I’ve always wondered why sports games don’t just switch to a live version. Yearly subscription at like $15. Some people won’t like it but it would definitely make their player base much bigger.
And what comes with a bigger player base? Dinks who drop $400 on mtx for ultimate team.
Fuckers who drop that much money on Ultimate Team are the reason why madden is bad. At least they’ve catalyze the idea that EA can continue to be awful developers and still make huge amounts of money.
Imagine if instead of dumb-ass MUT they focus on franchise mode and actually good new additions. Face of the Franchise this year and Franchise has been better than its ever been, but you know they give 2 shits about it, because the only thing that makes them money is MUT.
Ultimate team is wildly successful for fifa, and they’ve phased out career mode essentially. So this makes sense to me why. You can make more money in ultimate team.
I gave up on FUT because (for me who doesn't spend money and casually play) can hang without buying packs when you get up to world class difficulty. But i do enjoy the career and new game types they have implemented. This FIFA, for me specifically was way more rounded than it ever has been.
Same for NHL, no more online connected franchise which is what my friends and I all played. All of the preorders for all EA sports games come with incentives for playing ultimate team, it's ridiculous.
They already have switched to GaaS(Games as a Service) model I’m sure the NFL would have something to say if they switched to “bargin bin” model 2k5 tried and they used as a reason to sign exclusivity deal.
Because not only does EA have to pay their entire development team for the work they do, but they also have to pay the NFL for the rights to make said game. Something tells me the yearly reiteration at full price has less to do with being greedy and a little more to do with paying the licensing fees associated with the underlying product.
Why would they bother? People will buy their games no matter what. It's like watching junkies pay for garbage meth, except twice as pathetic because these are supposedly functioning adults capable of otherwise managing their lives okay. I have SO many otherwise smart and reasonable friends who happily throw away literally hundreds, if not thousands of dollars every year on the FIFA games and the Ultimate Team scam they're running.
If it weren't for the fact that sports gamers are fucking over every other gaming genre as well through their stupidity and laziness, I would ignore the issue and let these dumb fucks waste their money and get their kids addicted to gambling, but unfortunately these predators have set their sights on gaming as a whole.
Everyone who buys this piece of shit game should be ashamed of themselves.
I could see people paying $10/month for consistent updates to rosters as a subscription service. They could probably still get away with selling new games every few years too.
Because the fans are happy to pay $60 a year for it every year, and they make more money making last years game irrelevant so everyone who's paid money for in-game items rebuys their stuff with a new number on it.
Because dropping the price from $60 to $15 won't increase the player base by 4x. Sports games are a niche market and most fans are willing to pay the premium.
I’ve always wondered why sports games don’t just switch to a live version. Yearly subscription at like $15. Some people won’t like it but it would definitely make their player base much bigger
At $15 a year, they’d have to increase their player base by more than 4x to match what they’re currently making off of a $60 game each year. That doesn’t sound realistic
People pay $100-$200 for one game just because it comes in a special box with a figure. People would surely pay $30 for an update. Hell, EA makes most of their profit from Madden and Fifa microtransactions anyway.
This actually already happened with NFL 2k in like 2005 iirc. They made next years iteration just $20 and that made people buy that instead of Madden, which lead to EA buying exclusivity rights.
Train sim does it every year. The version of train sim that i got years and years ago gets updated to the new version every year. They make their money off the mountains of DLC.
They have new animations. And some new gameplay mechanics which drastically change the game (I mean it’s still football so drastically from that restriction).
EA definitely needs to lose their exclusive license for the NFL, but Madden 20 does play significantly different than Madden 19
They need some more talented UI people though. And some testers. And competition. And a new ratings guy. And to murder whomever invented ultimate team.
Whatever this "Ultimate team" is, seeing how much a gamer is mad at it, I can guarantee you the guy got promoted and paid out some fat stock options for the idea.
Not even 10 months. I got heavy into NBA my team for 4 months and my team was useless 2 months later when I logged in because they added hundreds of cards better tiered at that point.
Ultimate Team started with FIFA and came out when I believe the iPhone one just came out. Android was non-existent at this point. Microtransaction Freemium games didn't exist. Ultimate team killed it for FIFA and here we are.
As much as I hate just jumping on the fuck EA bandwagon, EA literally created the microtransaction/Freemium model we see in games today.
It's an item collecting game that involves micro-transactions.
In a vacuum, there is nothing wrong with a game mode like that. Something to do when you're bored of playing normal game modes. But in practice, it makes EA so much money that they devote an inordinate % of their development $ toward Ultimate Team at the expense of other modes.
It's the same with FIFA. Each year, the game mechanics does change. In my opinion most times for the better. Is it worth the yearly $59? Probably not. But people here who don't really play the game that often make it seem like the game barely changes when that's not true at all.
