Heh, no surprise, the way Qroach is portraying the situation, you'd think Microsoft is casting EA as far away from Xbox as they can.
Excuse me? Are you trying to portray what i'm saying as a fan comment? I clearly listed reasons (or at least the biggest reasons) EA doesn't want to be on xbox live. Is MS casting EA away from xbox live? No. MS wants EA on xbox live as it will drive up the number of suscriptions, but they aren't going to make many changes to thier service just for them. Hey i really can't blame EA for not wanting someone else to make money off their games, but they do have the option of charging extra fees on otop of what MS charges for live. MS even said they can charge fee's for their games if they want to already, so that's not the only issue, but something I personally don't like as a gamer.
You really don't have any idea what kind of corporate company EA really is in the game biz. The only stuff you hear is what's written in the press, and there's a whole lot more than that going on. Most people don't even know how EA bullied Sega into allowing EA games to be made on the sega genesis without a license. EA even made thier own cartridges and won a court case against sega making a genesis designed to block thier games.
I can tell you that EA's employees actually WANT to support xbox live, I still know a whole lot of senior employees there and they told me there's a mandate that comes down from the top that say they won't do it unless they get thier issues resolved.
EA is constantly referred to as the Microsoft of video games. By that I mean they are pretty ruthless when it comes to business. They are extremly corporate like internally pitting teams against each other. sometimes they go too far in trying ot control situations they shouldn't and people get pissed off. For example I have a friend that was once on the NHL games. He lived in a house with a roomate that worked at Blackbox on a hockey game. EA told my friend that they didn't approve of his living arrangements because he was living with a person working on a competing hockey game. EA eventually bought black box in order to prevent them from working on the NHL Hitz series for Midway.
The truth is, they both have issues with each other, and both would have problems if EA's games were to appear on XBox.
Yes, and I already stated those issues on both sides, with the majority of them being EA wanting more control. You can disagree with it if you want, but that's what is going on.
Neither of them is a 'good' or a 'bad' guy.
Well isn't that easy for you to say? Does the fact EA wants the right to shut down support for a previous year sound like a good thing to you? Ignoring the pay for play per game thing. Forcing users to by the new version is somehting that really bothers me. You can read into what I wrote as saying EA is the bad guy in this case. Well I'll say it right now, that when it comes to xbox live EA is the bad guy becuase they don't want to support a service that someone else is making money off. That's all fine, but their reasons behind that are what bothers me, with the consumer loosing out big time.
EA would, for example, have to accept that MS have full access to their user's info, have access to all the stats of who's playing what, and how much - and who is to say MS wouldn't target-market their Madden players, for example, with Microsoft's own football game promotions, etc.
Pure speculation of course. However I could also speculate MS wouldn't do anything to specifically piss off EA in a way that that could have them pull ALL games from thier platform. EA not supporting a game system with any titles at all is the kiss of death for a console.
