Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

So, a lot has been said about Star Wars: Battlefront. Mostly the consensus seems to be that it is an initially good experience with superior graphics, great environments, and fun gameplay coupled with a severe lack of depth and replayability. Missions get boring quickly and there is not much fun to be had after about ten hours or so. Ultimately, it seems that most agree that it is not worth the $60 price and a lot of reviewers are casting an angry eye towards EA. So, I think it makes sense to think about what got us here and what as consumers we can do about it. Here are the dynamics I see leading to the quickly evolving catastrophe that is SWB: ********************************************************** (i) The cost of producing a modern AAA game. The production of a modern AAA multi-platform game now exceeds greatly the cost of a Hollywood blockbuster. To put it into perspective, Avengers: Age of Ultron had a pre-marketing budget of $279.9mm and an international box office of $1.403 billion. Contrast that to World of Warcraft’s initial four-year budget of $200mm and QUARTERLY revenue of $1.28 billion for a property launched fifteen years ago. This leads to a business model coupled with competitive pressures between the AAA producers raise the ante for any first tier game not just to be competent and fun, but a mega-success. Like Hollywood, it has basically an arms race to see who can throw the most resources at any particular project; the difference between first place and fifth place is a billion dollars. On the other side, indy crowd competition from below where producers have the operational efficiency and the willingness to create and sell meaningful games for a mere fraction of AAA blockbusters (pretty much dominating the $0.99 to $30 space) puts significant pressure on the big AAA companies not to head downstream or compete on price. Additionally, gamers are expecting more innovative, technically complicated, deeper experiences than ever before with more and more content shoved into the same package. In 1997, Final Fantasy VII broke out of all expectations by producing an experience of about 40 hours (including extended content like the dreaded gold chocobo). Nowadays, a deep experience can be a 200 hour single player slog like Witcher III or an infinite timesink MMRPG like World of Warcraft. Add to the mix the $60 “commodity pricing” for platform-based core game (the game disk that you buy), so producers need to keep building bigger without increasing the base price. Basically, you are looking at total pricing inelasticity. So, caught between the rock of a do-or-die competition for the biggest blockbuster and hard place of not being able to go down market, the big AAA players are turning to novel revenue streams however they can. This maximizes the revenue on the ones lucky enough to become blockbusters and mitigates the risk of those that miss the mark. ********************************************************** (ii) New Revenue Streams So, what are these new revenue streams? They take a lot of different forms, but I think most could be categorized as: (a) Microtransactions (b) DLC, and GOTY repackaging (c) Deluxe additions with exclusive content, silly statuettes and other tschotske (d) In-game advertisements (e) Out-of-game and extra-platform tie-ins (like Assassins Creed Unity’s portable companion app, movie tie-ins, and breakfast cereals). Now, none of these are problematic in-and-of-themselves and you can see successful implementations of all of them in the Apple App Store. (e.g., I am happy to play Candy Crush for free, but have to watch an 30 second video every 10 minutes or so and am happy to try out free-to-play “freemium” games with micro-transactions like Angry Birds). The problem with this model is this: Producers can choose to either allow these revenue streams to be ADDITIVE or SUBTRACTIVE to the existing products. That is to say, developer can choose to make more money by (A) providing additional value than what was previously expected (think of movie theaters charging more for seat service and 3D IMAX); or (B) taking away value and requiring customers to pay extra to get as much as they had for the original sticker price (think of airlines that now charge you for pillows, boarding passes, carry-on luggage and cans of diet soda). EA, along with some of the other most loathed producers (ah-ah-ah-Ubisoft-choo), have definitely gone with Plan B here. Instead of delivering a full game for $60, they have decided to cut the essentials out of the game, and offer them later for an additional price tag. No single player, four worlds, six heroes (out of a universe of about a gazillion), few upgrades, about a dozen mission types. All of the things that had come with the base package of other Battlefield games are removed with a promise of inclusion in future DLC. In essence, EA has offered (like a street dealer might) just a taste, a little 10 hour taste, to get customers hooked wanting more, and willing to shell out another $50 per Season Pass. Just like that first hit of blow, SWB really is pretty satisfying for a short time; the problem being that after ten hours or so, it wears off and you’re scrounging in your couch to find another $50 to throw at it. ********************************************************** (iii) Purchasing Dynamic So how do EA and other AAA producers get away with it? How do they get to make a consistent $60 while accreting value each time? Like movie blockbusters, much of the revenue that the producer will ever get on the product is at the release. Companies rely so much on this dynamic, they are willing to throw in extras like exclusive content to get customers to commit to purchases at the outset (pre-order and first day). This, of course, incentivizes a lot of nasty stuff like hurried, buggy releases; immunity from poor reviews; and undeserved network effects. Our enthusiasm lets them get away with such nasty stuff that they are evolving the industry to take advantage of the necessary ignorance of consumers that have not had a chance to evaluate the game. Ever wonder why they let you download games prior to being able to actually use them (First Day Digital)? Do you think review embargos are for the benefit of customers? Nope, they are to make sure that the market is maximally uninformed about the quality of releases. ********************************************************** (iv) So, what’s to be done? The obvious answer is to stop purchasing crappy games. That may be a little too glib and there is definitely a collective action problem here (a thousand people withholding their $60 ain’t gonna help if there are