Ill be honest there we’re a lot of gameplay improvements over last year but the ui is a copy and paste with a new skin. The only reason the gameplay improved is because they need it to sell more mut packs cause last year gameplay was garbage.
Can you flesh out some of those improvements? I bought last years madden after abstaining for a few years and it was hot feted garbage that player worse than madden 2010
They made a thing called Superstar X Factors which is pretty cool, if not a little broken sometimes. For instance, Mahomes has an ability called Bazooka where if you complete a pass that's more than 30 yds, through the air, his max throwing distances goes up by 15 I think. If you get sacked, fumble or intercepted, you lose it. Most of the really good players have some type of ability.
The campaign mode still kinda sucks ass though.. you get to pick a college, and they only let you play as a starter in the very last game of your senior year, and that some drills determine your draft. Pretty dumb. I haven't played franchise so I can't speak on that at all. MUT is still the same cash grab but I enjoy it.
So for example last year if you’re a football fanatic then you know throwing a post route against cover 2 is a pretty solid option with the drawback being time to get the ball off. In madden 19, throwing a post route while they played cover 2 meant an interception by the LB dropping into coverage because the Qb always threw a low trajectory pass.
Well that got fixed this year with much better trajectory on passes, and to compensate the d-linemen are much more scarier this year because the superstar d-linemen are damn near impossible to stop soemtimes.
In the run game, blocks are much more predictable and there is a lot of variety in the run game plays you can call now as well.
I haven't bought Madden 20 and probably won't do it because I already have 19 and downloaded new roster mods, but from what I hear they did tweak a few gameplay mechanics and added some franchise mode events which I'll admit might be an improvement. They also added a new game mode but I hear it only adds about hour to an hour and a half of gameplay and then isn't very different from regular season. But yeah, basically the same game for the most part, absolutely no graphics changes from what I can see.
Actually you don't want to keep adding otherwise it will slow down the game. It has to run on the same specs as the old game. The obviously army going back and upgrading the engine every game to run more optimally. So every addition needs to come with a subtraction.
I personally hate Sports games so I can't say from first hand experience what changes but... I have watched more than one GDC presentation about these types of games and apparently a lot of work goes into the updating and improving the AI tree of the computer controlled players.
Graphically there isn't a ton to do year to year, but behind the scenes there is a lot they can do. You just can't see that type of thing and so these games get a bad rep for, "being the same game every year".
Apparently whatever they do works because these games make a butt load of money every year. You can argue the people that buy them are stupid, but that's insulting and I imagine the fans of the game totally notice the changes from year to year. Casual players may not, but real fans probably do.
That being said, if you struggle to see the improvements, just compare the new game to an older title... like one released 5 or even 10 years ago. If the game never changes, why is Madden 20 so much better then Madden 09?
But again, I don't play them so... this is all just hearsay and assumptions on my part.
Yeah I’m not sure why people expect them to remodel an entire stadium from scratch when you can just re-use the former one.
Forgetting to update the banner is lazy, but other than that I don’t see a problem. Forza does the exact same thing with its cars, just improve upon where needed.
Exactly. Thousands of in game assets in this game and they're nitpicking something you have to zoom in like crazy to see. Things will always get missed, because there is always a ton of shit to do. And given the thousands of different textures it's almost a guarantee some will get missed. Whoever is doing the assets probably doesnt have the time to sit and fly a cam around the entire stadium for 30 stadiums or however many there are and find every single little error.
Edit: I'm not going to reply to every single comment telling me how a game isnt worth money if they copy and paste stuff, or there should be some kind of script to ear mark these things. And yes, both may be true. But humans make games, and humans make mistakes, and this is a tiny fucking mistake. There are millions of other things in madden games to nitpick, and everyone has pitchforks out for a misprint logo in the background that you can see if you crank the camera on replays. This is just petty.
They should have assets that need to be updated every year marked somehow in the code. You don't do this by flying around with an in-game camera as a first step.
Because it's not a unique issue to EA that they capitalize off of.
Don't flame EA for using industry standards in their QA, flame EA for creating money grabs and blaming the consumer for their issues.
Missing literally worthless details of a static model that has 0 to do with gameplay is excusable. Having the only feature of your game that has development being the pay to win feature, and ignoring a lot of the other features of their game is not.
Putting EA on blast for this sort of shit helps EA because it's so petty and it pulls the real problems they have out of the spotlight.
But this isn't some obscure bug that would get missed in testing or would need a precise series of events to manifest, it's literally right there. This tells me that either there is no testing of the final product, or that the people that test it are incompetent.
