| mjk45 said: Yep it's a mess from both ends, what I would like to see Is rather than making a knee jerk reaction and Bioware closing they look at the management that got them here, to often the guys who make the games are made scapegoats for upper management decisions, if the guys making the game have done their part and made a technically competent game why should they get it into the neck for issues like lack of content and story that are linked to management, another worrying trend is this 10 million talk , it wasn't that long ago that a successful game was measured if it was a series /franchise by how it performed against it's predecessors or more generally it's peers. now we are seeing series that historically sold in the 2-3 million range suddenly expected to make 3 or 4 times that, a classic example was tomb raider upon reaching 6 million it was viewed as underperforming by SE even though historically the series sold in that 2-3 million range because they had an even higher forecast , while tomb raider did great not every game is so lucky, not satisfied with a healthy profit and satisfied customers and growth over time, these games are now under pressure to be chained to or morphed into whatever is seen as the next big money thing or left to rot and the unfortunate thing is the traditional gamers voice is getting smaller each and every year and we are the ones who are missing out and missing out now no polished MEA no DLC and who knows how many great games and series in limbo. |
Huh, I'm not too sure. I think you could potentially link lack of content and story to Bioware's developers themselves, in fact I think that's very likely. Unless by "upper management" you mean the people on top of the development chain. But if you're saying that the technical team developing Bioware's games are technically proficient, and that those people should be kept, then I'd agree I suppose.
As far as your Tomb Raider example, while I completely see your point and agree with it, what Square Enix did was even more fucked up then the average publisher. Square Enix had a huge management problem, some of their Japanese games were in development hell, and as a result they decided to "blame" their Western studios. What I mean is that for that fiscal year they relied WAYYYY too heavily on their Western divisions to pick up the slack. So despite the fact that Hitman Absolution sold 3.6 million in 5 months (making it the fastest selling Hitman by far), despite the fact that Tomb Raider sold exceptionally well, and despite the fact that Sleeping Dogs did great for a new IP ... they still fell short of their expectations by $100 million+. That's somewhat similalr to what you're talking about, how publishers want to inflate their expectations and make an unreasonable amount on their IPs, but I think it's even more fucked up in this case because it was basically just to excuse their poor management and it ended up leaving a huge friction with their Western studios (Hitman studio eventually left Square Enix's control because SE fucked them over with a bullshit marketing scheme that ruined their potential to find mainstream success, the studio developing Deus Ex had their Western Final Fantasy game cancelled and ended up having Mankind Divided again fucked over by SE, the studio SE contracted to help make Sleeping Dogs shut down). That same fiscal year, Square Enix's 2nd biggest money maker Dragon Quest, ended up having it's worst debut in series history ... a debut that was so bad compared to the franchises regular debuts that I don't even think the fact that it was a subscription based MMO could have made it nearly as profitable as they were expecting. The only other games they had that year were Bravely Default (which sold very well but was Japan exclusive until much later, making it's potential for turning back their fiscal year very limited), Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance (which I believe only had it's Western release in that fiscal year, essentially halving the sales profit that was contributed for that fiscal year), and a Final Fantasy spin off which only had it's Western release contribute to that year (and even then the Western releases only sold 300k lifetime, let alone what it must have sold that fiscal year). The West was carrying Square RIDICULOUSLY hard and they were expecting too much.
I agree with what you're saying overall. We shouldn't expect every game to sell 8+ million. The funny thing is that I would not be surprised if EA actually made a profit on all of Bioware's recent games, even the ones that were panned and didn't sell a lot. I would guess that at least Andromeda cost them a lot given it's advertisement push, huge development time, as well as the fact that it was mostly sold at a discount, but who knows. I think what EA really needs to do, is scale back on the staff of Bioware. Yeah, it sucks, but I think they need to be scaled down and really work on a quality singleplayer game for 3-5 years. They're currently at somewhere between 500-1000 employees, and that's simply too much for a company that is consistently in dire straits. I think going for something smaller and more manageable, and making their releases big in quality but not huge in investment amount would carry them a long way.
