EA SPORTS WILL NOT RELEASE ITS FLAGSHIP GAME ON THE PC

Game developer Electronic Arts has become the Wal-Mart, or Microsoft of the PC gaming industry.  It has practiced the art of buying its competitors and releasing their products under the EA brand.  This practice has hurt the PC gaming community more and more over the years, and shockingly, EA has decided not to release Madden NFL 09 on the PC.

    EA has killed many of its competitor’s games on the PC, and even all together through its business practices.  Game developer Papyrus created NASCAR racing sims that were far and beyond the best, and even their last game Papyrus Nascar 2003 is still a better game than EA’s own Nascar games.  The real issue is that EA saw its competitors were making better games and began throwing money at sports entities for exclusive rights to their licensing.  Without the ability to have the real cars, teams or players in games, developers were unable to continue making competing games because fans want realism.  The most striking incident came when the NFL2k series came out.  It was clearly better than EA’s own flagship sports game.  When they started selling the game for a mere $20, EA went and got exclusive licensing rights to the NFL.  This allowed them to stop lowering the price of Madden to compete, and now Madden costs $60 and isn’t improved upon much from year to year.

    Another gripe I have with EA is that they practice making games that HAVE to be bought each year.  You buy a perfectly good game and its obsolete after a season.  PC gamers will remember how developers like Papyrus and Sierra made their sports games open for user mods.  You could buy a game, and then fans would update rosters so you could use last year’s game with this year’s teams.  You didn’t buy the game because you wanted new rosters, you bought it because the next game had improvements that you wanted. 

    Now EA has begun giving up on PC gamers altogether.  They would rather we pay for increasingly expensive consoles that cost more than computers now.  They say that piracy is the issue, which is understandable since its more difficult (but still easy) to get pirated games on a console.  It would only seem fair for them to leave the PC market, but release rights to licenses for PC developers.  This way, someone could step in and take their place.  As it is, EA is simply dropping PC gamers.  Madden 09 isn’t released for the PC, just as EA has given up on a PC NASCAR sim.  Who is to say they won’t give up on other popular games, like the SIMS or SIM CITY when they figure out how to make them console games.  EA is already trying to buy other big name developers.  We may see the day when EA kills ALL PC games. 
  
    The only good news is that EA’s licenses to sports games end eventually.  The NASCAR license ends in 2009.  If someone out there has the money, please buy these licenses, and make them available to all competitors.  Its obvious that EA will not work to make better games as long as they don’t have competition.