"cactusjuice;c-16432453" wrote:
"Erpe;c-16432438" wrote:
@JoAnne65 I could believe that an uneducated leader of a small company could think that way. But EA’s top managers are headhunted among the top managers in the business world by EA’s owners (banks, insurance companies and investment companies). Such top managers don’t make such primitive and foolish mistakes!
To do so would be such a mistake for the following reasons:
1. The sales numbers for the packs are everything. Therefore the packs need to be as new and interesting as possible. They don’t become interesting just by being split up in minor packs. On the contrary this will make the packs more boring and too much alike.
2. To reduce the content of a pack just to use the omitted content for another pack is completely unnecessary and will likely just reduce sales numbers for both packs. It is unnecessary because another pack with a different theme is just as easy to make and will likely sell better too.
So why omit small pets and other content in Cats&Dogs? There is only one possible reason why a company like EA would do that and it is that EA didn’t think that the customers would care! Yes maybe they would talk a little about the missing small pets. But only because they were in previous Pets EPs. Even those customers would likely just buy Cats&Dogs anyway. So why not just save some money by omitting such unnecessary content?
Usually omitted content wouldn’t be in later packs anyway - and exactly because packs with different content usually will sell better. But this time EA needed stuff for an SP and therefore EA decided to make MFP as an experiment. It almost certainly wasn’t planned until after EA had decided not to include small pets in Cats&Dogs but concentrate on the most important and most popular pets instead.
MFP was an experiment and I don’t think that it was one that EA will repeat and exactly for the reasons I mentioned above: It doesn’t cost more to make an SP more different from the previous bigger pack and such an SP will usually sell better.
Ok a $bn industry will never try to milk it's customers or lie manipulate its target audience with packs created just for further fiscal gain. "There is only one possible reason why a company like EA would do that and it is that EA didn’t think that the customers would care!" or were too gullible to care or notice...
I didn’t say that at all!
A $bn industry will of course use all tricks in the advertising business to make their product sell better. The tobacco industry will even manipulate its customers into believing that they get a better life when they smoke - if only the governments still would let them. So yes they will manipulate us all they can in their advertisings about their products.
But this isn’t the point here. Simmers here in the forum thinks that EA only would omit things like toddlers or the small pets from the basegame or a pack if they instead intended to add those things later. I completely disagree with this because I don’t believe for a minute that EA omitted toddlers in the basegame with the intention to just add them later. Likewise I don’t believe that the small pets were omitted in Cats&Dogs with the intention to add them later. Instead I am completely sure that EA omitted those things with no intention to ever add them because they weren’t important in the advertisings and because EA wanted to save some money.
For the toddlers EA became wiser because the missing toddlers seemed to hurt the sales numbers badly even though TS4 was made with the idea to focus on multitasking and partying for adult sims with less emphasis on raising kids. So after a year or two EA changed the decision and told the devs to make toddlers anyway.
For the small pets EA changed the decision for another reason which likely was that small rodents and more stuff for cats and dogs seemed to maybe could be a good idea for one of the huge number of SPs that EA had decided to make for TS4. This was an experiment which EA likely only made because pets seemed to be so extremely popular among the simmers. But I don’t believe at all that EA ever would consider a similar idea for another GP or EP because generally SPs shouldn’t contain some less popular stuff which was omitted in a previous pack. This isn’t the way to improve sales numbers and EA knows it very well!
