Electronic Arts, as a game publisher, is one of the oldest and most successful publishers in the industry. Its sports arm, EASports has arguably been built into the powerhouse that it is today due to the success of the Madden football franchise. EA's leadership, however, has made a conscious decision to forget their roots and have been excluding not only the PC, but quality, more and more of late.

I have been using or playing EA software for the better part of 20 years. I had several EA titles back in the early days of the Commodore 64: Adventure Construction Set, Racing Destruction Set, Erving/Bird One-on-One, and others that were amongst my favorites. Madden wasn't the first football game I owned, but it eventually replaced Fourth-and-Inches and Joe Montana Football in my software collection.

Origin software, with is hugely successful Ultima title, was responsible for the purchase of my first PC. Ultima VI was the first "killer app" that I encountered and I scrapped forever my trusty old Commodore for my first PC--back when IBM-Compatible and IBM-Clone were common descriptors. EA eventually purchased Origin, and so EA as a company was then the rights holder of almost all of my favorite early video games.

Now, IBM has sold its PC business to a Chinese company, Origin no longer exists, being bought by EA, and EA is slowly but surely moving away from the personal computer as a gaming platform. Of the six titles currently featured front-and-center on the EASports website, only two include the PC as a platform: FIFA soccer and NBA Live. Not even the NASCAR entry, which debuted exclusively on the PC, has a PC incarnation.

Over the last ten years, I have purchased probably 200 games for the PC. I have owned three PCs. I have also owned two consoles and purchased a grand total of six games for them. One, the Sega Dreamcast, sits in a closet collecting dust, along with Crazy Taxi, Hydro Thunder, and NFL2K. The other was sold a long time ago to a video game store. The problem is that console games lack a certain amount of polish and depth that PC games inherently have. This makes the PC customer base more demanding, and that is apparent in the cruddy reviews that console-to-PC ports generally get. The problem is that this makes PC games more difficult to produce, especially when one must consider the array of hardware to be found in the PC market. You will rarely see user-reviews on gaming sites giving a game a 0 on a console because the user has incompatible hardware or couldn't bother to read the minimum requirements. Consoles don't require technical support. All this translates into less cost and fewer headaches for the publisher, but also ultimately less quality for the game itself.

It dismays me, but doesn't surprise me, to see EA taking the cheap way out. While games like the Sims 2 and the Battlefield series continue to rake in cash for Electronic Arts, that doesn't seem to be enough to port all the EASports titles over to the PC, even those that began their lives there. Perhaps EA is worried about the potential bad press it would get from cranking out turds like "Arena Football" to the PC. Arena Football should have been a good game--one that could have captured a fanbase that is loyal to a sport finally gaining popularity--and laid the groundwork for a series of successful titles; or it could have been a fast cash-grab assembly-line production completely without focus. Guess which it is.

So while EASports is completely focused on the short-term bottom line in lieu of seeding long-term successes, the road is littered with the corpses of companies that have taken the same stance. EA is betting that console gamers won't be as discriminating as PC gamers. They should look at their history to see what makes a game publisher successful over the long term. EA clawed to the top of the heap by generating a raving fan base that was salivating for the next release of the next great title--and they came with their wallet open. By limiting their release platforms and producing pedestrian titles, EA is souring that fan base. Some competitor will be there to pick up the slack. They can't buy exclusive licenses forever.