mistake of saying "Why not do an update? You all seem to love this game." Their response was that space games and RPGs are both dead genres. We all parted a few minutes later as I had apparently killed the mood.

anon3_ 11y ago
> Their response was that space games and RPGs are both dead genres. We all parted a few minutes later as I had apparently killed the mood. Do you mean you were fired / you quit? Or was that the conversation?
- seanflyon 11y ago
  The conversation ended.
anon3_ 11y ago
> Their response was that space games and RPGs are both dead genres. We all parted a few minutes later as I had apparently killed the mood. Do you mean you were fired / you quit? Or was that the conversation?
TillE 11y ago
It's really funny how many "dead" genres have been revived thanks mainly to Steam and Kickstarter. Or how Minecraft would have certainly been laughed out of the room by any major publisher. Most of these games will not make obscene profits. But it should be really clear by now that it makes sense to invest in and sell a variety of games, not just mass-appeal action games.
- socceroos 11y ago
  It's the bent to 'now profits' that ends up killing them. They can't see the forest for the trees.

Sleaker 11y ago

I'm not seeing where EA lost it's soul simply because it made the correct business decision to not go with the CEOs idea of 3DO. It was a bad decision especially given Sony's upcoming entry. The fact that the then-CEO decided to make an offshoot company instead of miring EA with trying to go into the hardware field was probably one of the better ones to keep EA functioning well. However, despite EA not backing their CEO's offshoot company, I don't see how that signifies that they lost their soul. I think people would attribute it more to the move to yearly releases, consuming studios for their IPs, etc. Rather than choosing to not promote a specific piece of hardware. Like I really want to like 3DO and it's open spec ideas, but holding a grudge over not getting exclusives just makes me think less of the guy.

jefe78 11y ago

Working there a while ago was quite interesting. The corporate structure is incredibly heavy on management and lacks communication. You could have more managers than you knew and it wasn't unusual to be told to work on something else by someone you'd never met, which put you at odds with your known managers...

DonHopkins 11y ago
VPs who program can be very disruptive! When I was working on The Sims 1, Luc Barthelet [1] was the VP who was closely shepherding the project, and he just loves to code his ideas up in Mathematica. (He later became executive director at Wolfram|Alpha.) He would come over to my desk and show me some cool character animation trick he'd coded up in Mathematica, and suggest I implement it. He had it reading in the Sims character animation files that I was exporting from 3D Studio Max, blending them together, drawing stick figures, and exporting web pages with animated gifs. It's quite impressive what he can do with Mathematica, and of course I felt compelled to take some of his suggestions to heart and work on implementing them in the game. But of course that pissed my direct manager off to no end, who insisted that Luc stop putting things on my plate without going through him first. Luc's quite an animated character himself! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc_Barthelet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc_Barthelet

tacos 11y ago

I'm not sure how an article about Trip Hawkins could possibly take this tone. Trip's approach to business is legendarily eccentric/arsty/wacky -- for better and for worse. A business mastermind he was not. A man with a clear vision for "Electronic Arts the Game Company" in 1982? No way. For starters, it was not yet called Electronic Arts. And secondarily, it did not author much (if any) game software for years. For sake of brevity I will quote this gem from the back of the Deluxe Paint II manual, published in 1987: "About our company: We're an association of electronic artists who share a common goal. We want to fulfill the potential of personal computing. That's a tall order. But with enough imagination and enthusiasm, we think there's a good chance for success. Our products, like this one, are evidence of our intent. If you'd like a product brochure, send $1.00 and a self-addressed, stamped envelope to: Electronic Arts Catalog Request, 1820 Gateway Drive, San Mateo, CA 94404." That is truly delightful and a great reminder of the tone of the early Valley. It is also a sign of weak management, lack of vision, and in many ways a cry for help coming from a five year-old company.

chipotle_coyote 11y ago
I know they incorporated under a different name (Amazin' Software), but they changed it in 1983 -- only a year later. I'm not sure they ever released anything before the name change. They came out of the gate in 1983 with Archon, M.U.L.E., Pinball Construction Set and One on One, all of which were not only games but arguably historically significant. I agree that Hawkins wasn't a great businessman, but I think you're a bit off on both how quickly EA became EA and how invested they were in entertainment software from the start.
- tacos 11y ago
  Those were published (not written in house) and not even exclusively published -- often USA only. EA shifted its razor focus to games much later, in the process alienating many of their core engineers who were all about the "making tools for Electronic Artists" mission. Pretending this was some grande vision from day one misses the most interesting part of the story, and arguably the exact moment EA "lost their soul." (Hate that phrase, but I'll play it since the author used it.)

