Obi_Kwiet
It's Stuart, Martha Stuart
Posts: 7,943
What worries me about EA and other huge game publishers, is that they seem to be more concerned about marketing to the casual crowd. They're marketing to people who play games for the SP and never change their graphics settings. Now I realize that's where allot of the money is, but games that are designed that way tend to disappoint serious gamers. It's usually the actual game developers that bother to go into the forums and try to fight the publisher to allow them to incorporate the features that the gamers want.
It's difficult to explain, but I get the feeling that when the CEO's of EA Games think "gamer" they think of a guy with a Dell XPS playing an FPS with a gamepad. Failed arcade titles such as "Spiderman" and "ROTK” for PC which are designed for a gamepad show this. If PC gamers want to play that style of game they'll go to the consoles. Even though most of their FPS's aren't like that today, I get a bad feeling that that's where they're going. If they pander to the crowd who know little about PC's they're not going to have to do nearly as much work or make the game nearly as good as with serious gamers.
Another area in which the CEO's of big publishing companies show their ignorance of the gamer is with their strange aversion to SDK's. While with some titles it is better not to release an the SDK, this should only be don’t if the developer is willing to constantly update it and add new content. I have seen many a title that would still be alive today, had they allowed the community to mod it.
My worry is that as publishing companies start viewing the PC as a console that’s what it will become. I don’t thin they understand that the mouse and keyboard, when properly utilized create a wholly different style of game that many of us would hate to see die. I would like to see smaller, less bureaucratic publishers, whose CEOs are gamers themselves that can be more aware of what the PC gamer wants. While not perfect, I would say that Vivindi and UBI are an example of a step in the right direction.
When there are no little publishers like UBI and Vivindi to give them competition, I worry that they will forget the gamers altogether, because they will have no choice.
Ok, that sounded disturbingly like an essay someone would write on a matter of national import that he or she felt strongly about, but I suppose it got the job done. I’m probably wrong about all this, but it’s just sort of a feeling I get every time I see a game or an ad by EA, Microsoft or other big publishing company. I mean, it is a bit disillusioning when you see a picture of a gamepad on the “PC games” tab. But like I say, it’s probably just me. :p Sorry for wasting five minutes of your life.