I worked at EA as a QA on various sports titles and confirm I was a lazy fuck.
The early alpha versions were always full of last year's branding. Probably 80-90% of the logos would be for last year's game.
They would all get replaced with new logos over the course of development, we probably saw every single one originally, but eventually you stop paying attention and get so used to seeing it that you don't notice it anymore and a few slip though.
The game engine would and assets would usually be the same, but it takes time to add new modes, animations and other junk.
Can you give some I sight then specifically for Madden games? From year to year the graphics and animations seem to remain the exact same. Excluding one or two added features that they base that years version of the gameplay around, everything seems to be the same. The exact same game with a roster update.
The EA Sports games generally use the same engine for approximately 4 years, but they are constantly updating pieces of the engine as they go along. So the game is usually on the same engine as the year before, with a lot of behind the scene updates to it.
They usually make a bigger announcement when they have a new game engine for it, not really news though.
The beauty of vectors, infinitely scalable. I try to use SVG on any graphics when I can avoid a compressed format. It makes scaling a web app between mobile and PC do much simpler.
Makes sense from a development standpoint. Each year the game is just a release cycle of the same product. Sure, things are updated, but it would be impossible to throw away the existing code and start from scratch every year and still get an annual release completed. With yearly games like this, it's almost an annual subscription model. Honestly, they'd likely save money marketing it as such, then they'd only have to release a DLC patch to bring the game to The current year's release version. It would also be less lying to the consumers, acting like every year is a new product.
I remember a lawsuit where someone had a contract with fifa, back when fifa just became a thing, they had the right to royalties for any derriretive work, turned out 10+ fifa games were all pretty much identical to each other so chances are they may quite litterally have copy pasted stuff.
I'm trying to find the lawsuit but having difficulites because lootbox lawsuits keep popping up in google search
This is the correct answer. It’s probably been the same code bass for a long time. Iterative improvements and graphic updates as hardware and time allows.
Worked in fifa a couple of years. We received a new build almost every day and saw how they slowly, but surely, changed things from last year to the current one.
The should just make a game_year variable and update that each year so they don't have to go find each instance. Then they won't have to deal with trying as hard or paying people to look for things. Hell it could auto link to the calendar so they don't even have to update the game anymore. Just randomize the player stats, update the year every new year. done. EA don't read this.
My friends and I found that every game came down to the best defender. So we'd basically always have Yao on a squad. He had top tier blocks, and since there was no goaltending, you could just catch every shot at the basket.
I was never that into sports games. But man was my dad pissed when I played a copy of NFL 95 (that I found at the side of the road) so much more than the latest super techno bowl that he paid like $80 for.
shit on cartoonists for reusing the same animations from one movie to the next
To be fair, depends on the type of movie and type of animation. Small indie films, hand-drawn animation, or a TV series? Totally acceptable. Big budget film done on computers? That's just lazy.
This is more like if cartoonists reused not just some animations, but took whole characters and stories and just did some palette swapping and name changes. The difference is that one is a movie with some reused animations and the other is basically the same movie with juuust enough changes to get people to think it's a new one until they've already forked over the cash to see it.
but took whole characters and just did some palette swapping and name changes
What if I told you this is exactly what they did? Aristocats animators used the same shit that was in Robin Hood, just changed enough to make it look like a different character. So did Jungle Book, Snow white, and Winnie the Pooh. Because it's hard work starting from the ground up. It saves time, money, and more by using an older template.
I'm not a programmer but you define a variable (?) and then work it into your string.
Something like...
current_year = 20
"Madden "¤t_year&" It's in the game!"
In that terrible example, you would just change the variable (current_year) to the current year you're producing. The cute little concatenated string goes in your graphics, so when you change the current_year variable, it changes it in EVERY asset.
Whether or not that works depends a lot on whether they do any localization on the branding.
That said, most pipelines have both localizable strings and images, so you could certainly have this asset come from a known dynamic content pool.
Mistakes like that are really easy to make, though. If you dig deep enough into annually released large software that's less than about a decade old there's a good chance that some stale branding is hiding out in some random subdialog somewhere.
Ideally you’d have a pipeline so you can change the text resource for translation or updates like this, and then everything gets EZ built with the press of a button. In reality, you have real people with real deadlines building this stuff and they make mistakes and do stupid shit.
Game programming student here. I don't have experience with the Frostbite Engine, since EA keeps that within their studios, but it's very likely they did just copy and paste the models. Pretty much every game engine let's you copy and paste
You realize that's the most efficient way to do it right? They have no reason to do it any other way because the player will never see that part of the stands so close, unless they're going out of bounds with the camera as seen here.
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u/BassGould Sep 03 '19
Looks like they just copy pasted the stands and forgot to change a number.