IamA EA Games User Researcher, AM(A)A!

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Haven't heard anything about it, sorry. Rivals just came out and is decent, some similarities to Underground gameplay-wise. Might worth checking out.

Any intel about the next need for speed? And buy intel I mean, is it going to be arcadeish like Hot pursuit, Most wanted 2012 and Rivals, or simulator?

Sorry, couldn't say even if I knew.

Ah, too bad. Guess I'll have to wait, thanks thoiugh!

Cheers. I've been playing Rivals as a cop and enjoying it, for arcade racing. For sim, I think Shift 2 was the most recent. I haven't played it, but heard good things.

Am I ever gonna be able to play through the single player without the game crashing and corrupting all my save files on bf4 for ps4? Cause I'd like that...

My crystal ball says, "Absolutely"

My utter lack of any actual information says, "I hope so dude"

You use Steam more than you use Origin, right? Right??

Im mostly a PC gamer, so I use and like both. I also hate both, frequently at the same time :) Both have some good holiday sales on atm, for example.

Are some of the game features built around being able to monetize them or is monetization always an after thought?

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So what you're saying is that you have all these extra features you'd love to add into the game, but you set them aside for later when people will fork over the cash?

Either way, you just said that you had a whole bunch of extra work on a game and actually took it out instead of giving it as a part of the game.

Not at all. There is always more that we (and every other developer) would like to add to our games. We have to reduce scope to stay in budget. DLC being in the plan makes that budget larger, which lets developers push for more content being included.

How about a skate 4? ;)

I've love for that to happen. SSX is pretty similar, but I'm a fan of skate for sure.

It's at the point where I'd love to play through skate 3 again but its just the same over and over, even with free skate. Need more spots to hit!

Check out skatePark for Skate 3, it's user-generated content :)

How was your day until now?

You know that "I should not have done that" meme? :p It's ok, I have no illusions about what a lot of this'll be like.

Do you feel like the company you work for deserves it's horrible reputation?

Would you walk around town wearing a shirt with an EA Logo on it?

Bonus: Would you consider burning the place to the ground? I bet you could kickstart your bail money and end up a millionaire.

Not at all. Nobody is perfect, but I'm happy to work at EA, and proud of most of what we do. I own a bunch of EA stuff that I wear regularly, and in the real world, have never had anything but positive reactions.

That's not to say folks don't have legitimate gripes, which is unfortunate, but part of my job is to reduce the frequency of those :)

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I played it and enjoyed it. I had nothing to do with the game, so nothing to be proud of or ashamed of.

Regarding public opinion, it's not something I can talk about, I'm not a PR dude, and I doubt they'd appreciate me trying to do their job :)

Lucy Bradshaw (Maxis GM) posted a good article about it: http://www.ea.com/news/simcity-update-straight-answers-from-lucy

Please understand I won't be able to answer some questions about stuff, if I think some PR person might not appreciate it - my team makes those folks cranky enough as it is, risking random people seeing in-dev games, heh.

I work there as well. This is the nicest way you could have said that.

I work security, btw.

Awesome. Hopefully the occasional free food makes up for the headaches we give you guys too :)

What is your personal opinion on micro-transactions?

When done right, they're fine. I've sunk a lot of money into Clash of Clans and FIFA Ultimate Team, for example. They're very easy to do very wrong though, and you have to design the game from the ground-up to accomodate them. Bolting them on gets you bad results.

As long as it's not pay-to-win, and the game isn't artificially frustrating to try to coerce you into paying to skip shitty stuff, they can work. I'm less a fan of MTX for $60 games - the latest crop of games from everyone on XB1/PS4 is frustrating, as it seems like everyone is trying to get onboard. They work best for totally optional game modes like FUT, or ME3 multiplayer - we get to develop that content for players because of the money the MTX provides, but if you don't play it, you're still getting great value for the $60 base game.

why does Bill Budge no publish titles with EA? Quality of titles have gone down since you folks stopped publishing his work.

