EA shut-down news
On June 14, Electronic Arts and Maxis will be shutting down several Facebook games, EA announced on its web site.
The reason, so EA claims was because, "interest in the games has dropped dramatically".
Does this mean that people just aren't spending as much time playing games on Facebook anymore, as EA hints in its announcement?
According to Face Book this is not the case at all.
"Facebook says it's still a major hub for game players. Last month, Facebook offered a bunch of stats, Chris Welch at The Verge reported: over 250 million users playing via the Facebook.com website every month; about 20 percent of daily visitors playing games; more than 100 game makers that generated over $1 million last year. Overall, games generated a total of $2 billion in payouts to developers last year, too, Facebook said."
All of the games to be shut down, gave essentially the same post, with text changes to reflect the name of the game, the date of closure, and the in-game currency. Each posting says EA is shutting down the game in question so it can "reallocate development resources" to other titles. As for in-game currency and Playfish cash cards, EA is telling players to spend them before the games are retired.
Meaning millions of people are getting duped.
"The EA acquisition was structured to pay out $275 million in cash, $25 million in equity for key employee retention, and up to $100 million in additional payments if performance targets were met by the end of 2011. Playfish met enough of those performance targets to earn $50 million out of that possible $100 million."
September 30, 2013 -- Online Services Shutdown
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World Series of YAHTZEE, Ad Free Version for iOS
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Word Smack for iOS and Amazon
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Word Smack FREE for iOS and Android
September 2, 2013 -- Online Services Shutdown
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Madden NFL Social for Facebook
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Madden NFL Social for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch
August 15, 2013 -- Online Services Shutdown
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Trade Nations for Facebook
July 31, 2013 -- Online Services Shutdown
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Rock Band for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch*
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* Also affects Verizon HTC ADR6400L (aka HTC Mecha/HTC Thunderbolt), SGH-i510, and LGVS910
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Rock Band Reloaded for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch
June 14, 2013 -- Online Services Shutdown
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Pet Society for Facebook
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SimCity Social for Facebook
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The Sims Social for Facebook
June 6, 2013 -- Online Services Shutdown
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Tiger Woods PGA TOUR Online for Web
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Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 12 for PC
May 30, 2013 -- Online Services Shutdown
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Party Play Mode in SCRABBLE (Mattel version) for iPad
May 13, 2013 -- Online Services Shutdown
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Madden Superstars for Facebook
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NHL Superstars for Facebook
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TMI Trivia for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch
April 24, 2013 -- Online Services Shutdown
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JetSet Secrets for Facebook
Xbox Chief Reportedly In Line For Top Job At EA Before Moving To Zynga
Zynga (ZNGA) shares continue to rally on news that Microsoft Xbox chief Don Mattrick is taking over as CEO.
Mark Pincus is stepping aside on July 8th, though he will remain firmly in control of the company he founded.
Mattrick made his departure known just days before Microsoft “planned to announce a massive reorganization and months before the release of Xbox One,” writes Fast Company, “there was no contingency plan for Mattrick’s departure–a sign that almost no one had a clue.”
Sources say Mattrick’s move is largely due to dissatisfaction with his place in the company following the reorganization.
But Zynga was not the only company looking to snag Mattrick. Another struggling video game publisher had its eyes on their former employee: Electronic Arts.
Mattrick worked at EA between 1991, when the company purchased his studio Distinctive Software Inc. (which later became EA Canada) until 2006 when he left for Microsoft. Formerly President of Worldwide Studios, taking on the role of CEO would have been a natural fit for Mattrick. Now analysts are predicting a possible promotion of former-Microsoft employee and current EA COO, Peter Moore, to the top spot.
“We had expected Mr. Mattrick to be offered the top job at EA following the departure of its last CEO, John Riccitiello,” analysts at Wedbush said.
“EA presents a different challenge from Zynga, with over 4x the revenue and significantly higher profitability, and we think that the company is largely on the right track already. We were surprised that Mr. Mattrick took the Zynga job, as we understood that he was the front-runner for the EA job as well, and we believed that the larger company presented a more prestigious opportunity.”
As peculiar as Mattrick’s departure from Microsoft is—on the eve of the Xbox One’s launch, no less—his choice of Zynga over EA is more puzzling still.
EA, the publisher behind Madden NFL, the Battlefield games, and the Mass Effect franchise, has been struggling to find a major hit lately, but it doesn’t face anything quite so precarious as Zynga’s post-IPO slide.
That’s not to say EA doesn’t have its fair share of troubles.
Like Zynga, which shed 18% (or 520) of its employees closing down offices across the country and globally, EA has seen its own recent layoffs—to the tune of 10% of its workforce, or approximately 900 employees.
The recent launch of SimCity 5 was a disaster; Dead Space 3 saw weaker than expected sales; and EA’s massively-multiplayer online roleplaying game, Star Wars: The Old Republic, continues to tread water in its shift from subscription to free-to-play.
Snip.
Source:
EA sold the "Angel Statue of Shovels" for 149 Blue Coins.
They released it on March 7th and announced the game was closing a few weeks later.
They knowingly robbed their loyal players of money and then the game.
Don Mattrick made a very smart choice.
After all why would he want to work for a company that, A; has a very bad reputation and B; rips of its customers!
That Sim City 5 is a disaster does not come as a big surprise either, obviously cyber sex is not very popular.
So much for their trumped up campaign to promote this game.
As the saying goes, you win some, you lose some.
As far as EA is concerned, may they lose it all.
Unless they come to their senses and give us our beloved family friendly games back.
