The Woes of a Giant Publisher

Poor old EA. Things seemed to be going so well for a while, there. They’d decided to stop churning out so much utter dross, come up with a bunch of compelling new titles, announced the inevitable plans to sequelise the life out of every single one of them, and things seemed good.

But now they’re laying off 600 staff worldwide, Spore and Red Alert 3 are causing an outcry (and being massively reviewbombed on Amazon) due to the DRM they insisted on using, and things don’t seem to be quite so rosy any more. How did it go so wrong? What could they do differently?

Here’s my tip:

Try and be a bit less stupid.

Let me give you a couple of examples.

There’s the aforementioned DRM. I’ve gone on about this already so I won’t say much about it again here, except to note that they’ve clearly chosen the path of not listening to their customers, and that never strikes me as a particularly clever choice to make.

Also, with the official launch of Red Alert 3 this week, it appears that a lot of copies have gone out with the printed CD keys missing the last character, making it impossible to successfully install the game. EA’s response:

There is currently a work around that may allow you to bypass this issue. Since you have the first 19 characters of the code already, you can basically try “guessing” the last character. To do this, simply enter your existing code, and then for the last character, try the letters A-Z, and then the numbers 0-9. You should eventually get the right combination, and be able to play the game.

To be fair to them, this has now disappeared from the official support pages and been replaced with a simple “Contact Us” message, but the games should never have left the distribution centre in that state in the first place.

And finally, and the main impetus behind my choice of this subject today, we have the EA online store. Theoretically, this is a good thing, offering online purchasing and download of EA titles direct to your PC without the need to even stand up. Digital distribution is considered by many to be the wave of the future and, given the reduced costs due to the lack of a need to manufacture, warehouse, distribute, ship and/or stock in shops should make for better value for the gamer.

Unfortunately, that’s where it all falls apart. The EA store charges the exact same amount as the RRP for a boxed retail copy of the games. None of the massive savings are passed on to the customer, who doesn’t even get a physical copy of the game for their money; and it’s possible to get a boxed copy of the game for less money by buying from somewhere like Amazon or Gameplay, who don’t have the costs of running game stores and do pass some of the resultant savings on to their customers. EA make less money this way than they would by discounting downloadable versions of the game. Doesn’t seem that smart to me.

In summary:

1. Listen to your customers.
2. Don’t ship broken products.
3. Try and price your online store in a way which makes it seem like good value, rather than poor value.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, somewhere in the world someone else needs my aid.

Away!