"We are retooling these titles [on the PC] to take advantage of the online connectivity in a bigger and more meaningful way," Moore said today, noting that EA's usual sports offerings--Madden, NCAA Football, NBA Live, etc.--will reappear on PC in 2009.Did they not miss the collective yawn when they originally said they weren't releasing most of their sports games on the PC this year? And I'm a PC gamer. The problem isn't the platform. It's the genre. It's composed almost entirely of games that are either shit games or games that have grown incredibly stale because they've been relying on the same code base and status quo for years. There is absolutely nothing interesting happening in the vast majority of sports game franchises right now. (MLB 08 and NHL 2008 are excepted; as are text-based PC games, which are a different market.)
If I ran EA Sports or 2k Sports, this is what I'd do right now. (And who knows? Maybe they are doing this.) Put new teams together in every sport into which I want to publish on the next generation of consoles. These teams should be composed of people who are not only quality developers, but people with real exposure (ie - played on an organized level and not just a fan) to the sports they're endeavoring to emulate. Call it the Harmonix model, if you will. Stick them in a room for the next few years with absolutely no access to the existing code and just see what they come up with. From a gameplay standpoint, I'll bet you the results would be amazing. (Flawed, sure, but still amazing and rife with potential.)