Well played :)

In NHL 14 the player gets pucks to use to build their ultimate team for almost any action, on the other hand in FIFA the only way to get coins towards the ultimate team is to play the ultimate team modes which model do you prefer and which do you think is more effective to incentivise players to play ultimate team.

Madden takes the NHL approach too - you can get a ton of free cards for doing non-UT stuff, who doesn't like free stuff?.

At the end of the day, I think a good game will make players happy. Those players happen to also be customers, and happy people spend more money than angry ones ;)

I spent a lot of the last 2 years helping the FUT team make that more accessible, so hopefully it'll be better for those that choose to check it out.

What sort of things did that entail? Balancing of drop frequencies? UI for managing your team?

It's the kind of question I'd love to answer, but can't. If you play both, hopefully you'll see the results of the work we did, I'm proud of it.

Tell me at some point EA had or has the idea of a Bowling Game.

I'm sure the idea has been had, but I can't see it selling well enough to get made. And really, could we improve on Wii Bowling? ;)

I worked on a demo/internal project that was curling on the DS. It was based on the Playground engine and was actually pretty good!

I'd have loved to see that, that might be fun. I guess we could sell it in.. um.. Saskatchewan? :p

What did you study?

I didn't, actually, which is unusual. Most folks that do what I do have degrees in HCI, or in experimental psychology.

As a Linux user, why should I be interested in EA and Origin?

Not something I know much about. Any thoughts yourself?

When people test sports games like NHL or FIFA do they just test basic gameplay or do they test Career type modes? Obviously this would take more time but is important to improve on such popular areas of the game

We do a lot of different testing. Most of it is targetted gameplay, because that's faster, but we also do multi-day testing of things like career modes. QA does that kind of stuff as well.

We also do At-Home testing, where we give copies of the game to people, and have them fill out surveys and such after the game is launched.

How do you get involved with this testing do you put out job ads or what?

We advertise via Facebook and local advertising around our playtesting studios. Folks sign up online, we send them surveys for playtest applications, and folks fill 'em out. If they meet the demographics we need, we contact them to come into the studio.

It's -not- a job at all, we give you EA developed games as thanks for your time. Sometimes it's a $60 game for 15 minutes, sometimes it's 5 games for 3 days of playtesting, it varies a lot :)

What type of experience did you have before becoming a game user researcher? Really interested in what type of degree you have, if any, and if they ever hire psych researchers.

I'm a weird anomaly, in that I don't have a degree in anything. Ran my own businesses, did some cool gaming-related stuff, but no formal education. Most of my team is very intelligent, highly educated folks. We have 1 phd, 4 masters degrees, 1 game design degree, and 2 of us without degrees. Both of us non-edumacated yokels spent years in QA learning a lot, and performing very well.

There are a lot of games-industry academics, but very few people actually work in the industry - there's just not a lot of jobs. The demand is growing fast though, so if you're interested, do your research on it. Most people that make the jump to industry get degrees in HCI or psych. Psych tend to have PHDs rather than Masters, but I don't know why. Psych is really useful in understanding player motivation, and in designing good, scientific experiments to measure results. Clubbing video games with science is a pretty awesome gig.

Awesome. Thanks so much for answering. I'm working on my phd in psych now. I like to keep tabs on my private industry options. Academia gets old quickly.

Quite welcome. More big brains in the industry are always welcome.

I love your games, mostly Fifa and BF, so , thanks for that. Also, what do you think of EA releasing a broken game like BF3 and BF4? That shows total disrespect for your costumers.

PS: Your customer service sucks donkey balls, EA, work on it please.

I have nothing to do with BF at all, other than talking to a few people on their team, so can't say much about what went wrong.

If you need CS, call them, don't use the online stuff.

In your opinion do you think EA is the industry's leader for sports games? Were they? Are they? Why has there been such lack of reinvention in their series' as compared to NBA 2K from 2K. Being such a large company I think a lot of people in the world expect them to dominate game quality and 2K. But from my personal experience and others' EA got destroyed on their next gen (PS4 XboxOne) games when compared to the other releases. Why do you think this is?

