NOA #2 publish in America

[Great Rumbler]

No. Company Sales ($) Market Share (%)
1. Electronic Arts 76,932,800 24.5%
2. Nintendo of America 31,420,940 10%
3. THQ 20,576,320 6.5
4. Midway 18,616,340 5.9
5. Sony (Corp) 16,830,500 5.4
6. Ubisoft (Corp) 15,086,620 4.8
7. Capcom 13,127,970 4.2
8. Take Two Interactive (Corp) 11,943,910 3.8
9. Konami of America 11,842,710 3.8
10. Activision 10,774,100 3.4
11. Atari 10,247,890 3.3
12. Eidos Interactive (Corp) 9,717,023 3.1
13. Sega of America 8,766,206 2.8
14. Vivendi Universal (Corp) 8,527,526 2.8
15. Microsoft 7,590,376 2.4
16. Namco 7,369,502 2.3
17. Acclaim Entertainment (Corp) 5,597,203 1.8
18. Square Enix USA (Corp) 3,190,971 1.0
19. Temco 3,061,416 1.0
20. LucasArts 3,037,204 1.0

But look at EA! 25%!! That's crazy. Still, Nintendo did pretty good since they only release games on the GC and GBA and EA releases games on all platforms.

Cube-Europe

[A Black Falcon]

Way too many sales of Madden to people who already own the last four versions...

[Great Rumbler]

I really don't see the point. If you've got one you've got them all, right?

[A Black Falcon]

It definitely seems stupid to me. My only baseball game was released in about '93 and yet I find it tough to justify buying a new one... (though I did get one for GB in '96 or so, but I didn't like it at all and eventually got rid of it...) WOO UPDATED ROSTERS!!!@@@11

[Great Rumbler]

I bought a few sports games, but that was only because I found them in the discount bin.

[A Black Falcon]

All three of mine were gifts. :)

[Dark Jaguar]

That's one of my main beefs with sports games like that. I might actually get one if I didn't have to worry about it being completely outdated a year later. Thank goodness for the upcoming era of the hard drive. With that, I should HOPE that the measly updates they add to these sports games will be downloadable as patches. Of course, the series would have to ditch the year in the title thing.

[Sacred Jellybean]

With that, I should HOPE that the measly updates they add to these sports games will be downloadable as patches. Of course, the series would have to ditch the year in the title thing.

Yeah, if I were into sports games, I'd hope the same. Unfortunately, EA may decide not to, simply because there's more money involved in releasing a new rehash (assuming what you guys say is true; I know next to nothing about sports games) every year. :hmm:

[A Black Falcon]

Um, replace "may not" with "won't" and you'll be a lot closer to the truth. Only insane people would cut off such a massive source of revenue!

Unless they start charging, say, $40 or $50 to download the roster update?

Note that PCs have had hard drives for a very long time. Guess how common next year's roster updates are.

[Dark Jaguar]

Except, eventually some other company will do that, which if they end up successful, will force EA's hand.

[A Black Falcon]

Hasn't happened on the PC, probably won't anytime soon for consoles.

In-season roster updates, possibly. But not next year's.

[Dark Jaguar]

Having little experience with the genre, I can only add this. Can't they just program it so the users themselves can create an entire year's roster and save it as is? It might take about a day's worth of work to add such a feature I'd imagine. Letting them create new characters, which I imagine would be something they would need, is another matter of course, but whatever.

In any case, I honestly don't see how someone could justify buying a whole game just for some lineup change. Maybe if there's some big gameplay changes and additions, but not for that.

Oh and, aren't most PC sports games just ports of console ones?

[A Black Falcon]

Oh, most sports games do have editable stats. If you really wanted to you probably could do all the roster changes yourself... but it'd be an insanely big job that no one would ever even want to consider doing.

Oh, and they DO make other changes from one year to the next. Not nearly enough for me to say it's justified to buy the next version, but they do make other changes.

As for ports, I don't think so. Well, it depends... there just aren't that many PC sports games anymore. But I'd say most of them in the past have been for PC. Many do also come out on consoles, but ports? I don't know. Not all or anything. Different but similar PC versions is more likely. And plenty of games were definitley on PC first... like Hardball, or High Heat...

[lazyfatbum]

Yay for capital gains and increased profit margins!!!!!!11

Tell EA I hate them. If I could, I would force them to swallow tuffs of human hair. I would put funny things on them and steal their pockets. Then I would point and laugh at their butts. I would make prank calls telling them that I know where Ghengis Kahn is buried and have nothing to back up my claim and I would do so while wearing a mask of Burgess Meredith. Just to spite them. Burn in Hell Electronic Arts, may all your Secretary's Day parties go sour at the last minute and further more, you dig your tongue in to moist rectums. If this were court, and if I were the judge, I would give you horrible dirty looks when I clearly know you can see me. Your games are coasters! and that sucks for Gamecube games because the coasters are then really small in comparison and can usually not sustain the girth of the average mug or glass, instead they are coasters for small orange juice glasses, which is fine... if you like that sort of thing.

[Dark Jaguar]

They are bought by the average gamer. The average gamer buys one of the three systems and says "hey, I got one of them game systems" and then they all get together and buy a game, this game is from EA because they want to totally get up in each other's faces with some hoops or something. They then go at it and have some fun I guess, but then the party starts and at the end, someone breaks the game, so they buy another one, also from EA, to play football. This is a scientific fact gathered by my top surveyers who walk around the mall asking people to take a survey, and only the people who say "yes" are surveyed, and the people who say "yes" are either desperatly lonely, incredibly bored, or think it's their ticket to becoming a big hollywood star.

[A Black Falcon]

I have zero EA Cube games. One N64 game (BAR). None, I think, for GB. I do have some for PC though (Moto Racer 2, NFS High Stakes, Gettysburg, C&C Red Alert 2 and its expansion, several more...)... but no sports games of theirs.

But yes, EA's target market is generally the "average gamer". Oh, did you also know that EA doesn't like to publish M-rated games? It publishes almost none of them...

[Great Rumbler]

Didn't EA publish Timesplitters?

[A Black Falcon]

No idea... but if it's rated M I doubt it. Remember Allied Assualt (I think that's the name)? Bloodless FPSes...only recently did EA allow any M-rated titles released by them and they said "none of the worse ones".