TechStuff Classic: The Electronic Arts Story- Part Two

which means these published back to back. I must have missed a day or something. But I'm not gonna miss a beat because we're going to pick up where we left off and continue the Electronic Arts Story. Let's listen in. One thing I didn't mention at the end of the last podcast was that was the year e A purchased Origin Systems, and that's the game company that was founded by Rich Garriott, the guy who created the Ultimate series, and they also had another series. They had James Combat

simulate simulators. They also had the Wing Commander series, and so that was a big move on their part. But then we move on into and that's when the three D O console actually hit the market. Uh, and then e A also released the first Need for speed for the three D O because e A was actually a partner in that three D O console experiment. They were not the whole owners of that, which I guess in retrospect,

I'm sure the company thinks is a good thing. But they were partners, so it wasn't like Hawkins had severed all ties once he left e A. Uh. Now again, we're not going to mention every single release that Electronics Arts had um Electronic Arts I should say had throughout their history. That it would be ridiculous, and you'd also get tired of hearing A say FIFA. Uh like thirty or forty time we say FIFA. He's just that word. First of all, I didn't if you're in the United States,

you're probably thinking, I don't know what that means. And even if you're not, after you've heard it that many times, it starts to lose all meeting and become something of a cone that we're just saying over and over to achieve enlightenment. But so I don't have anything for for ninety four, Lauren, do you? I don't want to skip

over you you've got anything that was? That was actually the year that Hawkins resigned as chairman of the board for e A. Okay, so now he had actually not just left as the CEO, but also left the board of directors. Uh inve e A acquired a company called bull Frog, which was a game development studio in the United Kingdom, and they were known for a couple of different series, their theme park series and their series called Populus. Did you ever see Populous, Lauren? I did not see Populous.

I did play some of the theme parks. Okay. Well, Populus was a game where it puts you in the role essentially as as like a god, and it was a job to try and shape landscape so that fild stuff and worship you. Right, yeah, this this is what m Yeah. Indeed, I was about to say that this is what I think black and White because that was the same studio later on Black and White definitely was

was something that was inspired by the populist games. You could definitely tell that Populus was was not quite as sophisticated as that, and there were there were different ways of winning Populace. You had opponents that would also have their own worshippers, and you were trying to dominate the world. So if you wanted to go over to the your opponent's side when your opponent wasn't looking, and start digging down until all of the villages were submerged in water

and all the little villagers drowned. And it was both entertaining and horrifying at the same time. All of these series, by the way, we're serious that he had published and so um so the acquisition of bull Frog was kind of a good following steps since they had done pretty well. Right yeah, now now he has decided that they want this as an actual part of their development team, not

just a title that they published. Once Bullfrog joined the A, they the division began to develop the Dungeon Keepers series, which reached some acclaim I thought, I always thought it was a very entertaining series. And that same year, in ninety the Sega Saturn platform launches, and so does a platform that would become one of the most disruptive platforms in video game console history, because at this point Nintendo is pretty much the heavy hitter. I mean, Nintendo is

owning video game consoles. Sega keeps coming out with consoles that from a specs perspective, might beat out whatever the Nintendo console is at that time. But but just but just that the games. The programming that was going on for Nintendo was incredible, right, Yeah, the Nintendo had all the momentum, so Sega, while it had its fans, just didn't have nearly as many as Nintendo did. Well. Was also when we saw Sony get into the game with

the PlayStation console, and that really shook things up. You know, a CD based console that had far more graphic ability than the Nintendo consoles did. Uh. And that that gave e A a lot of opportunities as well to develop for yet another platform, because remember e A wants there to be as many platforms as possible because it means that no single platform has enough power to tell e

A what to do. Um. And then e A also starts to port several three d O titles to the Saga, Saturn, and Sony PlayStation platforms in order to take advantage of the thirty two bit processing power. So in this sense, they didn't have to develop new titles. They just had to retool these titles for the three D OH so that they would work on these other systems. Now, I say, just that's still a pretty big thing to have to do, but it does. It's different from having to build a

game from the ground batch. Yeah, you don't have to go through the whole conceptual phase at all. Uh. I don't have anything for ninety six, so we're gonna go right into nine seven. Sounds good. So e A in ninety seven acquires Maxis, And this is this is a big one, folks, because this is the company that was

responsible for sim City. The first sim City game came out in ninete, so almost a decade earlier, right and h And since then, will write who is who's the designer for Maxis had had been making all kinds of all kinds of related titles as sim Earth, Sam Aunt. Yeah. I was a big fantasy man. Yeah. Yeah. On the on the s n E S it was. It was great Aunt simulation. Man, I got it. Sounds so goofy

and I had so much fun playing it. I'm not going to argue with the goofy part, but hey, I like lots of goofy stuff, so I am not one to talk. And once e A acquires Maxis, that's when will Wright starts to work on a game that would become an important part of e A's arsenal. In fact, you could argue it's the most important game that e A ever came out with, and that is the SIMS. So will Wright starts to work on the SIMS back in ninety seven. It would be a few years before

that game would come out. Uh. E A also gets into the online gaming market. They launch Ultima Online, which was one of the earliest, at least one of the earliest successful massively multiplayer online role playing games in the Western Hemisphere. So Ultima Online goes live and starts to prove the model that online gaming could be a thing. Keeping in mind this is before broadband penetration had really spread out throughout the United States. Uh, there were people

who are playing this on dial ups. Oh my goodness. Uh. And so it was you know, this was the earliest days of that, and it was before really in those days, it came down to Ultima Online or ever Quest. Those were the two big names. And it wouldn't be until the world of Warcraft that that dynamic gets really shaken up. Um, and you had people who were hardcore fans of one

and hated the other anyway. That that same year, nine seven, bull Frog chief Peter Mullineux leaves e A to start a new studio and supposedly one of the reasons he left was that he felt that e A was getting two hands on in game development, that they were interfering too much in the actual development of games, and that he felt that the pressure was to establish a game and then just churn out sequels right right, And this is in U is in direct opposition to eas original

mode of operation, wherein they were they were treating game developers with extreme respect and kind of letting them do whatever they wanted on the principle that whatever they wanted

would be awesome. Yeah, and yeah, and but but since then had, as we discussed in our previous episode, decided that that, yeah, that that the real way to go is to create brands and and really um push the brandin, find a brand that resonates with an audience, and then all you have to do is keep on creating uh sequels to that and that, and people will buy it because you've established an audience for it. This is not an unusual idea. We see it all across video games.