I think we're the leader for western spots games, for sure. We dominate with FIFA, Madden/NCAA, Tiger, NHL, but we're obviously getting stomped in basketball. We used to do baseball.

2k puts out a very, very good basketball game every year. They share baseball with Sony, but that's a small market.

Not sure which games you're talking about where we got destroyed by other releases on gen4.

i meant that the majority of EA games i have played on next gen have been far less of an improvement compared to the ps3/360 versions of the games. the jump from 2k14 current gen to next gen was huge. It isn't that noticeable in for say Madden. you have the crowd, and thats about it. why was the use of next gen not for dramatic.

Ah, I see what you mean. I can't say much, because it'd be toeing too close to the "Dont talk about that stuff, stupid" line. I think folk will see way cooler stuff next year, and in titles from everyone, not just us, coming out later this year. Developing software for machines that still have their own software being developed is always going to be challenging. I'm pretty happy with most of the results :)

NBA 2k is a weird game - their front end is totally different between PS4 and XB1 (and it's absolutely awful on PS4). I wish I knew more about how everything came about for them.

i understand :P and i completely agree. an entire year will do such great for the gaming industry — cant wait for what is to come.

Yeah, there's a lot of awesome stuff coming down the pipe industry wide.

Why do games published by EA often seem to intentionally be designed to make it hard for users to create mods? They can add tons of replay value to a game, and make more people want to buy the game. Mirror's Edge, for instance, had the console deliberately removed, despite it being a standard feature of the Unreal Engine, and several commands were disabled to prevent them from being manually bound to keys in the config files. What's your personal opinion on the matter?

Also, why haven't EA Sports' main games (Madden, etc.) been released on PC in a long time? Is there any chance they'll come back to PC?

re: mods, I don't know enough about the situation to even have a personal opinion. From a QA/design standpoint, giving people that ability makes the game much more complex. The Skate series for example did "create a spot", which was a sandbox for skateboarding. It was awesome.

Once a game company releases mods, they also can't control quality. Check out the Skyrim forums, and all the problems that stem from users installing stuff that doesn't work, and then going to Bethesda for support about it.

Re: PC games, it's a business decision that I don't want to speculate on, sorry. I'm a PC gamer, so I'd love to see more PC sports games. FIFA is on PC (and everything else), if you're into football.

Where's MVP Baseball 2014?

Best I can do is point ya to this: http://www.polygon.com/2013/6/21/4453304/ea-sports-mvp-baseball-barriers-to-entry-andrew-wilson-interview-e3-2013

What is the most under-represented demographic that EA markets to, that may be profitable in the future?

That's an awesome question that I wish I could answer. I don't have anywhere near enough facts to have a good guess, and if I did, it'd be information I have to keep internally.

I might be several hours late here, but I'm going to give it a shot anyway - what does it take to get picked for a playtest? I'm in near the Burnaby campus (I visited with my class once a couple months ago too, it was fun), and I've applied countless times, but never gotten picked. Any tips?

Answer screeners honestly is the best you can do. Unfortunately, we get so many applications that we can't bring in everyone, but we constantly try to get new faces in.

Any hope for skate 4 on next gen?

Sorry, couldn't say anything even if I knew.

What does it feel like to hack off a third of the finished product and sell it over the course of time from that release to the next product's? No, I'm not such an asshole. Really though, what's with all the microtransactions? It's alright if you can't talk about it, but seriously, is there even that much profit to be had?

MTX used well is done in one of two ways - it supports a F2P game, or it's used to make a game mode that a company otherwise couldnt do otherwise. The more it makes, the more they can improve it, etc.

MTX in general is still new in the west. There's going to be a lot of bad implementation until the market decides what 'good' implementation is. Support the stuff you like, and the market will have it's way given time.

How would one get a job like yours?

