Apparently EA and UBI have forgotten something
Saturday, February 20, 2010
How many of you have owned your own business? Even if you haven’t I’ll bet every single one of you have hear the phrase, “the customer is always right.” This is of course not the literal truth, but more of an axiom for how you want your customers to feel. In business, it’s imperative that your customers be at the very center of each an every decision you make. When you make a product or service, the end goal is to have people pay for it, be happy with it, and think of you again the next time you want to sell them something. In today’s world of instant results, and today’s bottom line is the only one that matters, it seems many companies have forgotten this all important rule. They may think they “have to” protect their bottom line for the next fiscal quarter, but by taking short sighted actions today, they all but assure that there will be less money later. Two companies have made it clear they have lost the concept that made them a success in the past, EA and Ubisoft. Some of you may be thinking that it can’t be true, how can two of the biggest game publishers in the world be so wrong? I can’t say how it happened for sure, I can only speculate that poor ineffectual management at the highest levels must be at the root. A company evolves a type of feel, or culture that directly reflects upon the leadership at the top. Good companies foster a balance between the needs to perform today and invest in tomorrow, while bad ones sell their souls grasping at the elusive last few percent of profits, apparently ignorant to what it means to the customer, and the companies future sales.
Earlier this year EA announced that they would be ending support for online play for many of their games, most shockingly EA Madden 2009. Now, sure we just finished the 2010 season, so 2009 is about a year and a half old, but its also a game you could have purchased just a few months ago, because it was still on many store shelves (and likely still is being sold some places). So what is EA telling us, well its clear they are trying to say “Please buy madden 2010″, the problem is what they are really saying to me is, “we got your money for that game, now give is more you moron.” You see, they have just taken the value away from every single one of their titles, even brand new ones. If I know that when I but an EA game the clock starts ticking, and in just a year or so I have a new drink coaster, well, that doesn’t encourage me to but your games, IT MAKES ME NOT WANT TO BUY THEM. Now before you all start shooting out a few thousand emails about how you can still play the games, just not online, let me assure you I know that, but that is not the issue here, there issue is one of perceived value, and lost features. When I make a decision to purchase a game, many things go into the is it worth the money equation, and the last thing you want me to be thinking about is how the company that makes the game screwed me over last year, and that some of the game features may be broken in the near future. I don’t expect EA to keep running servers indefinitely forever, but to shutter them so soon is a clear money grab that is destined to backfire. The lost sales for the current years games long tail of Madden 2010, and next years Madden 2011 will most certainly exceed the cost associated with maintaining a few servers to keep customers happy.
Then we have Ubisoft, a company well known in the gaming community for poor management decisions when it comes to DRM. The uproar caused by some of the choices they made several years ago actually seemed to work, as they dropped use of one of the most poorly implemented pieces of DRM code in the history of bad ideas. One that destroyed DVD drives, made systems unstable, and was so important to them that they actually didn’t take it off when you uninstalled the game they were allegedly protecting. So they learned their lesson right? Sadly no. UBI has announced that all of their future titles, even those that are 100% single player, will include a special form of DRM that will actually cause the game to crash (on purpose) if your computers connection to the internet or their servers is interrupted for any reason. You lose any unsaved progress, and are sent to the “we think you stole our game” corner until you fix the connection issue. Now online activation is problematic at best, because what happens when the authentication servers that bless you with permission to play the game you paid for are no longer running? But to require a constant unwavering internet connection to play a single player game is so anti-consumer its hard to fathom. If you are worried about lost sales due to piracy, you need to increase the number of people who want to pay you for your product, not reduce that number. I can guaranty that you will lose a big chunk of the very people you want, the ones that pay to play your game, the moment they lose progress in a game because of a momentary hiccup in their internet connectivity, or your servers. Every internet connection has minor hiccups now and again, it may not happen every hour, but it happens, and to call me a thief as soon as I commit the unbelievably heinous act of allowing my internet connection to laps for a few seconds it unacceptable, and I will not stand for it. Piracy is out there, and no matter what you do, someone is going to play your game without paying for it, but I can’t imagine why you want to take the people who wanted to pay for your game, and drive them to find a way to “fix” what you broke so they don’t have the game stop working all the time is the ultimate stupid idea. One of two things is going to happen, either they cant find a way to get the game to work properly, so they never but another of your products, or they find a way to “fix” the game, and CONGRADULATIONS!!! You have just taught a paying customer how to pirate your game…good job UBI.
