If you put stock in consumer reactions, the video game industry is on the verge of collapse and will be the next big bust, largely because of the hubris of publishing companies. EA is one of the worst offenders, with recent events gathering scorn and reproach from consumers and investors alike. The video game industry, from producers to consumers, is broken.
In October 2013, The New York Times interviewed Patrick Bach, the executive producer for the Battlefield development team, an intellectual property held by EA, and he said, “Every new game needs to be the next big thing.” And it does. As game studios look for new ways to buttress their revenues and maintain their market share, small developers who create cheap games that can be bought for a dollar or are free-to-play increasingly challenge the market dominance of big-name studios.
“Battlefield 4,” the blockbuster release for EA this year, was met with a fairly enthusiastic response that quickly soured as reports surfaced that the game was riddled with crippling bugs and other issues. Gaming site Polygon lowered the score of 7.5 initially offered to “Battlefield 4” to a four, arguing that because the game was “still barely playable for many players,” it was “difficult for [Polygon] to recommend.”
EA also recently released a mobile version of “Dungeon Keeper,” a remake of an old strategy game, to dismal reception from critics and consumers alike, largely because of its free-to-play system. Dan Whitehead of EuroGamer said in his review, “The tragedy isn’t that EA has crammed micro-transactions into a beloved game … but that it has been done so in such a rote and predictable way.” Yet as criticism mounts, EA maintains they have adopted a reasonable approach to the free-to-play mobile market and that the large amount of consumers are pleased with their product.
Part of the problem with the gaming industry is that, in many ways, the developers and publishers are right to avoid listening to the consumer reaction. Though Activision’s “Call of Duty” franchise has been met with a vocal denouncement every time a new iteration is released, it continues to dominate the games market and brings in substantial income to the publishers. Following that, it comes as little surprise that many companies have chosen to listen less to the vocal consumers and attempt to find their own formulas which create blockbuster games that pull in large amounts of revenue. And therein lies the problem.
The producers have decided the consumers cannot be trusted, and a growing part of the consumers have come to the conclusion that the producers cannot be trusted. The lack of communication between the two halves of this market has left it broken, floundering and in dire need of revitalization.
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