Right, but does that give the company an excuse to bring garbage year after year with MINOR improvements? Money is money. We expect BETTER results year after year, not when they feel up to changing it. Smaller budget? then focus on the content of the game and not so much on the graphics.
Graphics are a bit of a global effort that's funded mostly by fifa, and madden.
From what I understand, their central graphics team will make changes for things like more believable lighting, better shaders, crowd, physics, etc... and then deploy it across all EA sports games.
I could be wrong, but NHL might be one of the cheapest sports games they make in terms of production costs.
400k copies means it only brings in $24million.
Totally ballpark out of my butt numbers but:
$10million goes to NHL/NHLPA & arena liscencing.
25% goes to marketing.
10% goes to print and distribution.
25% goes to Microsoft and Sony
Leaves roughly $5.6 million
Expensive as hell offices in Vancouver+higher than average staff costs. Not to mention very expensive equipment and facility costs.
(EA has a mocap facility/skating rink also used for sound).
If the execs and shareholders want this game to be profitable at all they're spending pretty much $2million a year. Mobile games and kickstarted indie games have budgets around $2million a year. It's also not a particularly prestigious title so you're not attracting high end talent to work on it.
What they're left with is maybe a team of people using absolutely as much as they possibly can from the previous year, and cobbling together incredibly quickly whatever graphical updates, and roster changes they can cram in there. It's also an annual game so whatever miniscule team they have probably has under 8 months to ship it.
Knowing EA probably 1/3rd of the team are probably managers rather than actual developers. So that 1 scout probably has 4-5 different bosses shouting at him what the stats are supposed to be.
This is totally conjecture on my part. But I'm gonna guess given they spend most of their time fixing bugs and fighting fires than actually getting to make the game play better.