Step 1: Be astoundingly lucky. Step 2: Work your butt off.

Most people that do what I do have post-graduate degrees in HCI or experimental psychology. I work with a lot of very big brains. I'm an oddball, since I came through QA, where I basically just outworked most people and performed at a high level long enough to get noticed, and then got extremely lucky to be in the right place at the right time.

Getting a full-time job in the gaming industry is hard work, because it's extremely competitive. Keep working on your own skills to make yourself more valuable to yourself and your team, regardless of whether you have one at the moment.

How does one apply to test a game in development?

To test as QA, it's a job, can find them the usual way. For playtesting, it's not employment at all, just a fun way to play a game, get some games for your time, and help make games better. I'd post links, but they'd get trolled to death. If there is an EA studio near you, hit their website, or google their name and "playtest".

Will EA ever release another NHL game on PC?

I hope so, i buy it every year, and would rather play on my PC than a console. Whether we will, sorry, couldn't say if i knew.

Hopefully you can answer this, something that I've always wondered. With FIFA Ultimate Team, what are the chances per pack of getting someone like Ronaldo, Messi, Ibrahimovic or say Neymar? I've been playing UT for over 2 years now and spent around €300 on UT and never got any big name player.

Definitely not something I could talk about, sorry.

Can you even say there is a certain method in how them types of players are given out, or is it complete random? KSI must be making an absolute fortune off FIFA.

I really wish UT was easier for people to start off in, not in actual divisions etc but building teams, so expensive to start off.

I can't, sorry. Some advice if you're finding it difficult to compete with what you've got, is hit offline Seasons for easy coins. Team of the Week on high difficulty is awesome too.

FIFA 14 has a new feature where you can compare items in your trade pile to the market prices, which makes it easier to identify expensive players. I had a silver striker that I sold for something like 80k coins, never ever would have expected him to be expensive without that feature.

First of all, thank you for doing this.

Can you tell me the reason why there is no more Madden & NHL on PC?

You're welcome, unfortunately I can't help with your qeustion. Even if I knew, which I don't, it's not something I could talk about. I'm a PC gamer and NHL player myself, so I'd love to see it come to PC again. My first QA project was on NHL 09, for PS2 and PC, so it'll always have a spot in my cold, dead heart :)

there are some great titles EA makes but im also often left scratching my head on some releases coming out being not ready.

How much of a divide between the EA corporates and the developers?

Do the developer sometimes lose control of their games?

I think a smarter man than I has said it better than I could: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-04-09-the-doctor-is-out-greg-zeschuk-on-bioware-ea-and-the-uncertain-console-future

I work directly with developers, and they all want to make a great game. If that game sells well, they know they'll probably get to keep making great games.

How do I get to be one of the people that comes in to test the games?

We do playtests at some of our studios, so if you're near one of them, your best bet would be to contact the studio, or do a search for the studio name and "playtest".

What is your opinion on EA's "bundling" of indie games?

Fantastic news for everyone. Humble Origin Bundle was awesome.

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It's got a lot of potential, and I like a lot of the stuff we're doing with it. Origin has the (afaik) only digital return policy on games, and we've done some awesome promotions like the Humble Bundle a while back. The possibilities for cross-game promotions are cool too. It's certainly not perfect, but it's constantly getting better.

Any insight to why the Vita has gotten snubbed in regards to sports games from EA other than a sub par Madden 13 and Fifa?

Small market share. I'm hoping it gets better with the PS4 cross-features, but dubious.

Ditto WiiU.

The fact that Fifa Football, Fifa 13 and Fifa 14 on PS Vita have been exactly the same minus rosters and Kits is actually appalling, the game engine feels like its stuck in Fifa 11

FIFA 14 on Vita won't have the same features as FIFA 14 on XB360, for example. Hopefully you'll enjoy it.

