EA Sports Back On PC In 2009
EA Sports titles are to return to the PC next year, it has now been confirmed. After the fuss caused when Sports boss Peter Moore posted some rather poor reasoning on his blog, PC players were left both insulted and in the dark about the future of the various well-milked franchises. During an investor conference call today, Shack reports that Moore is beginning to lay out his plans for reinventing the titles for the PC.
2009 will see the return of all the familiar franchises, but hopefully with some fresh and innovative ideas on board. Moore, he say:
"We are retooling these titles [on the PC] to take advantage of the online connectivity in a bigger and more meaningful way."
Oh but please be more than that! Please don't just add a multiplayer button and be done with it. Start again. And for heavens sake, develop either for the PC, or with the PC as a major consideration when going cross-platform. The issue with EA Sports games hasn't been that we can't play them online with our friends, it's that we wouldn't want to embarrass our friends by asking. They have been poor for years now, and so long as EA delude themselves by pretending it's because of a lack of multiplayer, or piracy, or the imaginary decline in PC sales, or whatever other excuse avoids identifying any fault with their games, they will stay poor.
Moore - people stopped buying the Sports games on PC because they were increasingly bad. It's essential that EA take this on board. Go look at some reviews. Draw a graph with the decline in sales plotted alongside the decline in review scores. Put it in Power Point if it will help. And then think - what are the PC's strengths? Browser gaming, easy large downloads, extreme high-end graphics or all-come, all-play casual level cartoon simplicity. It's a machine that can emulate everything from an iPhone to the unimagined next generation of consoles. It's not a dumping ground for PS2 code.