Game Discussions Is diversifcation / publishing the first step in becoming evil?

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

The quality of the fleet carriers announcement got me thinking (well actually it was toddlersitting but anyway).

Now that frontier has multiple and stable or successful ips, and is growing into 3rd party publishing as well.. would this create the condition that frontier no longer sensitive at all to the success or failure of any one title (which is a very strong and sane business target sure). A downstream effect of this is frontier simply dont need to care about the quality / wholesomeness of what they do.. compared to if their survival depended on it.

The fact that certain features make no sense, or at least its still 1/2 built for group only and 1/2 for single player release.. they could have got it right but they just dont care. Probably because they dont have to anymore.

In other areas makes sense while marketing and sales sensitive bandaid solutions have for years been allowed to undo / obsolete / invalidate the fundamentals of the game.

Sorry the point was remember when Electronic Arts was a developer. When you saw the logo flash up on your megadrive there was even high reputation that went along with it...

 

[Shadowdancer]

Publishing is only evil when you get blamed for your studios not having their act together (Since you were bringing up EA.)

If I was a publisher responsible for Elite, I'd sure be asking questions about continuing it without the elements that are usually considered "evil". That sucker would have trading cards and lootboxes coming out the wazoo, it's so much easier to make money off those than shoveling developer time into something for free, no matter how much sense the results make.

 

[Morbad]

While I don't "evil" is the right adjective, I think monetization itself is the first step down this path and I am a hair's width away from only looking at FOSS games. More and more I feel the whole business side of games is at odds with the game side of games.