EA Sports – It’s Not In The Game

Over the course of my life, I have been one of Electronic Arts best customers. It’s embarassing to admit how much money I have spent on the company, but year after year, I’m the guy who falls for their trick of repackaging the same content, over and over again.I’m not sure why I feel so compelled to upgrade each year, but for the last decade, I’ve purchased an EA title at least, once every three months. A few of these have been new games that EA has come out with, but by and large I’ve mostly stuck with the tried, but true sport franchises.

I like the sports games the best because they allow me to play a quick game without having to keep track of what’s going on. I’ll usually start with a season mode and by the end of the real life season, I am wrapping up the playoffs. When the online capabilities started to come out, I was pretty fired up about being able to skool other gamers with my mad John Madden skillz, but as a casual gamer, I quickly found out the hard way, that I was no match for the caliber players, who have the time to play online.

Right now my lifetime winning record for all Xbox Live games is under 10%. These days, I tend to stick to playing the computer, but every now and then, I’ll still log in, just so that I remember what it’s like to take a beating.

EA knows that they make their bread and butter on customers like myself. Most of their titles are franchise oriented, which allows them to have a neverending game pipeline in the works. In the past, I thought it was silly to upgrade from one title to another, just for the updated player stats, but each year the subtle differences in the gameplay was enough to convince me to keep upgrading.

Normally, overpaying for a game that I won’t play very long, isn’t really all that big of a deal, but over the last few years, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend at EA and after continuing to be disappointed with their products, I’ve finally decided that enough is enough.

Every since I first bought my Xbox 360, I’ve noticed that EA sports has been building in planned obsolescence into their franchise titles.

My first disappointment came when I purchased Fifa: Road To The World Cup. This game was one of the first few titles that came out for the Xbox 360 and as a huge World Cup fan, it was immedietely on my must have list. After getting the game, I quickly set up my franchise and ended up picking Sweden to try and take to the World Cup. For the next few months, I played my season diligently and finally made it to the end of the qualifiers. I had a lot of tied games, but was able to successfully make it into the World Cup tournament.

It was then that I found out, that my game wasn’t FIFA World Cup it was only “the road to the World Cup.â€? If I wanted to actually play in the tournament, it meant that I had to pay another $60 to EA, just so that I could get the follow up title that was released shortly thereafter. I did end up trying out the real World Cup game and other than the tournament, it was exactly the same game.

As a customer, this is really frustrating because it would have been easy enough for them to include a playoff round in the game, but instead they wanted to resell the same game to me a second time. Had I known about the subtlety, I probably wouldn’t have bought the game, but you never really know what a game will be like until you’ve already purchased it and it’s sitting in your console.

After being disappointed with the FIFA game, I decided to try out NBA Live 2006. At the time, the basketball season had already started, but I was eager to see how far Kobe could take the Lakers without the help of Shaq.

After buying the game, I loaded it up and was excited to try it out, but quickly found out too late, that EA had removed the franchise option from the game. The franchise has always been my favorite part of any sports title and often times, I would build up a promising, but young team, only to sim 3 or 4 years, so that I could play my players in their prime.

While I enjoy the actual gameplay of NBA 2006, trading players and adjusting the starting lineup can be even more fun for me. Even though this feature has been included in every NBA game that I can remember, for some reason EA left it out. Given their history, it makes me suspect that the reason why they did this was so that customers would have an added incentive to upgrade in 2007.

With both of these games, I was willing to cut EA a little bit of slack. When the Xbox 360 came out, there was a rush to get the games out. I could see Microsoft making them release a stripped down version of their games just for the launch. I kept buying titles hoping they would get better, but finally, my patience wore down. The straw that broke the camel’s back was the ultimate EA franchise game of all time, John Madden’s football.

I’ve been playing this franchise longer than any game I own today and every year I’ve felt really good about making the upgrades. There were some years that they would tweak the controls a bit and it would drive me nuts, but year after year, I’d see little improvements and the game only got better. Then all of a sudden, EA decided that they needed to take away past functionality that their customers had gotten used to. In this case, they decided to kill the ability to do a fantasy draft at the start of your franchise.

The fantasy draft was my favorite way to run a franchise. Not only could I make sure that my favorite players ended up on my team, but it also introduce parity into the league. When you combined the initial fantasy draft, with the college draft at the end of each season, it allowed a user to take over the general manager position and try their hand at managing a team from the executive level. Now it could be that I’m misinterpreting EA’s intentions, but given how popular this feature has been with players, the most logical reason to take the feature out would be if they wanted to build in an automatic reason to upgrade, for the next year’s game.

I don’t mind when EA adds new features that don’t turn out to be so great. I also don’t mind, if they kill features because they are terrible or because of outside legal considerations, but when they make their games intentionally defective, it doesn’t make me very happy about upgrading year after year. It would be one thing, if I had the option to take a bad game back, but most retailers have strict rules about returning lame games, after you’ve opened up the package.

Because I’ve become convinced that EA is intentionally making their games bad, I have stopped purchasing their titles unless someone makes a personal reccomendation. The strategy may ensure that more people upgrade each year, but by watering down their games, they’ve lost at least one important customer from being so short sighted.

Davis Freeberg is a technology enthusiast living in the Bay Area. He enjoys writing about movies, music, and the impact that digital technology is having on traditional media. You can read more of his musings at www.davisfreeberg.com