[QUOTE=Harmonious Discord]
Almost all those companies that are gone after all the buyouts, were on the brink of closing. To many were all making the same type of game, and people were not going to buy 8 games all first person shooters at $60 a crack. The adventure games were going down in sales too. They never met their release dates either, some being years behind. A couple low sale releases and they folded.
[/QUOTE]
No offense, but that’s a pretty serious mischaracterization of the situation. First off, computer games (and the vast majority of EA’s buyouts have been computer game companies, not console game companies) did not and for the most part still do not cost $60, but $40. Hell, even most console games cost $40-$50 back in the time period EA was doing most of their buyouts.
Secondly, by and large, each company EA’s bought out (Westwood, Maxis, etc) did different kinds of games than the others. Most of the FPS companies out there are still relatively independent (Id, Valve, Epic, 3DRealms, Ubisoft, and the guy’s behind Rare’s good FPS games (N64’s GoldenEye and Perfect Dark) went out on their own as Free Radical and developed Time Splitters and are now making Haze for PS3), and EA didn’t acquire a whole bunch of adventure game companies (Most of them were a part of Sierra, or became one, and are now owned by Vivendi).
Third, just buying out most of the market wouldn’t be that big of a deal if EA’s ownership didn’t seem to invariably mean one of three things for a developer: Lobotomizing the company by laying off large parts of the staff (especially the more creative jobs), watering down the product for more rapid release rates and attempt to push big brand ambition, or a radical increase in bugs and lack of quality control prior to release (which has always been a problem with PC games, but is considerably exaggerated with many EA titles).
Their end-run around serious competition in sports games by acquiring exclusive licensing deals, their exploitative pricing “choices” for Xbox versions of their games (charging for access to content already in the game as opposed to having a freely available cheat code, for example), their on-going refusal to use Microsoft’s proven turn-key Xbox live suport in favor of their own (often highly buggy) online interfaces are just icing on the cake for reasons why gamers generally dislike EA so much.
Not that it matters, since people keep buying their games in such numbers, it’s not going to change anytime soon (although, EA’s primary role as a publisher who simply owns developers makes the possible threat of digital distribution a concern, unless they set up their own channel for delivering games that way).