Day 16: The Good, Bad & the Ugly: Part 1

Sorry about missing a post yesterday. I didn't get to write up anything yesterday because I was preoccupied. Yes, that's a set of alien wall boobs.

Alright so, I wanted to do a post about good, bad and ugly video game publishers in my opinion. I started writing it and realized it was going to be much longer than I'd anticipated so I'll just post one part at a time. I'll probably revisit the concept from time to time because business constantly changes and a good publisher today may be an evil one next year. I'm gonna start out with the bad publishers today.

Activision:

Infinity Ward aside Activision is still the worst of the worst. Activision is thriving off a very short list of franchises that annually see full priced revisions. Call of Duty is getting stale fast and Activision practically single handedly built and destroyed a genre of games in a matter of a few years. They bought Red Octane and the Guitar Hero franchise but discarded Harmonix. They released dozens of different Guitar Hero games over the course of 3 years and most of them were shit and the rest were mediocre. Harmonix were doing Rock Band the way it should have been done and Activision just gave the genre a bad rap. Maybe if it weren’t for that Rock Band would still be thriving today. 

But hey, that’s just a personal beef, here’s something evil that’s universally appalling. Activision shut down no less than six different studios and everyone were laid off in the last year alone. Included in that list is Red Octane and Bizarre Creations. Red Octane was building fantastic, affordable DanceDanceRevolution pads before publishing Guitar Hero 1 and 2 along with producing the controllers for it in 2005 and 2006 respectively. Red Octane were bought by Activision and worked on hardware for new Guitar Hero games until Activision’s profits started slipping. Instead of re-evaluating their approach, Activision fired most of Red Octane and just canned the Guitar Hero franchise. Plus I think Neversoft, who developed all the major Guitar Hero games for Activision, (GH3, GH World Tour, GH5, GH Warriors of Rock and GH Metallica) were fired too. 

Anyways, Bizarre Creations made the Geometry Wars series which were pretty good as well as the Project Gotham Racing series for Xbox. Activision bought Bizarre in 2007 and since then the only major game they made was Blur in 2010, besides Geometry Wars expansions and ports. It didn't do so well because it faced stiff competition from ModNation Racers and Split/Second, two other arcade racing titles which frankly were marketed better. So what happened next? All of them fired. 

Now, the Infinity Ward situation is too inconclusive to make an informed decision about but even without that situation Activision is a cruel, evil publisher. That’s why you top the list.

EA: 

For everything good that EA does they do something horrible. The EA partners program is a great deal for everyone involved. A high profile developer gets distribution and maybe some marketing assistance and EA gets a cut and their production profile looks sweeter. In most of those cases those games get a pass and aren’t corrupted. 

EA’s games, though, are loaded with stipulations. For a while every EA PC game had secuROM DRM which limits the amount of times you can install a game and effectively turns a purchase into a rental depending on when EA’s servers expire or your configurations/formats wipe out your uses. This included some of EA’s biggest titles too such as Crysis, Spore and Mass Effect, the former two unavailable anywhere else and the latter previously only available on Xbox 360. Well, the DRM seems to be gone from PC games but replaced with something even worse that affects every SKU. 

PC gamers, if you use Steam or an equivalent service, are used to having to sign into some online account or client to play your games, console gamers aren’t. Now every EA game has an ‘online pass’ which is a one use code that effectively locks a portion of the game away. Every new copy of a game includes a pass code for the use of one account. Basically, if you don’t have that code you can’t play multiplayer or in single player games EA generally withholds expansions. If you bought the game used you need to cough up $10 to buy a pass. Seriously, that’s fucked up and now other publishers are starting to bandwagon on that idea and it’s only going to get more disastrous as time goes on. 

Then there’s Origin, EA’s new online service competing with Steam. It’s now required for every EA PC game and has a scary TOS. Supposedly if you buy a game it’ll expire after a year or something. If that’s true then that’s incredibly fucked up. Let Origin sit for a year or so and see if it even still exists before buying anything off of it otherwise you’ll be throwing money away on irredeemable garbage. 

If all that wasn’t bad enough EA has this habit of producing terrible marketing campaigns that are tasteless and just stupid. Look at Dead Space 2 and Dante’s Inferno ad campaigns if you’re not convinced. In addition EA has been pumping out an orgy of media collectibles for every damn franchise they publish nowadays. Every game launch isn’t complete, and you won’t get the complete experience, without about a hundred books, comics, animated movies, and downloadable expansions. Make a good god damn game, stop making all this extraneous bullshit, and for god sakes stop trying to combat the used game market by gimping your product! EA is a company that doesn’t learn from its mistakes nor does it think rationally before acting. But…at least they’re not firing as many people as Activision or running franchises into the ground with over saturated, undercooked releases…well, at least not yet but they look as if they may be soon, Dragon Age 2 is evidence of that.

Ubisoft: 

Compared to EA and Activision, Ubisoft is a saint but they still piss me off. Right now Ubisoft is the most hated publisher in the PC market. Every release is several months behind console releases and has usurped EA in the DRM department actually requiring online connection for single player games at one point but reportedly it was phased out awhile back in lieu of a one-time online check like disk check. It's a slippery slope premise but lets just not buy it and hope it disappears.

What really pisses me off though is how Ubisoft is milking games like Assassin’s Creed for all their worth. Assassin’s Creed 1 had a lot of potential. The second turned most of that potential into reality and given time it could be the next Legend of Zelda but the series is being milked just like Activision did Guitar Hero or how EA does the Dead Space franchise by churning out at least one new game a year along with books and collectibles galore. 

The game needs time to develop and thrive rather than build and release games that are intended to be incomplete. Assassin’s Creed 2 was fun but narratively it was deliberately incomplete and apparently there’s no less than two other games worth of narrative they yanked out. If it was a serialized series like Call of Duty then it wouldn’t be such a big deal but come on…you have a chance to turn it around, build something else and maybe create a portfolio that rivals EA and Activision without having to churn out new Assassin’s Creed, Just Dance and Tom Clancy games every single year. You’re becoming the European version of Activion only less profitable…it’s not too late to turn back. That Rayman Origins game is a good start, don’t fuck it up.

That's it for now. I'll bring you the second part tomorrow. Oh...and by the way...

I couldn't resist...Duke Nukem Forever review this weekend...probably.