I'm still more than slightly annoyed that we seem to have ditched the WiiU. It was an interesting platform to work on that showed a ton of promise. Too bad early sales weren't strong enough to keep our attention :(

Everyone but Nintendo and Ubisoft has left, it seems. I was optimistic about the Wii when it first came out, but not WiiU. I agree, there's some neat stuff. I really liked the map/companion powers on the screen for Mass Effect, and Nintendo has some neat games on it.

What do you personally think about the way EA is operating right now? Also, what do you think about the way people think about EA as a company and do you share that opinion?

Thanks for doing this AMA!

Mostly positive, but there's always mistakes made. Overall, we're not evil. Bad calls get made. I wish stuff went better, and part of my role is to help improve game quality by using player feedback.

EA puts out a -lot- of games, and we're a huge company, so the quality is going to vary. Comparing Bioware to Tiburon to Criterion is something people naturally do, because "EA" is on all the games, but the teams are totally different. Hopefully everyone does great, and good people work hard trying to make that happen.

People always focus on the negatives, which is understandable, but I get to see a lot of the positives too. We do a crapload of charity stuff (I can get $300 for a charity if I do a small number of volunteer hours, employee donations are matched, we do outreach/donations a -lot-, etc), and the company treats full-time employees pretty well.

Thanks for taking the time to answer my question. Just to stop talking about the negatives, or the negative view some people have on EA: what is your best memory working there?

Thanks, but I expect the negatives :)

Best memory for me was doing design work on the newer NBA JAM. As a well-intentioned but woefully inexperienced QA guy helping the team, it was an amazing experience, and people mostly liked what I did, which is absolutely awesome.

when are you guys gonna let someone else make an NFL football game so we can actually get a good football game?

http://kotaku.com/5988357/remember-its-not-just-the-nfls-exclusive-license-with-madden-the-players-union-has-one-too

That has a link to a guy doing an AMA that answered your question better than I ever could :)

Also, meta.

As someone in the industry does this not seem like a very fast way to lose your job? Did anyone approve this before you did it?

I'm not a PR guy, just a regular person answering questions with publicly-available information. If I disclosed anything confidential, absolutely.

Why, in Gods name, if I play the Bruins on GM made in NHL 14 and I sim I never end up with more than 31 wins? the team is much better than that. Would you agree that the ratings are misrepresentitive? expecially when Buffalo had won the Atlantic division the last time I played...

No idea, sorry. I've got some unflattering commentary about the Bruins, being a casual Canucks fan, but I don't think it'd be relevant ;)

Ratings are impossible to get "right", because nobody can agree on them. We do a lot of work trying to make them as accurate to real life as possible though, and it's why updating during the season is awesome for both us and players - if something gets overlooked, we can fix it.

If you had to take a straw poll of the guys who work on the NHL Franchise who do you think they would be fans of for the most part?

Hrm, probably more Canucks fans than any other team, but that's because we're in Vancouver. There's a wide, wide variety of fandom though - there's a lot of jerseys being worn around the studio in general :)

Any tips for breaking into the business end of the industry? Particularly QA, Marketing, Logistics or HR.

Sorry, that's way too broad for anyone to help with, let alone a dude that has nothing to do with that kind of thing. There's a ton of writing that's been done about it online though, if you're passionate, hit the books and enjoy the ride.

how much do you get paid?

I'm a full-time employee, pay is ok. In general, the gaming industry isn't where you go for great pay, but from what I've seen, EA does better than most in that regard.

Benefits are fantastic though. Standard medical/dental etc, but also get $100/year to buy online games, got $100 rebated for buying a gen4 console, and get 5 free EA games a year (10 if on PC).

Do you realize EA killed the battlefield series? does anyone over there feel bad? they should

I can't speak for anyone at BF, just myself. Personally, I don't think we have, but I hope the team can fix the game for people.

In bf3 to use high caliber weapons that aren't effected by suppression you had to buy an expansion pack! how lame is that? and click to drop mortars? wtf? The "matches" tab in the battle-log web browser that was "under construction" for years ? Was that deliberately misleading or did developers just forget to follow up?

