My hope is that that starts to happen more too. I think there’s a chance because a lot of the big money that’s just there for money (IE 80% of EA’s investors it seems like, and significant portions of Activision and Take Two) and because video games have been a growing market for a long time are spooked and getting out right now. Between macroeconomic conditions and what looks like a contracting market for games until at least the new consoles come out, investors who are there for money don’t want to be involved. These are the same people who think Apex Legends was a great idea and are utterly baffled as to why BF 5 isn’t selling as well as EA expected. These are also the people who want EA to get their $/hour of gameplay revenue closer to a movie theater ticket ($5-$10 per hour of movie, while games are “stuck” around $<1-$4 or so for the best monetized games). I’m not kidding, you can read EA’s quarterly reports, whether they like it or not, that’s what their biggest investors are pushing for. EA’s stock price depends about as much on getting that number up as it does turning a profit and actually selling games. They don’t mention critical or customer reception of the practices it takes to get there once, and they only mention things like the loot-box Battlefront II fiasco in terms of their legal liability as a footnote more or less.
So my hope is that those kind of investors get out of the industry, or at least understand that this isn’t movies. TBH one of the things that drew me to videogames through out my childhood was how economical they were for entertainment. Once you own a console, drop $60 and you can get at least 10s, if not 100s or 1000s of hours of gameplay out of it. EA has basically said that’s bad and it costs them money, so they don’t want to back games that can give you that. To me, that’s the antithesis of one of the reasons I got into gaming, so they can bite me. I haven’t bought an EA product since BF4 and they don’t have anything in the pipeline that I’m aware of that would change my stance. In the meantime, I’ll continue to back developers and publishers who still get that a game isn’t a movie (or music, or a circus, or whatever else they want to use to justify less content at higher prices).
was really looking forward to it. oh well, at least it seems like apex legends is actually really good. just finished dl it.
