If Ubi made it, it'd have three times the budget, five times the amount of people working on it, twice as many bugs, half the features would be DLC, the base price would be at least 45 quid and there wouldn't be any patches or updates at all.
Oh, its monetisation would definitely be different, but that isn't really my point. Worth pointing out that Ubisoft do heavily patch their games as well.
SI come under plenty of harsh scrutiny as it is
I'm not sure that they do though. There's basically: A. morons that would complain about everything even if the game was perfect and B. people that sometimes moan but will always come back for another hit of delicious crack. Considering how successful the game is, it actually faces very little scrutiny from any reasoned argument, either from within the community or outside it.
and plenty of it is undeserved given the massive scope of the game and limited resources (both fiscally and in terms of manpower) provided to create it.
Which is my point really. It's just interesting to see how general goodwill towards SI and the lack of a real competitor change people's perceptions of what's going on. When they have fairly large issues with their product, it's explained away by the fact that they're ambitious and taking on a project of enormous scope. If a big studio does it, they're moronic for overreaching themselves on a completely unrealistic project. You only have to look at how people (myself included) hate Skyrim for spreading its budget too thinly (Width of an ocean, depth of a puddle) to see how critical others can be in that regard.
In general, people tend to accept that you're going to need to wait a couple of months before the latest FM is in a polished state, something that pretty much no either full price game gets away with. Look at the shitstorm Firaxis (rightly) got for releasing BE in what was essentially an advanced beta form for full price and basically saying "it's a playable game, we'll iron out the balance issues/bugs soon."
There's precious few game studios that could make something like FM, and fewer still that could actually have a go at it. ****, EA tried and they got their arses handed to them by a company about one thirtieth of its size and budget.
That's a bit disingenuous really, given how studios actually function and how EA works as a business. It's not as if the whole company or even a sizable portion of it was developing the game: they put it out to one of the studios under their umbrella then gave them a budget and some help from central. Their game ended up getting cancelled because the ratios weren't good enough and EA are all about the quick buck. They didn't want to invest a serious chunk of cash into a new ME for the next few years when they weren't sure on returns, so it was canned.
Don't get me wrong: I enjoy FM and I think SI generally do a very good job. I just find it interesting that they can get away with the general standard of their releases: it's an interesting reflection on the community.
