Instead of ignoring Twitter trolls, EA’s Peter Moore goes straight for the burn.
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18 responses to “EA’s Peter Moore Goes Straight For The Burn”
Seems more like a logic failure than a burn, hey. ‘Number one’ is meaningless, high profits are what companies want. Releasing Titanfall on PS4 would most certainly increase profits for EA so Peter’s response is irrelevant to the topic.
If you don’t think that the value of the deal EA did with Microsoft would offset the losses of not publishing on Sony platforms… you need to go and think some more.
You’re obviously not familiar with how exclusive deals tend to work in the industry. Assuming both platforms sell equally (which they don’t), Microsoft would have to pay more than their platform licensing fee plus anticipated profits for unit sales caused by the title being exclusive to offset the profits EA would make on cross-platform sales. The fact there are more PS4 sales than XB1 sales just accentuates that divide. Microsoft at least only offer exclusivity deals that cover the former, generally not the latter since that just increases the losses they take per console sale.
When I was working in game development, exclusive platform contracts didn’t even remotely cover projected profits from selling on other platforms. There are two kinds that are usually negotiated – upfront lump sums, and more favourable platform licensing fees. Neither cover cross-platform profit potential, but what they do offer is a comfort zone for the developer and tend to simplify things during the development cycle. It’s a trade-off between having a moderate increase in profits in exchange for not having to support another platform during development and maintenance, vs having a high increase in profits but having to cover more platforms. Some companies prefer to take the easy way.
Thanks for the suggestion to think some more, but I think I might have to reflect that right back at you. It seems like you’ve just made assumptions and haven’t actually given any thought to the economics of things like this at all.
Some loose figures for you. We’ll use Battlefield 4 as a yardstick, which has only had a few months of sales on the current consoles.
If the game is only half as popular as Battlefield 4 (which XB1 preorder figures suggest it should easily achieve), you’re looking at $150 million in revenue. Of that, around 12% goes to platform licensing fees, or $18 million. Hardware conversions for big name exclusives are usually anticipated to be around 10% (about one in ten people will buy a console specifically for the exclusive title), which then requires sales of (going from memory) around seven other games before XB1/PS4 break even on hardware. Last I saw, average number of game sales per console for the previous generation was around 5, but even if Microsoft assumes the average is going to be 10 with the new generation, that’s a maximum of $70 million Microsoft can offer EA without the entire deal over the life of the game going into the red.
On the other hand, if the game is released on PS4 and is similarly half as popular as Battlefield 4, EA looks to take around $80 million from its publisher cut on that platform alone. That’s $10 million more after only a few months of sales, and that figure only increases as the life of the exclusivity deal continues.
Those numbers are meaningless to a CEO level. His job is more about being a public face and making a big public spectacle. And this IS EA – one of the most success numbers driven companies in the industry. He’ll make the deal, know that there’s enough space to ‘interpret’ his numbers and ignore ‘reality’ and boom. Number 1.
And Number 1 is Number 1. No matter what. It’s the same success driven logic as putting loads of gold medals on games even if they’re from obscure magazines.
Deeeeep burnnnnn….
When i checked my email today and noticed somebody had replied to one of my kotaku comments. Immediately i figured this would be somebody insinuating that they knew more than me about something and somehow their smug statement has to be more “relevant”. After acouple years i’m seeing this every week. Oddly enough the comment when i opened it was just somebody piggybacking to be higher on the page. But the fact is all i could think was “here we go again” getting real sick of this spiteful attitude, it’s getting hopelessly bad.
Are you referring to something in this article’s comments in particular?
I miss Peter Moore. Was great at Sega and Xbox
He was far more appealing in those roles I found, since going to EA he’s become a pretty big douche I find…
Can we not add links to articles?
Yeeeeah but Peter, it’s easy to be #1 when out of 10 games released on the PS4 so far, EA publishes what, 5 of them probably???
Give it six months when the REAL next gen games start coming out and not the shovelware EA keeps throwing on the fire, then we’ll see where you are mate 🙂
Hard to keep at #1 when there’s more appealing games such as:
MGS5
Infamous Second Son
WatchDogs
The Evil Within
Destiny
The Crew
Alien : Isolation
The Order 1886
Now, sure some of these are multiplatform but that doesn’t matter. EA’s gloating is kind of premature, lets see how it goes once the first year is up and some actual REAL current gen games come out (Games that are not available on the previous generation of consoles).
I thought it said, “EA’s Peter Moore Goes Straight For The Bum” and was like WTH….
I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who saw that.
Well, that seems to be EA’s strategy anyway!
Like with many posts on Kotaku…this one feels tortured to fit a certain form.
While @Naugthygods could have put his/her response better by not starting with “imagine what position”, I believe they both have valid points of view…all that @PeterMooreEA did was respond in way that detracted from a valid question..hardly a “burn”
EA despite much criticism over practices and games in particular…which lets face it…happens every year in different guises, is doing remarkably well however at the same time the idea of how much more of an event Titanfall could have been as a true mutliplatform game is equally as inciting to think about…if not more.
Maybe this should have been titled, “Peter Moore goes straight for avoiding a decent point many have thought about, with a smart deflection towards the other person’s bad presentation”?
It’s hard to be better than #1 unless you’re at #NaN on every other platform.
titanfall is shit anyway.