I mean you could think another media too, of course. Yeah, you can think of dozens of franchises that exist. Only you can look at entries to various franchises where you think this really didn't live up to what the original was or what later entries were. This was clearly something where a company was trying to cash in on a previously existing title. Um and and in some cases it's it can be the death of a franchise or or

even an entire company. Well. Then moving on, in n Electronic Arts moves its headquarters from San Mateo to Redwood City, and e A also acquires yet another company, Westwood Studios, which was the company that developed the Command and Conquer series, which are real time strategy games. Um. I'm terrible at real time strategy games. I'm just I can't. I don't. I don't have a brain from either. I can't. I can't manage. Yeah, I cannot manage the many assets. I

can't keep track of everything. Obviously, if I were going up against Kirk and Spock, they would be able to defeat me because I can't think three dimensionally. Um Also, Electronic Arts formed a partnership with Square, being the Japanese game company that's that's most famous for for RPGs like say Final Fantasy. You might have heard of it. Um and Uh, Square and and e A worked out this deal. They formed a Square E A here in the States

and E A square over in Japan. Uh. The idea of being to transfer titles that were happening in each place to the other and and see see how they did, you know, try to try to bring stuff that wasn't being seen in each country over to the other, because there were I think, especially in the Final Fantasy series, if I'm not mistaken, there were a couple of entries in the Final Fantasy Series that happened in Japan that

at that point had never been seen in the United States. Correct, and uh, and and people were you know, RPGs had a little bit of a following over here, but but none of the really big cool titles were coming over and so and so. So I meant that you had to have like a Japanese game console, and then you had to import the titles because of course, the the media for the Japanese consoles would not work on the

United States. It literally would not play correct. I mean, you know, aside from the fact that you would have to learn Japanese in order to play them very effectively, which is a whole other issue. But um, but yeah, so, so each square E A and A square each had a stake in the other um which which which is an interesting fun business model. And uh in that same year, they brought um Bashida Blade to Parasite Eve and Zeno Gears all to the American market for the PlayStation. Huh wow,

so another big move on e A's part. Also kind of interesting to see a an alliance in the video game world. Uh. Some people would call that, uh frightening because you know, when you're talking about being such a big power player and you already have a reputation for scooping up smaller companies and then to make an alliance with another big company, just that starts to make other

people feel really nervous, kind of nervous. Yeah. Seven years after e A had acquired Origin Systems, Richard Garriott, who was the founder of Origin, leaves e A. He had finished work on Ultimate nine, which was the final uh entry into the Ultimate series besides the online stuff. And uh. He also seems to feel very similar to the way other people who departed e A felt that that it was just it was not the most ideal creative environment, right.

Apparently a bunch of his former team members, of former Ultimate team members felt very much the same way because after e A canceled Ultimate Online to UM at the time, a bunch of a bunch of them jumped ship to go join Garriott at the new company that he had formed,

Destination Games. UH. Garriott would not see very much success here in the United States over the next several years, but recently interesting thing is that he had a kick started campaign for a new game that is inspired by his old Ultimate series, and the kickstarter funded in like two days, it was, and then went on to meet

lots and lots of stretch goals. Anyway, back to e a h. Still in they published their first Medal of Honor game, which is again another one of those big franchises that UH that they're very well known for, and that debuted on the PlayStation platform. UH. And that same year, Sega debuts a new video game console called the Dreamcastcast. I own a Dreamcast. I like it a lot. I actually got my Dreamcast after the Dreamcast had already run

its course and was no longer in production. UH. And I inherited a lot of games from a friend of mine who was not really playing them anymore. And you know, I think Dreamcast it's another one of those things where we've done an episode of about Sega. We did a full thing about Sega's um Uh successes and it's it's notable failures and it's interesting. Again. The Dreamcast was one

of those consoles that was phenomenal. It performed really well potatoly if you stacked it up against its competitors, but it just, you know, it just never never really caught on. It never cut onto the to the extent that it needed to in order for a viable platform. I think it was a little bit niche for for the for the mainstream American market real time especially um Also that year was when Square e A put out the Final Fantasy Anthology, which brought some of those games that had

not been published yet in America over here. So in two thousand, that's when the SIMS debuts, and it is a huge success, and it really gave e A a access to a brand new audience, which we usually refer to as women. It turned out, it turned out that they didn't know at the time when they were producing the SIMS. They had no idea that was going to

resonate with a female audience. And in fact, when they were first building the SIMS, it was just going to be a a way of building homes, and then they created these little virtual characters to inhabit the homes and realized that it was way more interesting to see what the virtual characters were up to than to build out

the houses. So that's when the SIMS focus shifted to these virtual people, and your job was to give them as much of a life as you possibly could, which became increasingly difficult than the game, where you're thinking, I don't have enough time. That's just like real life. I don't have enough hours to give this person a good job and a and a satisfying social life. Still have them go to the bathroom without having a terrible accident

in the middle of the living room. But uh, Anyway, it was a huge performer, and they immediately started to to develop expansion packs for the SIMS and also go into development for the sequels to the SIMS because it was clear they had touched the nerve and that It's also the year and two thousand, that's when Sony launched the PlayStation two. Yeah. Um. Meanwhile, back on the PlayStation one, Square e A put out Crymno Cross that year, which is my the only RPG that I've ever played all

