EA Sports: The Peter Moore Rationale

The head of EA Sports claims that sports games on the PC are dead for two reasons: 1) Piracy, and 2) "PC as a platform for authentic, fully-licensed, simulation sports games has declined radically in the past three years as the next generation consoles [...] have attracted millions of consumers."

  

The first statement is an unequivocal false statement as EA is still churning out shovel-ware versions of the FIFA and FIFA Manager series of games for the PC. It is strange how piracy is an issue for the likes of Madden NFL, NCAA Football, NASCAR, NHL, NBA Live, and Tiger Woods PGA Tour, whereas the FIFA franchise is apparently totally immune to this criminal activity.

The second statement is completely self-serving. Consoles primarily are two devices – The X-Box 360 and the PS3. The 360 was released in November 2005, and that initial offering had no core storage device provided. The most recent iteration is the S version released in September 2011 which sports a 320GB hard drive.

The problem here is that everyone who owns an original X-Box 360 will not fork out full price money to upgrade their device to the newer versions which only add to storage capacity or offer peripherals and a selection of gaming themes/color packages. There has been no significant increase in either the CPU or GPU processing power of these units.

What this means is that the X-Box 360 is almost a seven year old platform now. As any PC gamer, especially one who builds and upgrades their own systems can tell you, seven years is literally two generations in PC gaming capability in terms of CPU and GPU processing, memory, power supply and storage solutions.

The games that the X-Box 360 and PS3 can handle have to stay at the level of the architecture available to the unit purchased. So at the outset games could easily be ported from the console to the PC because at the time most PC gamers had systems within scope of the games requirements for the console.

Today this is clearly not the case as most mainstream gaming PC solutions (pre-built or DIY kits) are at least two generations past what the consoles can handle. Anyone who owns Battlefield 3 for the X-Box 360 and also owns it for the PC can tell you the difference:

Therefore, the only reason EA Sports is not making most of their sports games for Windows is not because of the false argument of piracy, but the completely true argument of declining sales: PC gamers will not accept the seven year old graphic capabilities of games ported to their platform. They simply refuse to buy games that look like shit by today’s standards.

And the cheap bastards at EA will not foot the bill to have two different versions of the game designed, so they front the argument of declining sales as justification, albeit for completely the wrong reason.

Liars.