What happened there? Why was that your Swan Song?

One is that EA doesn’t hire people specifically for working on franchise mode, that I have seen. They hire more general-purpose people and shift them to franchise mode as needed. So you might have a guy that’s good at organizing menus but isn’t so great at coming up with formulae for player progression.

Next, refinement doesn’t sell. Very few people (percentagewise) will notice the difference between a mediocre and an excellent franchise mode, and even fewer will change their purchase decision based on a nebulous “our franchise mode is better this year.” On the other hand, a list of feature additions is more likely to sell people on the game (hence the feature creep). Refinement doesn’t review well, either. 90% of reviewers won’t notice AI and franchise mode improvements (or flaws, for that matter), but they certainly will complain if they feel the game hasn’t added enough new features.

In addition, franchise mode is simply not a high priority for most consumers (or reviewers) and therefore gets short shrift in terms of resources.

Finally, there is not much time to perform the iteration and testing necessary to balance player progression, drafting, etc. Not only is the development cycle short, but a great of the time, the game is broken in some way that prevents those systems from working well enough to allow balancing. With ESPN MLB (I didn’t work with Kush or do anything on future 2k sports games), I had the benefit of working on the previous franchise mode iterations and knew that we would need new tools to test and balance these systems rapidly. Having these tools, which allowed me to do things like simulating 20 seasons’ worth of progression and aging in a matter of seconds, were vital in coming up with a decent balance. I am guessing that EA hasn’t created anything like that.

To sum up, there really isn’t any reason for EA to make better franchise modes because it would not improve either their reviews or their sales. As a result, they don’t hire the right people; they don’t put a lot of time/money into it; they don’t set their quality bar high; and what work they do put into it is focused on “back of the box” features that sound cool on paper but aren’t actually fun.

i haven’t played franchise in madden because, quite frankly, it’s depressing as hell to take over any Browns team over the past 10 years.

How many people play it? If it’s so few, why is it there at all? They DO put a fair amount of resources into these modes, though. Is that all $$ wasted?

So — if they are going to add that stuff, and it has been in these games now for going on 8 years, where is the pride in the work to fix the stuff that’s broken? I recall Neil talking to us on the old blog about how he worked his ass off to get player progression down in MLB 2K5 when he worked on that game for Kush (I think it was 2k5). Fixing this stuff would not require a full team of programmers.

NCAA ‘08 fixed its progression model, which Bill Harris proved this year. NCAA w/o a Dyntasy mode would go over like a lead balloon, right?

Are college games the exception to the rule?

Are football games the exception since it’s only a 16 game schedule? Is it less important in a baseball game? What about the people who love say..the Reds. What’s the reason to buy a baseball game right now other than trying to build the Reds into a winner?

I don’t have the answers here. Just posing the questions. I wish I knew how many people played franchise modes and for those that do how many play them for 2+ seasons, and if they DON”T it is because they get bored with the game..or because franchise modes in these games sorta…suck?

easy - no one plays franchise - ok maybe 3% of their sales are to franchise guys - granted a bunch of people clamor for franchse, like me, but then never play more than a season or two. if you think about it, to have franchise work and have it matter, you’re going to have to play more than 2 seasons (for the most part) so you get multiple offseasons. playing 3 plus seasons on a console game requires a lot of time unless you’re a simmer. but if you’re a simmer, you probably shouldn’t be looking towards console games to get your fix. I wouldn’t recommend 2k7 or the show for simmers - they should be all over ootp (unless of course they want real players), or pure sim, mogul etc. But I sure would recommend it to single season or 2 season players.

so why spend money on resources for something that so few people are going to use?