the way through. I'm not really an RPG person. I love that game with a burning and fiery passion. It is it is the best. Um. But but I think that it's interesting that, uh. I mean, although it had been out already in Japan, I think it. You know, they were like, no, that's PlayStation two. Whatever, this one's fine on the PS It'll still sell really well. And Sony was very good about supporting their old consoles even

when they're introducing a new one. PlayStation two games were developed for the PlayStation two well after PlayStation three debuts. So um, they have a very different strategy compared to say Microsoft. And speaking of Microsoft, in two thousand one, that's when Microsoft launched the Xbox. So now we have even more competition in the video game console world. At

this point, e as just having kittens. Nintendo launched the GameCube, and e starts developed games for all the three major console platforms, which of course does not include Sad Trombone. So Xbox, PlayStation two, and GameCube are all great platforms for e A to develop for. They just they see

that as endless opportunity. So uh. They then that same year closed the Bullfrog division of e A. Now this this kind of brings us to another thing that people have criticized EA for, not just the fact that they bought up companies, but that they would later go on to close them when they realized that they weren't performing quite as well as they wanted. Yeah, they just the

things weren't working out. And a lot of the people who worked for these divisions came out and said, well, the reason things didn't work out is because they were so adamant on us producing a brand and just concentrating on that brand as opposed to letting us develop do what we do, which is developed games. And so you have this series of stories of all these different divisions being or different companies rather being bought up and turned

into divisions for e A later getting closed. Um that you know, some would say that all e A was really doing was buying up competition and shutting it down. You know that that ultimately that's what turned out to be the case. Uh oh yeah. Whether or not it was intentional is absolutely you know, that's that's that's completely beside the point. It didn't matter if it was intentional

or not. That was the effect, right, So, uh, it was it was kind of rough and around that same time, e starts to make licensing agreements to make games based on films and other properties. Uh. These included big name properties like Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Godfather,

and James Bond. I think that that fits in really well with their strategy of of latching onto brands and not necessarily producing the best games, because a lot of those titles, especially in those early days, were not not playable. I mean, and and that's that that goes back all the way, you know, and any film title games kind

of spotty. There are a lot of times where I feel like like companies rely very heavily on the name of the franchise to sell copies, and so therefore the amount of time and effort you need to go in and build a very compelling game sometimes slips through the cracks. So um, you know, in that case, you end up getting these games that are based on these beloved franchises, but they failed to really live up to gamer expectations.

This happens. I mean, you can spend hours naming all the superhero games that just didn't live up to expectations. Not you know, there are a few that have been phenomenal, but they are way more that weren't so not a

problem that only e A possesses. Certainly, certainly not. Also in two thousand and one, I should put in that UM Square A put out Final Fantasy ten, So that was that was one of those I remember seeing the previews for Final Fantasy ten when that was coming out and thinking that that looked like a put particularly beautiful game at that time. But things have changed. It doesn't Things that were once the most gorgeous thing you could imagine have not necessarily aged. Well, do you have anything

for two thousand two, I do not excellent. Two thousand three, e A shuts down Westwood Studios and moves all the remaining stuff to EA's Los Angeles studio. The Westwood was in Las Vegas, and so they shut that one down. So there's another example. They did not keep everybody. They laid off quite a few people, but the people who did remain were then moved to Los Angeles. UH And then two thousand four, wait, Lauren, I didn't see your

high sign. My bad. We have we have an intricate system of hand signals going on in the background here.

I know. Two thousand three, UH Square decided UM their their relationship with e A had been slightly degraded, and also they had been UM flirting a little bit with with Enix stud Deos over in Japan and UH and so Square dissolved their relationship with e A, UM bought back all of their shares and formed Square Enix, which would continue to produce the rest of the series that people that they were known for excellent, well, excellent for them,

not so great for e A necessarily. In two thousand four, e A went ahead and dissolved the Origin Systems division, so that was the ultimately the division that produced the Ultimate Games. That one was formally no more as of two thousand four. E A also acquired Criterion, which was that was the company that had developed the Burnout games. Anyone who's familiar with those the driving games that get

really super crazy, Yeah, I really love those games. I'm not a big driving game kind of guy, but those particularly are very arcady. Yeah, yeah, they're They're a little bit less focused on the physicalities of driving, and so if you're not a huge car buff, the Burnout series is pretty fun because all the crashing parts some other games don't let you do. The crashing parts are pretty pretty spectacular and play a large part in most of

those games. Uh. And then there that was the same year that someone on live journal who had the handle e A Spouse posted a rather uh critical post about e A saying that they had some draconian practices as far as employment goes, that people were being forced to work super long hours six days out of the week,

they weren't getting compensated for overtime. Um. There were a lot of pretty ugly accusations, and eventually some uh, some spouses and some employees of e A got together and they filed a class action lawsuit, in fact, a few class action lawsuits against e A, and that ended up leading to massive changes in the A and in the industry in general, because other companies saw what was happening and they thought, we better fixed this before it happens

to so uh. In two thousand six, e A settled a lawsuit that was brought against it by a bunch of graphic artists and awarded the graphic artists fifteen point six million dollars in unpaid overtime. And in two thousand seven, the court awarded plaintiffs of a class action lawsuit fourteen point nine million dollars and unpaid overtime. So this this is a different group. It's not the same one twice.