a hundred thousand waiting in line). Here are a couple of suggestions: (a) Stop buying early. We have to stop as a market buying into the industry’s hype machine and pre-purchasing or purchasing on the release-day. I am sorry to say it, but every reviewer for this product as of the posting of this review (every honest reviewer at least) has either pre-purchased SWB or did a first-day purchase and, by doing so, we have all encouraged this bad behavior by EA and have ensured future shoddy products by them. Trust me, every game will be the just as good in a week, a month, or next year as it is on launch. It will certainly not be worse by the time it gets its first couple rounds of patches. (b) DLC should be purchased to reward great games, not to remedy poor games. While we all get tricked once in a while by shoddy crap, we all have a 100% choice in whether or not to get ripped off a second time. If a game is a lot of fun and you want to extend its value by purchasing DLC, that’s a great thing and helps incentivize producers to make the best releases they can. However, we all need to resist “fixing” lousy and incomplete games through additional purchases, even in cases where the DLC looks to “fill in the missing pieces” of the original. When EA comes out with their SWB campaign in DLC next year, our collective response should be: “No, we’re not paying extra for that; you already owe it to us.” (c) Never, ever, ever pay for micro-transactions. This just incentivizes the producers to make the game not fun unless you pay and to create digital hamster-wheels the only escape from which is to throw your dollars at it. (d) Make lousy producers and rip-off artists pay the price. There is no reason that our opinion of getting ripped off by SWB should not bleed onto other EA products. Remember that EA can (and does) write off bad releases every once in a while. It is part of their model that occasional blockbusters will compensate for the near misses. What they cannot write off is firm commitment from the market to stay away from their brand generally. EA is relying on consumers will forgive (but mostly forget) its misfires. We need to make it clear to them that, while the occasional less-than-stellar game is to be expected, affirmatively screwing over customers (liked with SWB) will not be tolerated. If we tell this to them unequivocally and with our dollars, their behavior will eventually change. ********************************************************** (v) Conclusion So, I think we can all agree that while SWB has some pretty spectacular aspects, EA has flubbed something essential. What is most painful about this is that the problem is not a technological or gaming misfire; it’s by design through an EA business strategy. We should not support this game, but more importantly, we should not let EA get away with the crap that they are pulling, which is exemplified by this game. ********************************************************** Post-Script (November 30, 2015): On November 23rd, GameStop released its third quarter earnings including a warning on sales of a number of titles including SWB. EA immediately went into defensive mode, basically saying that the weak sales are a product of digital downloads eating GameStop's lunch and certain analysts seemed to agree, though none that were particularly impressive). Additionally, without releasing numbers, EA released that SWB is its biggest digital download ever. This is not surprising or particularly impressive given the overall market shift; remember many minor titles have taken that crown just by riding the wave of technological change (i.e., if I sell one vanilla cone on Monday, two chocolate cones on Tuesday, and three strawberry cones on Wednesday, I have just had three record-breaking sales records). This, of course, also ignores the fact that expectations on SWB are vis-a-vis other products that can also be downloaded. Most worrisome for EA, you may note that as of Nov. 30 (just under two weeks after EA's biggest release of the year without any other blockbuster contenders entering the market in the intervening time), here is how SWB stacks up against other titles on Amazon that can also be downloaded digitally: PS4: 15th Place XBox One: 8th Place PC Digital Download: 19th Place Remember that according to EA, SWB should be #1. On top of this, EA is reacting by offering unspecified free DLC outside of the Jakku Map expansion and Season Pass, increasing some PvP missions to 40 players, and committing to new maps (all since the GameStop release). This all reeks of a frenzied reaction to something that they are not sharing. One could fairly interpret these data points as really bad news for EA; hopefully some of the purchasers' messages about this trainwreck are getting out. *************************************************************** Update (December 3rd) Infoscout just came out with Black Friday Sales showing that SWB came in 13th in sales behind Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, Madden NFL 13, NBA 2K16, Disney Infinity Star Wars Starter, Just Dance 2016, FIFA 16, Minecraft, Fallout 4, Assassins Creed Syndicate, Guitar Hero Live, Lego Dimensions Starter Pack, and Super Mario Maker. This can not be good for EA, especially considering that purely online games rely on network effects (the more people who participate, the more value each person gets). *************************************************************** Update (December 9th) A couple interesting developments. Last week, Peter Moore of EA gave out a soft rebuttal of GameStop's sales estimates on SWB, saying that he was surprised by the concerns. However, he then went on to reaffirm analyst guidance of sales of 13 million (oops). It looks like some analysts are estimating around 3.5 million units sold to date, which puts it behind Fallout 4 and Call of Duty Black Ops III. He must be praying that the release of the movie and holiday sales are going to save their bacon, which looks less and less likely. They have also started trying to focus the markets on their 2016 releases, presumably as an argument to look past SWB sales. One other thing to note is that they just slashed prices on the SWB Playstation 4 bundle by $50 (making the game essentially free) and just cut the standalone unit price down to $40. They have also started floating that SWB II is going to have a standalone campaign and have made SWB free to try on PlayStation Plus over the weekend (a dumb move as far as I'm concerned as you can get all the value you are going to get out of the game over the course of a single weekend). None of this looks good for SWB sales, so maybe the ire of their customers is having some effect.