this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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I agree with that person as long as we're continuing to use the qualifier "if anything". AAA studios have thoroughly undiversified themselves and are looking for buyers from the few other companies wealthy enough to afford them, hence Activision's and Zenimax's sales to Microsoft. EA, Square Enix, and Ubisoft were all looking for buyers, and it wouldn't surprise me if Take Two was as well. EA's got sports and Battlefield and little else. Square Enix has Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest and little else. Ubisoft has Assassin's Creed and Far Cry and little else. On and on. They spent the last decade not making small bets on new IPs to replace these IPs once their time in the spotlight wanes. It's the very thing that Phil Spencer was talking about in that leaked e-mail about what he sees as a strength of Game Pass and a weakness of how AAAs chose to respond to the changing market.
You're forgetting The Sims, a veritable cash cow for EA, where every tiny add-on costs $15+.
But otherwise, I agree.
They're pivoting to free to play, so that series may have waned as well. I'm sure it's still profitable, but you don't switch to free to play, especially for what is ostensibly a single player game that doesn't rely on player counts, if everything is going well.
Free to play with microtransactions is just the way to go for games that can be monetized in that manner. The lower barrier to entry means far more downloads and the piecemeal monetization means that players will frequently end up paying more than $60 alongside the larger player base.
Compared to the business they used to with the Sims, free to play makes it much, much harder to break even. You're hoping to monetize more off of a smaller percentage of your players. 95% of people will never pay in a free to play game, and the Sims games would sell over 10 million units each, handily, plus expansions. But I know that plenty of people would pirate the expansions, so EA probably sees that as a threat that they need to lock behind an internet connection in a server-based game, and they'll likely destroy the series' profitability in the process.