So yeah, that was a big deal. And obviously e A did not want to court any more problems down the line, and so they started to really take a look. Uh and in two thousand five, e A purchased jam Debt Mobile. So two thousand five, this is before the iPhone comes out. EA makes its first move into the mobile gaming world for for phones, not not mobile devices

like game Boy or whatever. You know. It had been developing games for platforms like that for a while, but this was the first time it started to really look into using um cell phones, not even smartphones yet as a potential gaming platform. And uh, and that was a smart move. I mean, we're seeing more and more that mobile devices are making a huge impact on the gaming industry, So that was a Whoever was the person who said we should do this was really they were really looking ahead.

And that's also the year two thousand five would be the year when Microsoft launched the Xbox three sixty. We'll be right back with more on the electronic arts story, but first let's take a quick break. Al right. So let's see, I think, according to my notes, we left off in two thousand five, So two thousand six, e A acquires Mythic Entertainment. Mythic Entertainment was responsible for the RPG, the m m O RPG Dark Age of Camelot that they viewed back into thousand one, So now e A

has decided to acquire another m m O RPG. They saw that as a way of of maintaining a steady stream of revenue. You've got all these people who are subscribing, so that was the strategy there, And that was the year the e A also acquired Digital Illusions CE better known as Dice and Dice is the company that made

Battlefield nineteen two. So two thousand six is also the year that Sony launched the PlayStation three and and Nintendo launched the week exactly, both of them one year behind the Xbox three six, which had had a head start, uh and uh, well not a full year, but several months behind anyway. But also what I thought was interesting was I found a statistic here from Bloomberg Business Week that said it was an article that was published in two thousand six. So that's why I put it here,

because we're talking about two thousand and six here. They said that from nine until present day, which at that time was two thousand six, e A averaged about one point two acquisitions per year. It was buying up more than a company per year if you average it out over those years, and that one third of the companies

that had purchased in it eventually shut down. So that's again showing that that kind of trend that I talked about earlier, the criticism that people have laid against it, saying, you're buying up these companies and when you are, uh, and you stripped the industry of the talent these people have, and then you end up closing it down when it

doesn't meet whatever your performance measurements are. Certainly not to say that those people didn't go on to do other things, but but yeah, yeah, but and it's not necessarily it's not necessarily the good business model for anyone in the industry, right,

anyone else. And the big criticism would be those those guys and those men and women could have been developing games during that time that would have potentially changed the industry, but they couldn't because they were under contract or part part of this larger organization where they had nowhere else to go At that point. Um, yeah, I mean it's from from e A's perspective. It's doing all the smart business moves. So they're from a gamer's perspective or an

industry analysts perspective. They might say this is not good for the industry, or the gamer might say this isn't good for me because I'm not getting great games out of it. E A's point of view is that this is I'm making money. Yeah, it's solidifying my position. Money. Yeah yeah. Money is the a when you're a business turns out. Yeah yeah. And I know this isn't financial stuff. So I didn't mean to blow your mind's there about how money is. Okay. So two thousand seven, e A

acquires BioWare. BioWare made some of my favorite games of all times. Still does uh ballers Gate. I love the Baller's Gate games, but the Kicking Phone just this, Um, there's a fantastic character who has a little hamster and he shouts out random things when you go into battle with him, and it's endlessly entertaining. They also made Planescape Torment. They made the Star Wars Nights the Old Republic Games Co Tour, which, again I was a huge fan of

the Cotour Games. They made Mass Effect, which I've played a little bit of. I never played it all the way through, and Matt Frederick would probably hit me if he were in the room, because it's actually his copy of the game that I have and I haven't returned it yet. Um. That year they also acquired Pandemic Studios, which was the company that brought us Star Wars battle Front and also the game Destroy All Humans, as well as some other titles. And that was the year that

that Probst steps down as CEO. He had been CEO since Hawkins had left the company. It was supposed to be more temporary than that, wasn't it. I think I

believe so. But he had led the company throughout those years, uh so from two thousand and seven and he's still on the board, but he ends up stepping down and John Richard Tello a Tillo I guess it should say Richie Tello becomes the new CEO, and he says the company is going to undergo a reorganization to address the problems they've had where they've been acquiring and trying to assimilate and then shutting down all these different companies that

they've been going after over the years. So, I mean this is this is an issue that all big companies have. If you acquire a company, there's always a culture shock era that allows it because unless the two companies are practically ideally well aligned, yeah, there's gonna be culture shock. So sometimes a company does this so quickly that they there's never that period that you need to adjust and have things work out. So he was saying, let's take the time to really look at how our company is

structured and make sure that it makes sense. That was his That was his statement from the the get go when he started right. Also unrelated to that, but in addition to the other games that they published that year, that was the year that they published harm Nix's Rock Band along with MTV Huge huge title. I mean, you know, Guitar Hero had been in the years before already kind of uh had revolutionized the idea of rhythm games on consoles, and Rock Band ended up taking that and dialing it

up to eleven. As spinel Tap would love to say, and uh, I mean, I've had a blast playing Rock Band. Even though I adore, I adore the series. It's terrific. My musical talent is is pretty negligible, but I still, you know, any game that makes you feel like a rock star is pretty pretty cool. It is, it is, And also karaoke in your own home is pretty cool. And also a little cheat boxes that allow you to hook up real electronic drum sets to the game and

actually rock out. It's pretty neat, pretty neat. Yeah. So we then move on into two thousand eight, where e A has a an attempt to acquire another big name, Take two Interactive, which you know gamers will recognize that it's it's pretty famous studio. So e A made a move to acquire take to Take two turned down the initial offer that e A made, and then, uh, the

negotiations kind of got a little quiet. But everyone kept an eye on this because they were really wondering if e A was in fact going to acquire yet another company, and some people were really worried about what the fate of Take two would be. Yeah. I think that part of the reason that it fell through was also that

the the economic crisis that year, yeah hit them really hard. Yeah, So e A's attempt to acquire Take two fails, and that year the entire world entered into an economic crisis, and it affected lots of industries, you know, Realist eight being the big famous one in the United States banking as well, but it also hit companies like e A and uh e A end up announcing that was going to cut more than a thousand positions across all of its divisions, which ended up being around ten to eleven