Here’s how EA has rammed free-to-play into Plants vs Zombies 2
Most publishers would be pretty satisfied with having a universally-loved golden goose gaming franchise in their portfolio. Not EA, though. EA will fire the guy responsible for that goose and immediately set to work trying to get that bird to lay diamond eggs. Into a Gucci bag.
Plants vs Zombies 2 has now soft-launched in New Zealand and Oz, giving those with access to antipodean iTunes accounts a look at what EA’s imposition of free-to-play has done to PopCap’s cherished franchise.
Over at Pocket Gamer (no relation), Mark Brown has dissected the new setup and it’s basically as bad as I feared. There’s an in-game currency which you use to buy power-ups, and there’s a number of plants (the “towers” in PvZ’s tower defence) that are locked behind in-app purchases. On top of that, there are rare-drop “keys” that unlock certain levels in the game — or you can simply purchase them outright.
Plants vs Zombies 2 isn’t designed for maximum enjoyment — it’s designed for maximum revenue generation. This is exactly what’s so loathsome about free-to-play: it constantly pulls you out of the reverie of gameplay by reminding you that you’re pushing buttons on a thinly-disguised cash register. There’s a reason you don’t go hang around with salespeople when you want to relax.
Making money isn’t a crime, and I get that price discrimination exists. But based on the phenomenal success of its predecessor, PvZ 2 is a game that would have sold like a baldness cure had it been sold with a five dollar price tag. But EA has decided that making $20 from the whales and zero dollars from the overwhelming majority is a better decision. In a couple of years, EA, you won’t have to wonder why your most beloved game franchises aren’t so beloved anymore.
Source;
http://pockettactics.com/2013/07/11/heres-how-ea-ruined-plants-vs-zombies-2/
SimCity @ Pet Cociety, the truth.
3-18 2013:
Misinformation. Server errors. Fan backlash. Since EA launched SimCity two weeks ago, the online city-builder has been nothing short of a catastrophe for everyone involved.
Much has changed since the game's rocky launch on March 5. Things have gotten better. But all still isn't well, even as EA takes its latest step to make amends with angry fans. In order to make sure you're caught up, we're zooming out and taking a look back at the whole SimCity Disaster so far.
Wondering how things got this way? What's gone right and wrong and right again? Fear not. We will try to explain everything
"It's a reboot! SimCity 2013, also known as SimCity 5 or just SimCity, is designed to take the popular simulation series in a new direction. Over the past year or so, the folks at long running studio Maxis—now a subsidiary of the massive publisher Electronic Arts—have been making lofty promises for SimCity. It'll come with all sorts of improvements, they said. New transportation options. Population determined by roads. And... an intricate multiplayer network that supports inter-city trading and requires SimCity to be online at all times."
Well... for one, you can't play SimCity offline. So your $60 game probably can't be played on, say, an airplane. Or while on duty in Iraq. Or when your router's on the fritz. Or when EA's servers are down.
By now you may have heard something about servers being down.
So with so much controversy leading up to release, surely EA must have been prepared for launch day? Surely they must have seen what happened to Diablo III and ensured that their servers worked flawlessly so everyone could play the game when it went live?
No. On day one, the game didn't work. Day two? Game didn't work. It took almost a week before people could actually play SimCity, and EA had to disable a bunch of features in order to get the game running properly.
So for way too much time, people who spent $60 on SimCity just straight-up couldn't play it. They couldn't play online because the servers were overloaded, and they couldn't play offline because there was no offline mode.
You would think EA could change that. But EA insists that SimCity was built as an online-only game.
In a blog post last December, Maxis's Bradshaw said just that:
"Creating a connected experience has always been a goal for SimCity, and this design decision has driven our development process for the game. This is easily the most ambitious game in the franchise and we've taken great care to make sure that every line of code embodies the spirit of the series. To do this, we knew we had to make sure we put our heart and souls into the simulation and the team created the most powerful simulation engine in its history, the GlassBox Engine. GlassBox is the engine that drives the entire game — the buildings, the economics, trading, and also the overall simulation that can track data for up to 100,000 individual Sims inside each city. There is a massive amount of computing that goes into all of this, and GlassBox works by attributing portions of the computing to EA servers (the cloud) and some on the player's local computer."
What was the real problem and what has that got to do with Pet Society, you must think.
"Server capacity is our biggest obstacle," explained Kip Katsarelis, "SimCity" senior producer, in a post to EA's forums Thursday. "We launched in North America on Tuesday and our servers filled up within a matter of hours. What we saw was that players were having such a good time they didn't want to leave the game, which kept our servers packed and made it difficult for new players to join."
But while he said additional servers have been added and will continue to be added "until we have enough to meet the demand," he also said that EA had to temporarily remove some of the game's features so more people could begin playing.
So, I think, it is safe to say, in order for EA to get this game to even play remotely like it should, more server space had to be freed and the world wide server overloads resolved.
This of course costs a lot of money (plus servers space) and that money (plus server space) had to come from somewhere.
The ripoff of Pet Society and other game players maybe?
To me that makes sense.
We were the sheep that had to be slaughtered.
Sources:
Kotuka.com
NBC news
I don't know about you readers, but for me the time frame matches perfectly.
EA sold this "online" game for 60-- US dollars each, (I believe they sold 1000.000 when it first came out) only to find the did not have the server space to support it.
Some of these SimCity players where so angry they contacted the Whitehouse for a full investigation.
No, time was not on the side of EA this time around. They had to do some serious damage controll.
Like EA has always done, what better way to just sacrafice some other games.
Did they not see this coming? I'm sure they did, they had plan B (so to speak) in place.
That was us, the players of Pet Society!