EA To Look At Player Perspective When Delisting Games

We spoke about it earlier this month, EA’s odd decision to delist Peter Molyneux’s only good work before shutting up and letting Dungeon Keeper and Theme Hospital run wild. They also delisted two of the Ultima Underworld games. If I’m honest though, classic RPG’s don’t do much for me.

Anyway, this whole delisting business has been a bit of a strange one for a while and I don’t understand an honest reason for it. However, I keep reporting on it anyway with news from Microsoft’s Forza series, EA’s own Need for Speed games, and even the game that was the poster child for what is wrong with delisting, Scott Pilgrim. It seems publishers are quick to pull games from the digital shelves with no regard for what it is doing. Limp wristed Utopian fantasists would argue it is a loss of history (don’t worry, I am one of them), but you can’t infinitely support them for the rest of time. A well-reasoned argument on bothsides notwithstanding, Chris Bruzzo, EA’s executive VP for marketing, commercial, and positive play, spoke with GamesIndustry.biz on the issue.

In his discussion with James Batchelor for the site, Bruzzo said, “When making decisions that affect players[,] we take the time to review exactly what the potential impacts are and whether they serve the players[‘] best interests.” Bruzzo goes on to say, “we missed that step and so didn’t fully consider the players[‘] perspective.” In short, the company from here on out is going to consider “the player perspective in listing decisions.” As Bruzzo says, that was something looked over when doing it in the first place, so why change it? Until September the 3rd, you can get the first two Syndicate games and Ultima Underworld games for free on GOG, thanks to this oversight.