of its workforce, and that the company lost over six hundred million dollars in the last quarter of two thousand eight due to accommodation of the economic crisis and just the fact that it's game releases had not performed very well in the market at all um and there their stock took a big tumble. So in August fifte of of two thousand eight, their stock was valued at forty

eight dollars and twenty four cents per share. By December twenty six of two thousand eight, it had fallen to twenty five dollars and thirty two cents per share, So, uh, not not quite losing half its value, just under at drop, but it's but a whole bunch, that's that's terrible, and it really what it signaled was that investors had lost a lot of confidence in the company. Now, keep in mind the value of your company is based upon how

many stocks are out there. If you're a publicly traded company, the value of your company, in part at least, is determined by how many stocks you have, and how how many stocks are out there in the market, and what they're the actual value of each stock is. So you kind of multiply those two numbers together and you get a rough estimate of what the value of the company is. Well, when you lose fifty percent of your stock price, that means that your company is losing fifty of its value.

More or less oversimplifying, but that more or less is what it means. Well, two thousand and eight wasn't all bad. They did come out with a game that ended up getting a lot of critical acclaim and a lot of fans, which was Dead Space. I was never a big Dead Space player, but I know some people who can recite everything about that game, including all the little hidden stuff that you had to find to get the backstory right right.

Also in the negative column that was two eight was a year that they were hit with a class action lawsuit over the undisclosed edition of Secure Rom DRM software, along with games like Spore for the PC and and the lawsuit was about the fact that they had included this this this uh digital rights management software without telling anyone about it, that it was separate from the game software, and that it was basically impossible to uninstall, even after

you would uninstalled the video game. Yeah, so e A was falling under the same trap that Sony did, where in an effort to try and keep its intellectual property safe, it had kind of over well, not kind of it overstepped. Yeah, yeah,

you know. The point was to prevent people from from installing it more than I think it was eight times, three times, six times a number of times, right, right, Well, it's one of those things where, you know, someone who buys the game, their argument is I should be able to install this as many times as I want, because you know, if I buy a new compute, it or I want to be able to transfer the stuff I own onto that computer. It's not that I'm you know,

installing it on all my friends machines. I just want to be able to play my game. And the other argument against that is that we don't want you to install this on or your friends machines. Right uh. In In other DRM news, that year, that was the year that UM the e A announced plans to require PC owners of things like Mass Effect and Sport to authenticate their copies every ten days, even if they were playing

the game offline. Yeah. Um, and this this is this becomes a common thread in e A as well, this idea of having either a persistent Internet connection or at least using the Internet every now and then to again verify that you have a legitimate copy of the game. So not only would you have to retain whatever the disc was, you would have to have that in your machine.

You would have to then make a connection to the Internet, and then the Internet would make sure that that, in fact was your registered copy so that you could play the game you wanted. Even if you were able to just move everything on the game into your computer and it's a single player game, you still had to do that. And a lot of players objected. Yeah, yeah, especially you know two thousand eight. You know, most people had had

pretty good Internet connections at that point. It was getting better, but not everyone wanted to be connected to the Internet all the time. And you know, the people who bought the game pointed out that this was really a hassle for the legitimate game player and people who were pirate into the game, were breaking this encryption, They were using keys that would allow them to right so that they

wouldn't they didn't have to authentic kate. They were playing pirated copies that they got for free that didn't have this DRM in it. And so the players, the legitimate players who had bought the game say it, said, look, you're only punshed us. You're not you're not stopping piracy, and you're making the game a miserable experience for the

people who actually paid to play it. Yeah. This this never did go into effect, this particular bit of of d r M. On the A side, they relented pretty quickly after community feedback, which was highly highly negative as you can imagine. They however, did not learn their lesson from it, because they would not they would incorporate it again in the future. Two thousand nine, e A acquires a play Fish, which was a developer of casual games. They had seen how Louis was doing and they thought

let's get in on that as well. Um they also went ahead and cut another fiftred employees, which was about sevent of its workforce, and they shut down Pandemic Studios that year. So get another example of them acquiring and then shutting down a company. Uh, and next I don't have anything for me neither. But inn in the summer they acquired pop Cap Wow. Yeah, another casual games developer. So lots of lots of mobile content all that. Yeah,

they're ones who owned like The Jeweled and stuff like that. Right. They also released Star Wars the Old Republic Blake, which was a Star Wars based m m O RPG. Uh. Now, we had one person asked us if we could talk more about Star Wars the Old Republic and why did it move from a subscription based service too free to play with micro transactions and and how you know, what's the story of its failure if you want to look at it in that way? All right, As so I

actually played Star Wars the Old Republic. I I subscribed. I was one of the subscribers. I was one of the people who got who rolled his eyes when I heard that was going to free to play because I had actually bought a I think I was like a

twelve month subscription in advance. But so Star Wars the Old Republic takes place thousands of years before the events of the Star Wars movie series, but it puts you in either a a Sith role or a Republic role, and you have different storylines that we play out based upon the type of character you were playing. I think part of the problem was that it, even though it was an M M O RPG, more frequently than not

it felt to me like a single player game. It felt like another sequel to Cotur, which isn't a bad thing. The Coach War games were great. I very much enjoyed them, even though the second co Tour game obviously had an entire section that was left unfinished because you could see it on your map, but you couldn't get to it in uh in the actual game. Anyway, the Old Republic felt like another sequel to that. It didn't feel as

much like an M M O RPG. You didn't have as many people partying up together and the kind of interactions that you would normally expect from and not after the initial launched like there was a lot of interest in it very early on, but that kind of dropped off quickly, and part of the problem was that people were completing the storylines for the characters very very quickly, and once you did that, you didn't really have any incentive to keep playing so it was just like if

