Should games be released annually? Plus, new FIFA 14 content coming soon

Battlefield 4

Should games be released annually? EA says Battlefield won’t be


EA’s CFO Blake Jorgensen recently announced that the company would not be releasing Battlefield on a yearly basis because doing so may lead to a resulting drop in quality. This got me thinking. Obviously, FIFA is released every year to tie in with each new football season. But does this relentless pressure and constraint on resources mean that we end up with an inferior product every year? Or at least, a product that does not quite meet our expectations?

We all have things that we would love to see in the game. A greatly expanded youth system, complete with youth leagues and pre-filled academy teams, is something I would love to see implemented because it would make an already exciting feature so much more immersive. Popular suggestions have been things like greater interactions with the players and a return of the ability to upgrade your club and its facilities. Ultimately, however, many of the things fans ask for don’t get put into the next edition of the game because the yearly release schedule means the developers just don’t have time to do it all. As we frequently find out, it seems they often don’t have time to even iron out all the bugs before the game hits the shelves.

Looking beyond that, do you think that other games that are not tied to a sporting calendar – games like Battlefield, for example – are negatively affected by being released on an annual basis? Should the industry reconsider this practice more widely?

Would allowing a great gap between releases ultimately be better for gamers, giving the developers the time to create the game everyone wants to see? Or would it leave a void to be exploited by the publisher’s rivals? Would the publishers even consider missing out on the huge sums games can make every year on launch day?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this issue, so I’ve written up an article and put in a poll over on my other site, The Next Level Gaming. I’d really appreciate it if you could leave a comment over there and take the poll letting me know what you think. The article is here.

Thanks!


New FIFA Scouting Tips content coming soon

I’m also hoping to get some more FIFA content up here on FIFA Scouting Tips by the end of the week. It is likely to be an article on good teams for career mode, so if you’ve got this far into FIFA 14 and are looking for a new challenge then keep checking back over the course of the week or follow me on Facebook and Twitter. I can’t give an exact date of when it will be published, but it should be up by Sunday.

The Lower League Gems articles are in the works, but the timeframe for them is unfortunately a bit longer because they take quite a lot of time to compile. I try to publish two articles a day once I’ve started, and as each can take about an hour I am finding it very hard to set aside the time to not only research everything but write it all up as well. However, I don’t want to leave you in the lurch (and I really do appreciate your patience), so that’s why I’m trying to get the good teams for career mode article up as soon as possible!

Thanks again for the patience.

Alex