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Interactive Entertainment and Detached Eddies

May 25, 2012 By Mark Leave a Comment

Stand beside a mountain stream and observe the water for a while and you’ll see that most of it moves in a continuous flow. Look a little closer, however, and you’ll see that the bed of the stream and objects in and along the stream — logs, boulders, the legs of a bear — all have an effect on the flow due to friction. Look closer still — say, at a rock near the edge of the stream — and you’ll find that the flow may slow to a halt if not actually move in the opposite direction, creating what is commonly called a whirlpool, but more accurately described as an eddy. Peer at the boundary between the flowing current and the eddy and you’ll see smaller eddies form and detach again and again, dissipating as they flow downstream because they are no longer powered by the object in the stream that created them.

Known as detached eddies in the science of fluid dynamics, these disconnected but still churning whorls can also be spawned in the atmosphere, as bodies of air move over the landscape or interact with each other. Heat water to the right temperature and move a low pressure area over that water and you may spawn a monstrous hurricane that lasts for days and travels thousands of miles. Move that same hurricane over dry land, however, detaching it from its power source, and it will slowly dissipate, even as it may still wipe entire communities off the face of the earth.

The key component of an eddy, and what distinguishes an eddy from a vortex, is that in the middle of an eddy there is a void — a place of calm that experiences none of the rotational effects of the moving fluid that defines the eddy itself. Drop a leaf in the center of an eddy caused by even the most ferocious mountain stream and it will float exactly where you dropped it. In a vortex there is no void, but vortices can also detach like eddies. This is known, sensibly enough, as vortex shedding — a phenomenon that has led to practical applications in the real world such as winglets on airplanes.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Interactive, Publishing Tagged With: computer games, EA, Electronic Arts, IE, interactive entertainment

EA Pounds the Nail

November 12, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

Yesterday I noted that Electronic Arts joined the ranks of publishers across all industries trying to embrace the internet and decrease exposure to retail. Today EA addressed the timing of its announced layoffs and acquisition of PlayFish by emphasizing the point:

“It’s no coincidence that we simultaneously announced a cost reduction in connection with the acquisition of PlayFish, because that represents, in our mind, a very important shift to digital direct,” said EA SVP and CFO Eric Brown, speaking at the BMO Capital Markets 2009 Annual Digital Entertainment Conference in New York Thursday.

The parallels here between interactive and publishing (and other industries), even including emphasis on free-to-play and freemium models, are unmistakable:

Like other publishers, EA is becoming increasingly focused on downloadable games and extra content. Brown said that the download-only PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 title Battlefield 1943 has sold 1.2 million units to date across both platforms. Half of those sales were in the game’s first week.

DLC trends at EA will continue to snowball. Dragon Age, a packaged and digital game developed by EA subsidiary BioWare, is selling “very well” and will receive regular DLC through the next “12 months-plus,” Brown said. Giving consumers the option to spend more than the $50 or $60 can be advantageous for game makers. “You can find extra demand customer by customer,” he said. And that goes for microtransactions too in free-to-play games.

And of course distribution plays a key part in this move (despite the soft-selling in the quote, which was probably added to keep partners and suppliers from freaking out):

“What you build sells through. There’s no physical good that has to be handled, printed, transported, et cetera, so you pick up this real efficiency gain in terms of the sales return allowance. So overall it’s slightly more beneficial to us as the publisher.”

You could map this to any content-driven industry:

For EA going forward, the four key principles of its business are to drive hits, expand digital services, “aggressively manage costs,” and continue focusing on the Nintendo Wii. But digital services — DLC, subscriptions, free-to-play, PC browser gaming, advertising — is clearly where EA sees its future.

“I think it’s important that everyone understands that the definition of the interactive sector needs to include online. It can’t be associated with the more limited definition of packaged goods through retail. Online is indeed a high-gross segment,” he said.

The internet is killing the retail content-distribution channel. Everything else is a variation on that truth. Whatever industry you are in, whatever content you create or sell, you are going to be affected by this truth.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: distribution, EA, Electronic Arts

The Last Nail

November 11, 2009 By Mark 3 Comments

You know all there is to know about the disintegration of music publishing, in part because you’ve lived it, and in part because you’ve done your homework. You know the newspaper-publishing business is getting killed because you can hear Rupert Murdoch squealing. You know the movie business is hurting. And of course you know the book-publishing industry is coming apart at the spine.

But even as all this is happening in concert, and even as the internet looms large in every instance, there are still people explaining how what’s happening in one industry has nothing to do with what’s happening in another industry. Or how it’s the recession that’s causing these problems. (It’s not.)

To this litany of carnage now add the computer gaming industry. On Monday Electronic Arts (EA), one of the the largest developers and publishers of interactive titles, announced that it was cutting 1,500 jobs. If that was the end of the story we could chalk up the layoffs to the recession, but that’s not the end of the story.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: content, digital, distribution, EA, Electronic Arts, greg costikyan, internet