you had played a single player game all the way through and then you're thinking, all right, well that was fun, but now I want to sell this game and get some money back, and then I'm going to buy another new game. That's kind of what people were thinking. Well, subscribers started to drop off from this game, and e A's response was that, well, you know, we could either pull the plug on it entirely, or we could try and switch our strategy and get more people interested in

this game. But obviously the subscription models not really working. So what if we dropped the subscription and go to free to play, and instead of making money through people subscribing, we make money by selling items in the game for real money, small amounts of money micro transactions. But um, and you could still play it for free without buying anything,

but you wouldn't have access to the entire game. There'll be sections of the game you could not get to because you would have to purchase them in order to have access. And all of the micro transaction items were the super powerful cool things with rainbows and unicorns or whatever the you know, Star Wars equivalent of rainbows in the cub lights. So I realize you're not familiar with the venerable franchise known as Star Wars. Yeah no, never

never seen any of those scruffy looking at um. So, yeah, the that was the whole response there was to switch order free to play and do micro transactions. Now, this is another thing that e A has received a lot

of criticism for as the whole micro transaction approach. I can't say the word criticism either, obviously, but the micro transactions are that's another way to try and generate revenue, and if you make your game free to play, it may be the only way unless you incorporate lots of advertising, and either way most players kind of react in a negative way. Yeah, that has also been something that e A has gotten a lot of flak for, is the the inclusion of kind of kind of annoying out there

advertising in the middle of their games. Right. Well, the disappointing performance of Star Wars may have also contributed to another dip in e AS stock prices in twelve of although, but before we move on, just thank you Chaz our listener from Twitter for for writing in about that. Yes, thank you very much, yea, And we have a few more questions. We will address at the end of this

episode as well. Also in twenty eleven, something else big happened to e A. E A had the honor is the wrong word for it had had the unfortunate um role as Lull's SEC final target. Lulls SEC being Laugh Out Loud Security was kind of a an offshoot of Anonymous. It was not necessarily related directly to Anonymous, but it was a group of of hackers who decided that they were going to cause as much trouble as possible really for the main reason they wanted to do it was

to show that they could. And uh, boy, I bet they're regretting that decision right now because as of the recording of this podcast, Uh, four of them have been sentenced to between a year and two years in very US uh jails or juvenile facilities. Well, so, yikes, I guess they weren't quite as Anonymous as they thought. Uh. Anyway, they hit EA as their final target before disbanding, and uh they ended up releasing the log in information of

thousands of people who were playing Battlefield Heroes. So uh that was a big black eye. A had to reset all that and send emails out to everybody saying you know, it was compromised and you need to change passwords and all that kind of stuff. Uh. In twelve he wins another awful uh distinguishing feature. Here they were called they they were named the worst company in America by the Consumerist And this is a this is a thing that that the consumers does every year. They've been doing it

for a while. They gave a Golden poo award. Yes they do. It's a very distinguished Uh. Yeah. The way it works is that they set it up like a tournament bracket and they let people vote on which company they think should progress in the bracket. And that year e A took home the Golden Pooh. It's final opponent

was the Bank of America. Now keep in mind this is all from reader votes, it's not I mean, I think I think the consumers is the one that ultimately decides which ones are in the brackets, but the readers are the ones who determine which companies progress. Right, And this is the Internet, and there are some gamers on the Internet, so so I'm sure that that is part

of why e A made it that far. But but also, I mean, was when occupy was happening, So so think I mean there were thousands of people on the streets protesting the actions of corporations like Bank of America, and e A still still beat them out. Yeah, by I think it was like close to to you know, twenty six or something like that. It's really like that. So it was it wasn't even close. It's a runaway. But again, you know the platforms the internet. Gamers like the Internet,

so you know, keep that all in mind. It's kind of it was kind of skewed to e A, is what we're saying. We've got a bit more to say about e A, and then I'll have a lot more to say about e A in a follow up episode right after this break. So why did it win Worst Company? Well, some of the the suggestions were because it had stripped the video game industry of talent through all those acquisitions and then shutting down competitions. Are shutting down competing studios,

I should say. So they not only bought up competing studios but then shut them down, which then meant that that talent and those games would often become inaccessible. There'd never be another one because e A would own the intellectual property but not have anyone to actually develop the games anymore, at least the people who had developed it

were gone, so it would be a completely different experience. Uh. Then there was also sighting of the use of micro transactions, just like I said, Uh, especially for any games where you already had to buy a game and then on top of it, have micro transactions within the things that we're not free to begin with. Yeah, So the idea of buying like a sixty dollar game and then having to spend more money within the game in order for it to be a satisfying experience that did not sit

well with a lot of people who voted in this. Also, the one of the things they cited were the exclusivity deals that e A had made with organizations like the NFL. Now that's a big deal now for e A, and made perfect sense. That meant that they had tied up the NFL license that they were the only company that could put out an official NFL affiliated football game, and the same thing is true for other sports as well. They made exclusivity agreements with other sports agencies, but NFL

is an easy example. So e A then shuts down competition because no other game company can make an official NFL licensed game. They can't use the actual team player names or anything. And I'll you know, another football strategy game could certainly be enjoyable. When you don't have that brand recognition behind it, it becomes a lot harder to market, right.

I mean why if if you're a fan of football and you want to play as your favorite football team with you, with the actual players who are on that team as your as your players, then you had to go with the A because no one else had the licensing agreement that would allow them to do that. And so that, you know, people said, like, you're essentially saying we're the only game in town. Yeah, you're you're further

further shutting down the opportunities of other studios. Right, So that was another reason why they got a lot of votes. Uh So the tournaments came out pretty badly for e A. Uh, It's showed that that he had a real problem with public perception of the company. UM and e A tried to kind of uh respond to that, and and a lot of people thought that their response was lackluster. This

would happen again, but we'll get to it. Yeah, I don't want to spoil it, but yeah, year also was when e A released Mass Effect three, which may also have affected its standings as Worst Company in America because, as I recall, there were a lot of people who were not happy with the way that game ended. Yeah, didn't they didn't they wasn't that the one that they released a different ending to that you could you could download.

