EA Thinks Games are "Too Hard"

So DICE was this week, and as expected, there was a small handful of news coming out of it, but nothing you wouldn’t expect. Activision announced there would be a new Call of Duty coming out this year, Dragon Age: Inquisition won game of the year for 2014 (naturally), and Oddworld creator Lorne Lanning accused legendary Sony developer Ken Kutaragi of destroying the industry with the PlayStation 2 and 3.  You know, typical DICE stuff.

But like every year, EA was there.  And like almost every year, they found some way to embarrass themselves, and since I’d hate to miss a chance to put my foot in my own mouth, let’s get on with it.

Some games are harder than others, and oftentimes that’s the draw—if people weren’t drawn to difficult games, no one would have finished Dark Souls and there would be no nostalgia for games like Duck Tales or Contra.  But according to EA, games in general—especially their own, such as Battlefield, Madden, and Sims—are too difficult, and it’s scaring away gamers.

"Our games are actually still too hard to learn.  The average player probably spends two hours to learn how to play the most basic game… asking for two hours of somebody's time--most of our customers, between their normal family lives...to find two contiguous hours to concentrate on learning how to play a video game is a big ask."

Okay, so, fair point, two hours is a lot to ask, but… it’s not really two hours, is it?  Take a brand new gamer and put a controller they don’t recognize in their hands, yeah, that could be two hours, but you take a seasoned or at least an experienced gamer and put them in front of a new game, there are some things that come intuitively at that point, right?   Either way, this bodes badly for us; EA is still deeply flawed, and attempts to ‘simplify’ games could make them less fun at best, and ‘it’s easier to just pay us to do it for you’ at worst…and no matter how you interpret it, it definitely means EA doesn't think much of our collective intelligence.

...still, it’s just words at the moment.  Not a commitment or a plan.  Here’s hoping it stays that way.