God at play – spiritual games» What Happened to EA?

I did some more research, and the results I found as to why EA failed to achieve its manifesto are pretty sad.

The Game Industry of the Early 80s

During the early 80s, we had Atari raking it in with lots of consoles in homes, although they were totally screwing over developers by doing so. Developers basically didn’t get any of the money, and they certainly weren’t getting the credit they deserved. As a revolt, some of them formed Activision, with similar goals as EA. In fact, both companies shipped their games with tasteful album covers to draw the parallel to being an independent music label.

So you have Activision and Electronic Arts both trying to support devs who were doing good things for games. And then the Great Crash of 1984, caused largely by actions of publisher/manufacturers like Atari, Mattel, Coleco, and Commodore, left the industry in shambles. As a result, EA resorted to actions that became increasingly different from their manifesto in order to gain the success they desired.

From Software Artists to Engineers

It started out innocently enough. EA switched its marketing style to promote the game as a brand, and its genre, moreso than the “software artists.” This apparently made more sense to the customer, who didn’t care as much about individual developers as EA thought. But of course that was the case because gaming was new and customers didn’t really understand it completely. Not only that, but the developers themselves hadn’t made too many games yet, so there wasn’t much to care about or relate to at this point.

Therefore, EA “adapted” to focus less on the developer as an artist. Activision had the same trend, too. And what happened when they focused less on the developers as artists over time? They published fewer artistic games.

For EA, this meant continuing to publish more games like One on One, which was a basketball title. Marketing One on One was easier when it featured people who were already celebrities, like Larry Bird and Julius Erving. After the crash, EA pursued this direction by publishing several licensed basketball, racing, and baseball games.

This was working out so well, that a few years later EA decided to develop a game in-house – Skate or Die. No longer would they focus completely on indie developers; they had their own developers to worry about now, too. Right after this, EA developed John Madden Football, based on founder Trip Hawkins’ passion for football simulation. The combination of first and third-party titles led to enough success that EA had room to expand.

The obvious next step for expansion was to consoles, like the upcoming Sega Genesis. By then, EA – or more accurately, its founder Hawkins – had quite a different focus. Hawkins had to convince the rest of his company, who had up to this point believed in his vision, to go the other direction. Gamasutra’s History of EA article quotes him as saying,

The goal was to stop making esoteric products for an elite customer base, and go make it in the big-time with mainstream gamers. Several employees were outraged and quit, but I convinced the team that if the public chose to buy consoles like the Genesis, then to satisfy our customers we had to make the best games possible on the platforms chosen by the public, not the ones our engineers wished they could afford.

Compare this to EA’s manifesto previously advertised:

Why do we cry? Why do we laugh, or love, or smile? What are the touchstones of our emotions?

Until now, the people who asked such questions tended not to be the same people who ran software companies. Instead, they were writers, filmmakers, painters, musicians. They were, in the traditional sense, artists.

Since when did the “touchstones of our emotions” become esoteric? Isn’t that why books and film are so popular? And since when did “software artists” become engineers? It seems that somewhere along the line, Trip Hawkins became one of the “people who ran software companies” that EA’s original manifesto was reacting against.

Was it the crash that caused him to change views? Was it based on his new experience from leading game development with Madden? Just simply greed? What happened? Maybe someday I’ll really get to the bottom of it. Until then, I’m left wondering what the world would have been like had Electronic Arts stuck to its original vision.

Pertinent Links:
Part 1 of What Happened to EA?
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20070216/fleming_01.shtml
http://www.edge-online.com/features/a-short-history-of-activision
http://www.edge-online.com/features/a-short-history-electronic-arts

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