They at least are still doing a few decent Star Wars games.
Jedi Fallen Order and Survivor are genuinely fantastic games (outside of performance issues at launch for survivor). And at least for now, we have a 3rd one in development. And while I’ve not played it, the new galactic racer has raving reviews.
But outside of those… urm… yeah. Battlefield and FIFA it is.
Edit: Galactic racer isn’t actually from EA. My bad! Must have mixed it up with that tie fighter game they made a few years ago.
Survivor’s performance issues piss me off because I played it day one on Series X and had zero problems and I just fucking love that game, it’s in my top five, so for people to have poor experiences and for that to dominate the conversation was a huge shame
The FIFA community doesnt actually interact much with the larger gaming community, that might be while they have that weird behavior, a colleague back in college even did those fancy bubble graphs for mapping game communities and the sports games fans live in a community bubble.
It might be possible those games are almost all they play or known within gaming context.
The problem is EA's model is one of the few ways to remain profitable in the industry. People may not remember it now but the industry used to have companies at their height just up and die because they carried so much debt and it took so long to get a return on game sales. Now companies that would have died get bought by EA and just die later because the profitability still isn't there. It's why companies seem to be treating gaming as live service or death. Even Konami couldn't maintain Metal Gear as profitable through conventional methods.
Your article points at Konami and Capcom but Konami had to restructure it's gaming division to emphasize gambling and Capcom is one of the companies pushing for digital services after facing potential collapse in the 2010s.
A succesful restructuring is even harder, so merit to them that most people didint lost their jobs at Konami (despite us not liking pachinko). Capcom in the 2010s made the transition to multiplatform releases, which also ended up saving them (specially nowadays, where for quite a few games, its unthinkable to not do multiplatform.)
The problems that lead to US game developers closing is sadly outside just the sphere of the game industry there, but things are what they are.
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u/Bitter-Tip705 8h ago
I’m actually shocked they didn’t go outta business years ago but I forgot sports games are like the only thing keeping them afloat