Madden's Biggest Issue: Vision and Focus

[johnprestonevans]

I dont want to start a thread to bash Madden. I like it, but lets face it, the game is not up to par where it should be. I think the biggest issue with the game is the focus and vision of the development team at EA. I know they have the talent to put out great games. So why is Madden falling behind other sports games? It's a fact of life that developers are pushing out sequels year after year and trying to upsell or improve on their current products. Enter the Madden franchise. A once all powerful sports game that seems to have lost its way after being phased by the 2K5 train. Since 2006 there has been no competition. While im sure is a big part of the problem, thats not what i want to discuss specifically. I would like to open up a forum to talk about the vision and focus of the development team and how their top-down leadership – or lack thereof – has negatively affected the quality of the game, and subsequently hurt their bottom line. Madden sales are down. Year after year their numbers are flailing. Sure they still do big business, because they are “Madden”, but they are not dominating the sports game world like they used to.

Why? I think its a simple problem that may not have a simple answer. Focus. When looking back at Madden’s mantra’s or taglines over the past few years you can see how all over the place this team has been.

09 - “The First Sports Game that Adapts To You”. - this is when they tried to implement “Jedi Madden” to teach you how to play and automatically adjust the difficulty setting accordingly. Didn’t work.
10 - “Everything You See On Sunday.” - going back to basics and getting the gameplay right and getting rid of all the extra crap they’ve been throwing in. Make it about FOOTBALL.
11 - “Simpler. Quicker. Deeper.” - making it accessible to casual players and don’t understand football and don’t have time to play full games.

I don’t blame the guys programming the game necessarily, but I feel like the executives at the very top do not understand what constitutes a great sports game anymore. They are trying to be the everything-to-everyone game. What does this year’s tagline even mean? Simpler, Quicker and Deeper???? Isnt that an oxymoron? It just sounds like its trying to be casual. What happened to the Everything You See on Sunday mantra? That is what we want.
Obviously EA wants people to stop thinking about and comparing Madden to 2K5, but here we are 6 years later and they still haven't taken the proper steps in the presentation and gameplay to do so. My argument is that if they could STICK to a vision over a number of years (like a 3 year plan) instead of jumping ship and going in a different direction every year, they would be putting out a much better product these days.

Look at what NHL is doing. They have a 3 year plan to fully implement a new physics engine. This year is about checking...next year is something else...and the year after it all comes together. Excellent. I think we can understand that it takes time to get things right. I accept that and i'm excited to see NHL continue to improved and polish its game. But Madden is more like this marketing juggernaut that does whatever it takes – makes false promises and goes casual...then hardcore...then casual...back and forth to try and get their sales up. I'm sure that at some point the executives came to the team with the demographics and numbers and mandated that Madden has to be made more accessible to people that don’t understand football so we can sell it to them.

I feel this is hurts Madden’s quality because people who don’t like football are not going to buy Madden anyway! Fix your game and polish it up for the people that actually love playing it. Their complete lack of presentation upgrades and discontinued push to "Everything We See on Sunday" this season is bewildering to me.

Does marketing and sales get in the way of good development? Your thoughts on Madden and this issue as a whole?

[roadman]

A lot of what you covered has been stated before.

You touch on a lot of good points.

I think the Madden executives(not developers) want to expand and reach out to every football fan or non-football fan in the world. They know their sales have been declining and that is not good news for their stockholders.

It's difficult to strike a happy medium when you want to develop a game one way and the executives of the company want to cast the net across the world.

[wormturd]

The problem is that madden 11 is basically the second version of the madden next gen... It wasn't untill madden 10 that they implemented all the stuff from the PS2 days and gave us what madden next gen should be....

I think 11 will finally give us that old school feel and 12 will be complete with the online franchise that everyone has been wanting.

We really got screwed with those initial next gen games.

[johnprestonevans]

It's fundamental marketing issue I think. If you wanna satisfy your hardcore market you need to find out what they want and do it. You cant lump every segment together and try to do everything. They have different difficulty settings and AI sliders to make things easier if that’s what you want. I just feel that last year’s mantra to give us a REAL NFL broadcast experience was a beautiful idea. Sure they didn’t fullfill that promise last year, but they laid some good groundwork that could have been built upon this year and next. Instead they went in a completely different direction.

Its like going to make yourself a piece of toast. You put the bread in the toaster but then while you're waiting you decide to draw yourself a bath. While the water is running you figure you can quickly get the lawn cut. In the end you have a half cut lawn, a flooded bathroom and your smoke detector is going off. Fix one thing - not matter how long it takes, then move on to the next. "Everything We See on Sunday" should be THE vision for Madden this year...and next...and the year after that.

[jvaccaro]

I feel like this thread would have been more appropriately relevant maybe 3-5 years ago. I truly believe that the current dev team at EA tiburon is making the biggest strides in madden's history.

It is well documented that they rewrote the next gen Madden from scratch. Ever since they've been trying to work back in decades of features from past gen in a single year development cycle. Considering the time constraints, and that this dev team headed by Ian is only on it's second release, I'd say they've done a great job.

It can be debated, but most (non-haters) would agree that Madden 10 is the best video football game to date. Maybe not 5 years better than 2K5, but again, that's because of the next gen rewrite pushing them backwards out of the gate. It's looking more and more like Madden 11 will be another improvement.