There were, as I recall, there were there may have been, I think there might have been, but I know there were at least three different endings that were already in the game. But some people argued that the three different endings were not distinct enough that you know, you would have small details that were different, but that in the grand scheme it felt like what you had done in the series of games did Yeah, it defeats the entire

purpose of the Mass Effect series exactly. It felt like like, well, while the whole game makes it feel like you're going to have this huge impact, ultimately, if the differences aren't that great, then it means that you know, what you did didn't really matter in the grand scheme of things, which from an existential point of view is kind of interesting.

But from a gamer player, uh, you know, experience, maybe not so much far right right, it's not called nic The game so therefore, so so people said that they felt that the game had the end game in particular, had been rushed, and that it just wasn't a fitting capper to it. Uh and Penny Arcades been Kuchera, and I apologize if I'm miss uh mispronouncing his name. He criticized the company for concentrating on free to play games and micro transactions, and he also said that the company

was failing to create compelling retail games. So you're saying that the games that you are selling for sixty dollars aren't really good good and the ones that are free to play with micro transactions are irritating. Right. So penny Arcade, by the way, has nine hundred and twenty two comics that are tagged e A in their system, which as of the recording of this podcast, yes as well, Yeah, as of as of Tuesday, I think actually Tuesday or

Wednesday of this week, so they're there. There might have been more uh since since then, but it just which just goes to show that the gaming community has had a lot to say and a lot of criticism to lob against the company over the years. And UH and in John Richard tell O stepped down as CEO and as a member of the board. Uh. Here's a direct quote from one of the blog posts that was written that he wrote about this. He said, I am writing with some tough news. I have resigned my position as

e AS CEO. I will be around for a couple of weeks and I hope to have it at the chance to say goodbye to many of you. Larry Probest will be stepping in as executive chairman to help smooth the transition. Uh. E A also continued to lay off employees in part as a streamlining effort at this time. And so Probest comes back in. You know, he had stepped down and now he was interim CEO. Uh and uh that's as of the recording of this podcast, that's

still the case. They hadn't found a permanent replacement yet. Yeah, but they Yeah, that was That was another ten percent of global staff that was laid off as of May of this year. So tough times over at e A. They also said that they planned to open a Dice l A office uh where they would be developing games, including Star Wars games, because they made a deal with Disney, which of course acquired the rights to the Lucas Arts stuff earlier, and they won the Worst Company in America

for the second year in a row. And most of the reasons this is the first time that any company has ever done this, by the way, done a tow for and they they the reasons are pretty much the same as But also there was another controversy that happened between those two times that ended up costing the company big time, which was the launch of sim City five, one of the most anticipated games in a long time.

I mean, like there's certain titles that when you hear about them coming out, people old school gamers get really excited. Diablo three is a great example of a game that got a lot of people talking months before it amount. Sim City five is another one of those where people who are fans of the sim City franchise were really excited by this game. But the big issue was that sim City five was a game that requires you to have a persistent connection to the Internet in order to

play it. Even if you're just playing single player offline, it's just you and your computer, but you still have to have a persistent Internet connection, and they had some server issues when the game launched, which meant that people couldn't play the game they had just bought, they had spent the money, the game was in their hands, they wanted to play a single player game, and they couldn't do it because the servers weren't working. Now, that tells

you that this is a huge problem. That that's another example of why the persistent internet connection thing is an argument that people say makes for bad gaming experience, because when you have a technical issue on the game providers end, then it's adding a completely unnecessary extra step that a lot of things can go wrong with, right, And if it's an online game, than that's just the way that works, right.

But when it's a single player game, then people have a real hard time feeling it's infuriating and uh, you know again, a lot of people say that the whole reason for this was just so that e A could have another kind of DRM there that you know, that's not e A has denied that. They said that's not the reason, but that's the reason everyone says, says is a lot of people suggest that's the real reason. Let

me put it that way. Sure. They also made headlines in February and March when UM the CFO Blake Jorgensen announced that all future titles would involve micro transactions. Uh. He backpedaled really hard a week later. Um let it. That did not get a great reaction, and again that's probably what contributed to it winning the Worst company in America again. Yeah, despite all of this, their their stock has been rising dramatically over the course of so far.

Um and uh really really interestingly, as of as of this week, the a couple of the really high level people have been selling off a lot of their shares in their own company's stock, like fifty seven thousand of their shares. Wow. That is Uh. I'm actually looking it up right now because it's actually a little lower than it was when I wrote it down. Because originally we were going to record this episode the day before. We're

actually recording it right We're gonna record it yesterday. This doesn't mean but on May fifteenth, fifteenth, the stock price was at twenty two dollars and fifty cents when I looked at originally right now on May sixteenth, at four forty four pm Eastern time, more information than you need to know, it's at two and two cents. So it's dropped almost fifty cents, right around fifty cents since I

checked it yesterday. So it's still and it's obviously not at that pre August two eight high when it was in the high forties and lower fifties, but it's but it's dropped a great deal since then. Um I think I think that that well, as of as of Wednesday, as of the May fifteenth, anyway, shares where shares were up very nearly for the course. Yeah, so it's it's

