EA Springs "Spring Break" Games, Posts $454 Million Loss
You know how E3's dead (long live E3!) and all the game publishers were supposed to veer off and stage their own annual "personalized" media events? Well EA held its annual "Spring Break" games showcase on Monday night in San Francisco, then followed with a modestly celebratory fourth quarterly earnings call last night.
First up, the games...
BattleForge (PC, RTS/CCG). Take an online PC real-time strategy game and mash it with a collectible card mechanic you use to build your own personal army. Everyone's calling it "Warcraft meets Magic: The Gathering" which makes it sound derivative, but you'll note that developer EA Phenomic were the guys who did the whole SpellForce hybrid RPG/RTS series, something that especially in SpellForce 2's case came off pretty impressively as far as I was concerned. With BattleForge, resource management is out, building a deck of 20 tradable cards by playing through a campaign is in. Stir with up to 12 players cooperatively (or not) pimping their decks by walloping Big Bads in battle. ETA: Q4 2008
Dead Space (PS3, Xbox 360, PC, Third-Person Shooter). Think Ridley Scott's Alien meets John Carpenter's The Thing with a dusting of Doom and a dash of Resident Evil to make Dead Space EA's shot at a "next-gen survival horror" game. Take a space engineer named after two of our greatest legacy sci-fi writers (Clarke, Asimov) and send him after the oldest hook in the book: An interstellar freighter issuing a distress call. What do you get? Space Hulk, I'm betting, which if you sabe "Warhammer 40k" means corridor crawl with lots of icky aliens-ate-my-companion's-brain moments and requisite plot shockers to keep things fresh. ETA: October 2008
Left 4 Dead (Xbox 360, PC, Survival Horror). It's -- gasp! -- another Zombie survival horror shooter! This one makes me think Gauntlet meets 28 Days Later through a Counter-Strike fishbowl (darkly, if also humorously). Gauntlet? Only in the sense that four human players cooperatively muscle through Mongolian throngs of Infected undead with splatter-ific zeal. Four additional players can pop in to control Infected "bosses" with special abilities, for up to eight-way neck-gnawing, bullet-clawing brawls. An "AI director" generates the population dynamically each time you play through the game to thwart predictability. It also scales the difficulty based on how well (or poorly) you're doing. According to Valve's Doug Lombardi, Left 4 Dead is the developer's attempt to do for cooperative gaming what Counter-Strike did for online multiplayer back in 1999. ETA: Q3 2008
Skate It (DS, Wii, "Extreme" Sports). Not a new game or a sequel, but rather an old one (2007's Skate, in fact) ported to the DS and repackaged for the Wii. The Wii version adds Wii Balance Board as well as 480p and widescreen support. The board won't be required, of course, and you can get by just fine using the Wii Remote to push forward, tilt left and right, or quickly "flick" your wrist to pull off a tricksy "extreme" move without buckling on a single elbow- or knee-pad. ETA: September 2008
Also...
Battlefield: Bad Company. The Battlefield series gets a "Commandos" style team-play world you can blow to smithereens, buildings to vehicles to vegetation (and more). Also, Battlefield Heroes, a cartoony action shooter that dishes out tickets and flags and pits two teams (national army, royal army) against each other in what looks to be classic Battlefield-style multiplayer done light.
- Warhammer Online. Or "World of Warhammer," as it's being politely referred to by some of us. Looks very pretty. Also monotonously combat-centric, which would make it, well, like any other MMORPG, just with Games Workshop's IP slathered everywhere. I'm a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay fan, so I'll probably play it whatever its genre cliches.
- Rock Band for Wii. Soon to be the bestselling version of MTV/Harmonix's game forever and ever amen. I mean, duh, right?
- Roy Taylor, the refreshingly forthright Nvidia VP of Content Relations I interviewed in January speechified about the importance of PC gaming at the show. While I sympathize with his position, tell it to gamers who prefer parking their keisters in living room comfy chairs with groups of friends bathed in the electroluminescent flicker of giganto-flatscreens rung round by Dolby 5.1 surround sound. That's "prefers" over sitting in front of a much smaller desktop monitor in a hard-edged chair pushed up against a hard-edged desk in much the same not-so-comfy slumped-forward position too many of us enjoy for 10 or 12 hours a day playing the game of life called "Our Day Jobs." (Never mind Vista quirks and audio-video driver inconsistencies.) No, PC gaming isn't dead, but I don't know that we'll ever see it become what Nvidia's after, i.e. a staging ground for the 189 million GPUs Nvidia counts as its install base. Sure, that's a ton of untapped potential, but convince the 188 million who barely blinked when the ostensibly heaven-and-earth-moving Crysis shipped last year. We'll always have our World of Warcrafts and The Sims, but there's a reason developers are hopping mad to get their stuff onto consoles, and it has nothing at all to do with recent media sourness about PCs and gaming.
As for EA's earnings call, EA boss John Riccitiello had several mouthfuls to share, including:
In fiscal 2009, we expect to add $1 billion in non-GAAP revenue. In achieving this target, we will have added $2 billion to EA’s revenues between fiscal ‘08 and fiscal ‘09. This would be the most aggressive growth in EA’s history.
What's non-GAAP? Stands for "Non-Generally Accepted Account Principles." Something bean counters hate and CEOs like Riccitiello love, because it circumvents straightforward asset representation and attempts to "recognize the future value of new contracts." Yeah, I know, more creative repackaging. Or voodoo. You pick. Anyway, Riccitiello followed that with:
What gives me confidence in these targets? Simply put, my belief in our teams and the quality of the products we will be introducing in fiscal year ‘09. Our label structure and newly energized publishing teams will be introducing the strongest title line-up in EA’s history, including: for EA Sports, Madden, our 20th anniversary edition, stepping forward with an entirely new way to play and learn the game involving a new holographic interface.
Holographic interface? Yeah, beats me too. Hey, at least it sounds like more than another boring roster update.
The "everyone's-talking-about-it" news? EA's $454 million loss on revenue increases up 19% to $3.7 billion. You can explain that number in part off EA's recent acquisition of Pandemic and BioWare (for $620 million), and overall, the company seems to be making money where it matters, so.
Me, I'm all eyes on Spore, the litmus test for PC gaming in 2008, as far as I'm concerned.
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I really do miss the E3 set-up. As it is now, i have no idea if/when people are gonna have a big updates on their games. E3 brought everything cool out at once, and I think the competition was good for the industry.
There was just soemthing nice abotu getting a yearly update from the entire industry at the same time. now it seems like a lot more work for the consumer to figure out when/what is coming out.