All in all, this dev team is what has saved Madden from the Ortiz era of Arcade-y gimmicks and gone down the sim road instead.

[GiantBlue76]

Quote: Originally Posted by jvaccaro

I feel like this thread would have been more appropriately relevant maybe 3-5 years ago. I truly believe that the current dev team at EA tiburon is making the biggest strides in madden's history. It is well documented that they rewrote the next gen Madden from scratch. Ever since they've been trying to work back in decades of features from past gen in a single year development cycle. Considering the time constraints, and that this dev team headed by Ian is only on it's second release, I'd say they've done a great job. It can be debated, but most (non-haters) would agree that Madden 10 is the best video football game to date. Maybe not 5 years better than 2K5, but again, that's because of the next gen rewrite pushing them backwards out of the gate. It's looking more and more like Madden 11 will be another improvement. All in all, this dev team is what has saved Madden from the Ortiz era of Arcade-y gimmicks and gone down the sim road instead.

I have to respectfully disagree here with, well, just about everything you wrote I think everyone can agree that Madden on next gen has been a colossal failure. That's been well documented by the community and even by many of the developers themselves. Although I personally did not like Madden 10, there were improvements for sure. The problem is that there is no competition (which is obvious) and that the executives at EA want to grow the madden base. They are not concerned with 35-40 year old football heads like many of us. They are focusing on the next generation of gamers, mainly younger kids. They feel that if they can make the game easier to just pick up and play, the casual football fan who plays games sometimes, will walk into the store and pick it up. The executives are not interested in the older, hardcore football guys as much because they know many of those folks are already hooked and will make a purchase no matter what they put in the box.

The other item is the fact that they don't want to make the game "too good" in one year, so as to hurt the sales the following year. That's why the hype train is down this year. Not hyping as much gets people to purchase for the gameplay improvements, but it REALLY hypes them for next year, with the promises of improved franchise.

Unfortunately this is all marketing and business 101. From a purely business perspective, it's a brilliant marketing scheme and it rakes in millions each year. You have to hand them that. Executives at EA care about one thing and one thing only... sales and the stock price. That's it. That's what every big public company cares about. The bad part in all of this is the consumer gets the shaft.

None of this is news so the best we can do is be active in the community, try to push for what we want in a great football game, and see what comes out on the other end. I've always been very critical of Madden and how EA Tiburon does things, but I always have an open mind. At the end of the day all I want is what everyone else wants, a great playing, realistic football game.

[DaveDQ]

I agree that there is a deep issue with Vision and Focus. I think we can have a good discussion about it too without the thread turning into a bash session. Let's hope that doesn't happen.

They key component in what goes into a high selling game like Madden is who is responsible in saying yes or no. Considering the game's capacity to sell well, I'm thinking executives have a big say in the direction of the game. They want to protect the game's earnings. The possible flaw in that is that they never take risks and and up settling for what is. I happen to think this is where Madden sits right now. The biggest reason as to why this game sells well is because of it housing the NFL. There is no one feature that the game has that the buyer touts as genuinely innovative or game enhancing.

Take one game like EA's NHL series and you will see the anticipation in the buyer as to what the next level is for that game. You don't get that upward sense with Madden. It's more of a lateral feel, where they are traveling along, picking and choosing things to enhance the game, yet never improving on what they picked up. There just isn't a sense that they are creating standards to be reached.

That's where vision and focus comes in. If you don't have those two things all you do have is a game that relies heavily on the fact that they have the NFL. But in reality is vision and focus is lacking and that's exactly why a game like Madden 11 appears to be more along the lines of Madden 10.5.

[jvaccaro]

Quote: Originally Posted by tazdevil20

The problem is that there is no competition

I don't view this as "the problem" at all. I'm sure the dev team takes pride in their job and gives their best effort, or else their job would be at risk. Competition wouldn't hurt, but I believe this card is waaay overplayed.

Quote: Originally Posted by tazdevil20

the executives at EA want to grow the madden base. They are not concerned with 35-40 year old football heads like many of us. They are focusing on the next generation of gamers, mainly younger kids.

I strongly disagree. Madden 10 took the largest steps in terms of becoming a "sim" game. Unless you're referring to the wii version (and I don't think so) I don't see this. For every gimmicky-type option they may introduce (gameflow/no sprint/fight for fumble) you can turn it off or back to the way it was originally. It also looks like Madden 11 is going to be even more sim now with locomotion and improved blocking logic.

Quote: Originally Posted by tazdevil20

The other item is the fact that they don't want to make the game "too good" in one year, so as to hurt the sales the following year.

I'm sorry, but this sounds a little bit like a conspiracy theory to me. I'm not buying it, and I have my BS in Business Admin w/ a major in Marketing.



My personal opinion is that people are still trying to look at it like we should have a game that is vastly improved every single year. But we all know that the dev team took a huge step backwards rewriting for next gen... If you based your expectations off of improvements over last year only (not where one person thinks the serious should be by now) then you'd be less disappointed.

I also feel that people underestimate the challenge of coding AI for 22 players on the field at the same time. It's a challenge uniqe to football games.


just my $0.02