Never another EA title for me, I'm glad at-least there is a warning sign on a games box I can easily recognize before purchase.

Sorry, don't work with the BF folks, and definitely would be out of line to speculate that far.

do any of your immediate contemporaries recognize that battlefield 4 might not have been well received by the pc community?

nice that you should reply, though

I honestly don't know, sorry. I bought a copy, but haven't actually installed it yet.

well, i wish you success in your future projects. question; what's the best way to pitch a game idea to a developer? who do you talk to? what do they want to see?

I'm not an expert, and other folks could probably answer better, sorry. Way outta my baliwick.

please don't be bothered, i just want to have a quick pick at your brain - what sort of demographic boundaries are producers looking to include with new games?

also, what is your impression of videogames as spectator sports? do you feel like they will receive attention at an increased rate in the near future?

I haven't heard designers really use that as a starting point. If someone recognizes an untapped market, that's one thing, but I don't think many designers start with the market, then design the game for it.

I know we're constantly trying to be more inclusive, particularly for women gamers. Double your potential market right there. More and more games are getting pushed worldwide and localized, and that's an industry-wide trend.

I know "Everyone" is a stupid answer, but it's the best I can do :)

esports is growing, I'm not convinced it'll be mainstream. If it is, it'll be MOBAs paving the way. The Gen4 consoles might be the biggest ally for proponents of esports there, they've done some very cool stuff enabling that.

Why is EA so afraid of trying new stuff and introducing new ip's? Especially considering that 2013 must have been a pretty bad year for EA as some of the the established ip's (dead space 3, sim city, battlefield 4, army of two, nba live 14, need for speed rivals) either flopped, had massive problems at launch or simply were bad. To support my point, here are the user scores on metacritic for some of these games: Sim City: 2,1 NBA Live: 2,5 Battlefield 4: 6.0 Dead Space 3: 5,9 Need for Speed Rivals (PC): 2,9 Army of Two: 6.0

The odd thing is, we're not. We do new IP alongside the stuff that we know will make money, but new IP is always risky, so it's the smaller part of the pie. New stuff gets launched and killed internally before you guys ever hear about it sometimes. Othertimes, it's decided to be good enough to take a shot at.

User scores for metacritic are garbage, and are ignored. COD: Ghosts is a 2.3, and you can't tell me it's not a decent game. Obviously not as good as BF, but it's not a 2.3 ;)

For PC I honestly think CoD: Ghosts is horrible. I don't think there was anything new, the story was cliche, and the optimization for PC was absolutely horrible (which I will ask about a little bit further down). The game isn't bad, don't think it deserves 2.3, but I wouldn't even call it a decent game. These are all my opinions and not directed at you in any way, so please don't think that.

Question: What is the deal with PC optimization for games? Why is it, most of the time, done horribly?

Examples I can think of are COD Ghosts is horrible from personal experience, Need for Speed Rivals is locked at 30FPS and when you use third party to unlock it, it runs double speed. Why is this the case?

Afraid I can't be much help there, I'm not technical enough to even understand the issues, let alone speak intelligently about their cause. I leave that stuff to the engineers.

Nobody at EA (or any other game company) is going to intentionally make a game worse on one platform. If something was done, I'm sure there was a reason that they thought was a good one.

EA dosnt have playtesters? But just get random people to do it on a regular basis...
Well that explains alot.

Playtesting is not QA. We do both. QA is professional bug testing, Playtesting is regular gamers giving us feedback while games are in development.

Can you mail me some games like that other EA employee that did the secret Santa ?

Serious question:

Mass Effect 4?

Serious answer: I couldn't say. I can point you to some public stuff, but that's the best I can do.

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/mass-effect-4-leaves-shepard-behind/1100-6398559/

How do you feel when /r/circlejerk calls ea employees like you "nazis"

On an unrelated note: are you Aryan?

It's the internet. I'm a white dude with a lot of Jewish friends, so no. They've told me some awesome Jew jokes, does that count?