Crash (Off-Topic)

by Korny , Dalton, Ga. US. Earth, Sol System, Saturday, January 07, 2017, 18:03 (2664 days ago) @ Vortech

The annual COD and Battlefield both run into production delays. EA decides to crunch out COD so as to have something in the Q4 season and delays BF until after the holiday season. COD is unstable and very poorly reviewed. Investors start to freak out about RoI and the ballooning development costs of these enormous games. The industry contemplates what would happen if they cut dev costs to limit their risk. Pundits announce that the era of AAA is over and games enthusiasts start to question the idea of Pre-orders.

But, sales are fine because it's CoD and people buy it on name alone. And besides, there's always Madden. Yeah, I think Cody's right. The expensive stuff is all buttressed with the other AAA stuff from these conglomerate publishers.

CoD is Activision, not EA.
But there was an interesting event this season, where EA put out BF1, and then followed up quickly with Titanfall 2 (which is arguably a better game with a more consumer-friendly design). Being the first out of the gate, BF1 saw great sales, while Titanfall 2 did not, and the annual CoD that released weeks later also saw a significant sales decrease from the previous year.

Why EA would dump Titanfall 2 in between these two major releases in anyone's guess, but word is that they were trying to pull people away from CoD by giving them two very different shooters at once, and it seems to have worked. Activision seems none the worse for wear though, as Black Ops 3 DLC and Rise of Iron were the top downloaded add-ons for PS4 in 2016, so I doubt they'll have to worry about any "crash" any time soon...

It's a weird time in gaming, for sure, but nothing looks even remotely bleak (with 6.2 million PS4s sold during Holiday sales alone (Microsoft has been completely mum about their sales figures, from what I can find), I think consumer confidence is pretty high right now.