EA To Slash Game Release Schedule In Half by 2012

Electronic Arts will continue to drastically reduce the number of packaged videogames it ships, CEO John Riccitiello told Reuters Friday.

In the last fiscal year, EA shipped over 50 games. This year, it will ship about 35. Next year, says Riccitiello, "I don't think it goes... less than 20, but there's some number probably between the low 20s and the high 20s that's right."

These remarks follow closely on the heels of Riccitiello saying that EA acquiring Rock Band maker Harmonix would be like trying to "catch a falling knife" or "doubling down on yesterday," depending on what sort of metaphor you prefer. The message is clear: Fewer high-risk disc-based games, more downloads.

But is this seemingly lower-risk strategy actually fraught with more danger? I'll turn it over to Bill Harris, circa March 2010:

With fewer games from everyone, it becomes a marketing arms race. Much more is riding on each game, and even one failure is a disaster. Remember, too, that these games have to sell over a million units to even have a chance to break even.

In the "old" days, maybe a "AAA" flop would be recouped by a lower budget game that exceeded expectations, a game that could grow into a top tier franchise. With the big publishers, though, that second tier is essentially gone now. There's no fallback, no surprise hit.

For us, it means that these companies are going to flog existing franchises until their coats are foaming and they break down. Then they'll be shot. But there will be nothing to replace them, because there were no lower-tier franchises being groomed to eventually take their place.

Call it Death Race 2010.

But here's the kicker:

In the end, here's what I expect to happen. There's no way that these four companies all survive with this strategy. At most, three do. More likely, at least two will fail. They'll be absorbed into the Collective of the companies that do survive.

Underneath the top tier, though, lots of money will be made, because there's lots of money out there. It's just not smart to pursue that money with gigantic budgets and epic amounts of advertising, though, because the strategy is too high-risk.

It's a gigantic opportunity, though, for someone who's smart enough to continue making the games that the big companies don't want to make anymore. Good games in the second and third tier are going to print money.

Hmm, isn't that pretty much what Minecraft creator Markus Persson was just saying?

The games industry started moving away from PC and into console a lot. While there are a few hardcore PC studios around, most of it seems to be focused on the console versions. They only really port the PC versions. The indie market really could blossom because people started realising that we’re actually doing interesting ideas in the indie games. Something like in the early 90s, games that were made by id Software or Epic -– small developer teams who actually took chances because they didn’t have huge projects. So the indie scene could blossom; there are a lot of indie games on console too and they’re selling really well as well. But I think it's one result of the sort of abandonment of PC gaming.

Replace "abandonment of PC gaming" with "abandonment of everything" and you see how it creates a situation for mid-tier games from indie makers to flourish, as there's less and less choice in the upper tier.

Half as much, anyway.

Original image: Elisabeth Caren/AIAS; terrible Photoshop: Wired.com