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In what can be considered another blow to EA's public image and marketing power the Game Publisher has decided to unload its waerz via STEAM. That's right, Valve and EA are now married in a distribution deal and it is Steam that will be pumping out the distributions, and not EA. How did this happen and what does it mean?
For many years now EA has been losing customers and taking some of the best titles and turning them into games nobody wants to play. It should come as no surprise that when they tried to push the warez online that they failed. No one likes to play games with SecuROM problems and crappy customer relations and piss poor community activism. I cannot recall the last time a person from EA actually interacted with the Game Playing community. They think going to trade shows and swapping business cards is "Interacting with the community".
So where does this leave EA? Far behind Microsoft and the Xbox Live/Arcade and XNA platforms. Microsoft's games have been bruising the competition and the developer friendly platforms and market place make it easy for some of the best games that would normally never be played to make it into your living room. The platform supports Zune, PC and Xbox360 as well as the future Xbox platforms. There is even a port for the Mac for XNA code
So where does this put the community? Between 2 giants who really don't know much about the people they are making games for. At the very least Microsoft has a community and constantly pushes its XNA platform. As such that is where I will be spending the majority of my money, development resources and time... In Microsoft's corner.
(One can only hope that EA's failures hurt so much that they finally wake up and start making games people want to play again.)
Hawthorne