I think volatile is a safe word to use. Yes, Yes, that that's There's a lot of very very important financial publications that are talking about e A right now, which I which I always find fascinating, and and all of them are going like, be cautious, don't actually invest, we don't know about this thing. Yeah, there does seem to be a real problem with consumer confidence in an investor confidence in a e A. And again that can really affect that. You know, e A is a multibillion dollar

industry company right now. It's you know, it's revenues can be over a billion dollars, can be over three billion dollars in a good year, and so when you're talking about that, it's kind of weird to think that it's

it's value as a company is in question. That suggests that there's been some pretty serious missteps or that something's really funky with the industry in general, right right, well, you know it's I think it's just basically that thing where they're not really they're not really heating all of all of this this feedback that they're getting from from all of their their from their fans, and that's you know, like and they also just renew their license with with

them the Football Association with a FIFA FIFA and the soccer soccer So yeah, sure, football whatever go back to France until um so and and FIVA is one of those titles that consistently does really well for e A. Sure, and and you know again like it's it's understandable why

would they would want that exclusivity? Now, we asked our listeners if they had any specific questions they would like us to address, and uh, we We've talked about some of them already, so I'm not going to go over all of them, but I've got two left that we can chat about really quickly. Peter from Facebook said, what was the most popular e A game? And if you go from the debut of e A till present day

and you look at all the units sold. The SIMS comes out on top with a level eleven point twenty three million units sold globally according to VG Charts, and second place would go to Need for Speed Underground. Now that that doesn't surprise me, because the SIMS is one of those games that had a very wide appeal. I mean I loved it when it came out. I thought this was such a cool innovative game. Also, I thought it was funny to lock people out of the bathroom. Um, yeah,

I did some pretty cruel things. A good good thing to know about you, Jonathan, That's great, that's why. Uh. And then Ian he asked also on Facebook if I could give a rundown of some of the PR meltdowns the e A has had. I could, but that's a full episode. So I'm going to give you, Um, I'm gonna give you three examples of PR attempts that e A maybe did not handle very well. This isn't just like coming out and saying, uh, we didn't do this right, We're going to do better. This is this is, this

goes beyond this. This comes into marketing mistakes. Okay, three big marketing mistakes. Keep in mind that this might not be entirely EA's fault. They could have partnered with a marketing firm that came up with a terrible idea and he just ran with it. Um One of them was when e A was marketing the game Dante's Inferno, right, remember that, yeah, which had all these different characters that

were based off the Seven Deadly Sins. So the promotion for the Sin of Lust came around and right around the same time as Comic Con An e A had a booth at Comic Con where they had some young ladies dressed in costume models colloquially known as booth babes to promote their games, and they had their Sin to Win campaign, which was a contest that encouraged people to quote commit acts of lust unquote with costumed reps at

e A's booth. Later on, the team clarified this as saying that they were just trying to tell people to take photos with these reps and then tweet and share them in various ways. But no, that doesn't sound like that thing like, yeah, I'm I I remember I had completely blocked that from my memory, but I remember exactly how offended I was by that, because it was really offended. Actually, yeah, yeah, not a great move. Okay, So here's another one. This one,

this one really makes me scratch my head. So there for a promotional campaign for the game Mercenaries to E a converted a London gas station to make it look like a military depot, so it was like a depot that you would see in the game Mercenaries to which is kind of cool. I mean, we've seen promotions like that, like the The Simpsons, Quickie mark type stuff. They had a bunch of a bunch of life size column dolls

on London Underground for a while, that clever stuff. So what's the big deal about converting a gas station into a military depot. Well, they had this campaign where anyone stopping at the military depot slash gas station would get seventy dollars worth of gas for free. Keep in mind that the game doesn't cost that much, which meant that even if every single person who stopped at that gas station then went out and bought a copy of Mercenaries to still be losing money. You still are losing money.

And they ended up screwing up traffic patterns so badly in London once people found out they could get free gas at this station that it caused a massive traffic snarl and even ended up with government censure of e A. Cost him about fifty dollars to convert the gas station into a military depot. Seventy bucks of gas per person who stopped. Yeah, not the most effective use of your marketing dollars, you might argue. And here's the third one.

So godfather to the game coming out and e A, like many companies, tries to court the gaming press by sending out publicity kits. They have various little gifts in them. Right, horses head No, no horses had, no fish, okay, no connoli. Brass knuckles. They send out brass, actual brass knuckles, actual bras knuckles, which, by the way, not legal and also

illegal to send by may. So then they had to send a message to everyone they had sent a package to saying could you please send back those brass knuckles and please don't sue us. Three examples of marketing failures on e A's part. Now, there are plenty of other examples of e A coming out and apologizing or not apologizing for something, like when they won the America's Worst

Company the second time. There was a blog post that essentially said we can do better, but a lot of people viewed it as kind of a backhanded slap at gamers, and not not like so much as owning up to problems, but rather saying, uh, you know, people perceive it as this,

so we can change their perception. So uh and I'm paraphrasing obviously, sure, but but nonetheless it no, they they've they've not always had the best attitude about that sort of thing, or at least that seems to be the implication anyway, you know, because we're all reading this through our own lens, and perhaps the way they intended it

and the way that we're interpreting it are just wildly different. Oh. Absolutely, And you know, and it's an understanding, understandably upsetting situation to be in um to to have to be the

company's representative coming off of something like that. Yeah, there's there's ever you know, it's you know that that's the kind of thing that if if I had to write that, I would draft it like nine and a half times and get everyone in the office to read it and make sure there was absolutely no way that it could be perceived as being negative to the fans that I had piste off. So much to begin with. Yeah, that's fair, and that wraps up this classic episode of text Stuff.

Almost forgot the name of my own show, The Electronic Arts Story Part two, As I said, I'll have to do another part. I might even just go and do a full redo of the story from beginning to end, because I do a much deeper dive these days than I did back in those days. So if you guys would like me to do that, If you have suggestions for other topics, maybe there's another company or technology or a trend or something you would love me to cover

on tech Stuff, reach out to me. The handle both at Facebook and on Twitter is tech Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Three