tvawnz 11y ago

Why does no one just put all the words in a row like a book or a newspaper or something anymore? Does anyone actually enjoy this "experience" where you have to wade through a maze of obnoxious pictures and logic puzzles and shit? Is the general assumption that, now that we've made it to the internet we can forget our big boy book-reading skills and go back to pop-up picture books? Why is there all this ADHD frame-shifty-scripty "chapter-one" and "look-at-this-shitty-cover-page-where-you-can't-scroll-right-or-down-and-spacebar-isn't-taking-me-to-the-words-and-neither-is-reader-mode-so-now-you-get-to-play-"find-the-fucking-button"-which-is-camoflaged-next-to-the-social-media-faggotry-because-surprise-motherfucker-it's-a-slideshow-but-not-really"?

benihana 11y ago
It feels like they saw the Bloomberg piece "What is code" then decided to do that but more that than that.
RGamma 11y ago
Try it with uMatrix and a policy like mine: https://i.imgur.com/TMzeWu2.png https://i.imgur.com/TMzeWu2.png (and yes, these links actually do something) The web becomes a lot calmer without scripts (and you start to notice how little regard many sites have for proper web markup).
- tvawnz 11y ago
  Thanks for the tip.
booruguru 11y ago
I'd like to read this article on my Kindle. Is there any way I can consolidate those pages?
fenomas 11y ago
> Does anyone actually enjoy this "experience" where you have to wade through a maze of obnoxious pictures and logic puzzles and shit? Yes. I thought it was beautifully presented and nicely paced, and well worth my time. Also: a single "Continue" button at the bottom of each page is "logic puzzles and shit"? Three tiny logos hidden in the title bar are "social media faggotry"? Seriously?

shostack 11y ago

I don't know how much I can blame EA as a driving force in the industry, vs. the industry as a whole and the nature of corporations and publicly traded companies. Games got into a slump for a while because the average AAA title was stuck at a $50 price tag, yet years of inflation and increased production costs were hitting revenue and margin hard. While prices gradually started creeping up, DLC/IAP/microtransactions were really all that was left to them to find new ways of maximizing revenue and shareholder value. When you are legally mandated to do what is right for shareholders, is it really your fault that you have to optimize for what makes the most money vs. what is right for your customers, especially when the two are not always perfectly aligned? As an avid gamer I remember way back in the day when we first started getting a whiff of microtransactions becoming a "thing." I knew it was going to be the new reality and fought it tooth and nail. To date I've only made a small handful of microtransactions to support games I truly love that have tried to do the right thing for their users. That said, they really have brought out the worst in gaming companies and while gaming has finally "hit the masses" with mobile gaming, there has definitely been a drop in the average game's quality in the gold rush. The reality is though that whales drive gaming, and microtransactions facilitate whales spending massively more on games than the "buy it once" model. So game developers optimize towards that, and unfortunately that tends to skew towards addictive treadmill models that have to make the game less fun to maximize revenue. At least with old school expansions and such, they had to actually make the game awesome and enjoyable to get people to buy more content for it.

darkmighty 11y ago
> When you are legally mandated to do what is right for shareholders I don't know of any CEO (successfully) legally persecuted for 'not maximizing shareholder value', or having a more 'long term strategy'. The most that can happen afaik is getting fired, which is scary enough. In the end what I got from the article is that the initial vision of EA largely succeeded: to replicate the music industry and Hollywood with a steady big budget revenue stream. The only problem is the glaring misnomer: the correct term would be the unsavory 'Electronic Mass Media' instead of 'Electronic Arts'. The sad fact about the shareholder revenue maximization in this industry is that people are happy to be fed dog food, and producers are happy to make tons of money off of it. They shrug off the moral dilemma and say "we're just making what people want!". This situation is reproduced verbatim across mass media -- the largest revenue share is absorbed by content that is simply not good at all. If you look at music, I would say at least 80% of the top revenue generators out there produce music that is objectively worse than centuries old music. Take this for example: [1], how can one not say it is altogether a better, more energetic, more expressive, more moving piece of art than the vast majority of what is produced? Yet people seldom listen to it. Who makes money off of copyright-free Mozart works? Of course, there are exceptions, but the situation overall is an unhappy conjunction of the vast majority of people being satisfied with repetitive industrialized hits, lame jokes with explosions, and the sports game or first person shooter of the year -- while the industry is satisfied with flooding the market and the media with this rehash-able mass produced content. With no good consumer content discovery and reviewing tools, I believe that's a stable status quo for the majority of the population. That's the role platforms like Steam with indie games (or Spotify with indie music, or Netflix with original productions) can perform: the consumers can seek directly quality, and marketers don't have the ability to distort this too much. With good discovery consumers should be able seek more engrossing experiences and share opinions directly, hopefully without bias towards what's brand new (although I confess that one is hard to get rid of). In this kind of marketplace producers can also target more specific markets, making what they enjoy and find beautiful (and still able to make good revenue off that niche) instead of aiming for generic mass market titles. Of course, it could simply be that a large fraction of the population irremediably wants to just shut off their brains outside their jobs, but I don't want to believe that, at least not without unmistakable evidence. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISBNqJZVrXM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISBNqJZVrXM

DonHopkins 11y ago

How many other people were never hired by EA, but resigned from EA? (That is, you were hired by a company that EA bought, then you resigned from EA later. Getting fired counts too! ;)