EA to publish Mercenaries 2, still PS3-only
by James Ransom-Wiley 
{ Feb 1st 2007 at 6:45PM }
How long was Pandemic's Mercenaries 2 to press on without a publisher? After LucasArts tapped out following a promising first round, it looked as if the BioWare-Pandemic conglomerate might go it alone, but then, from above, a bulging mass cast its thick shadow over the bustling Los Angeles studio. Megapublisher EA had arrived. It was time.Pandemic has announced that EA will publish Mercenaries 2 through its EA Partners program. The game has been tossed into a tentative holiday 2007 release window and remains confirmed for PlayStation 3 only -- despite a growing archive of evidence that suggests otherwise.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Metalmurphy @ Feb 1st 2007 7:06PM
OMG! 360 controllers on a game studio that does many other games! Not to mention the video blogs show they love playing Halo on the 360! That so means its comming for the 360!!!!
lol...
dork @ Feb 1st 2007 7:09PM
this would be the only game/reason to get a ps3, if it stays exclusive ill think about getting one, otherwise still no reason
LongshotX @ Feb 1st 2007 7:16PM
Still PS3-only....that won't last long.
MoonfirePewPEwPEw @ Feb 1st 2007 7:17PM
Since it has been announced for the PS3 only (lol), will it get upgraded to must-have status by sony fanboys?
tack @ Feb 2nd 2007 3:36AM
Why would they spend the money to release a game for a system no one wants/has?
Digi Smalls @ Feb 1st 2007 7:23PM
murph,
what are you going to say if (and when) Mercs 2 gets announced for 360? seriously, i'm just curious.
.
Fred @ Feb 2nd 2007 12:54AM
Ea publishing the game all but assures that the game will go multi plaform. We all know how greedy EA is.
Thryon @ Feb 1st 2007 7:34PM
I cannot remember the last EA game that was exclusive to one specific console. If we know anything about EA is that they like money, and will port a game to as many consoles as possible. But if you consider how people are talking about it not being announced yet for the Xbox 360, maybe not announcing it is the best way to generate free publicity.
Borat @ Feb 2nd 2007 7:27AM
hehehe, moonfire is a dipshit.
That's all that had to be said.
Man, I hate fanboys, and fanboys that pick on other fanboys.
LongshotX @ Feb 1st 2007 7:43PM
EA is building up the PS3 Fanboy spirit and soon they will crush it when they announce that it will be coming to the 360. I bet us 360 users will even see a demo before this thing comes out on PS3. For God sakes everybody knows EA is about money, if they could port Madden 07 to a DVD player they would.
ez054098 @ Feb 1st 2007 11:10PM
That makes sense. See to a console with only 2 million shipped as opposed to 10 million shipped.
Freddy @ Feb 1st 2007 7:48PM
What's more likely, gamers spend $650 for this game, or wait till it comes to the Wii60?
crazynip @ Feb 2nd 2007 11:55PM
Lmao i can so picture ea porting madden 07 to a dvd player
dsub @ Feb 1st 2007 7:56PM
Definately won't remain PS3 only for long now that EA's on board. Also, Bioware/Pandemic had better watch out, as EA will be looking to snatch them up soon enough. This is your cue MS. Buy Bioware/Pandemic now while you can and keep those great exclusives that they make for your platforms. Otherwise, EA will snatch them up and the next thing we know Mass Effect will be multi-platform.
dsub @ Feb 1st 2007 8:02PM
"Since it has been announced for the PS3 only (lol), will it get upgraded to must-have status by sony fanboys?"
I agree, since when was Mercenaries been a system selling, sought after title? I'm not saying the first one sucked, but it's definately not on the same level as games like Halo/FF/RE/DMC/MGS/GTA in terms of system selling power. Mercenaries was a good game, but nothing to get all excited about. When it comes to 360 I'll likely pick it up. I agree though, so long as it's "PS3-only" Sony fanboys will regard it as uber-awesome rub-it-in-your-face exclusive material.
RogueJedi86 @ Feb 1st 2007 8:48PM
I think the real question is why didn't LucasArts publish the sequel? The first one was very awesome. It seems like it was foolish for LucasArts not to publish the sequel that is already effectively finished. Maybe LucasArts copped out because you can't be a Jedi in Mercenaries 2? It seems like that's all they do nowadays.
Anyways, this is probably one of the few recent good things EA has done.
Kevin @ Feb 1st 2007 9:09PM
Its funny dsub,since it seems like the xbox fanboys are the ones making a big deal about it.
Anonymous Coward @ Feb 1st 2007 10:25PM
Murphy's Law of Seventh Generation Third Party Exclusives: If something is labeled as "exclusive for 360/PS3" by a third party, it isn't.
nate @ Feb 1st 2007 9:36PM
FYI the last EA kinda-of exclusive I can think of was Oddworld Stranger...but that's because they didn't have time to port it
Gansly @ Feb 1st 2007 10:04PM
Actually guys, it's not "still PS3 only"
http://www.psu.com/node/7474
It's remaining exclusive, there's nothing ambiguous about it I'm afraid. $560 if you wanna play it, Wii60 owners.
Gansly @ Feb 1st 2007 10:08PM
Forgot to mention, the date in the link is not in American format. Which means it's 1/February/2007 and not January/2/2007, i.e. posted today.
sonicyouth @ Feb 1st 2007 10:25PM
#2 Dork, hey dork! No other reason to get a PS3? Ever heard of Blu-Ray movies in 1080p? Oh, that's right, there's no 1080p or HDMI on 360 or Wii. Jackass!
Steve @ Feb 1st 2007 11:10PM
"Ever heard of Blu-Ray movies in 1080p?"
Ever heard of a total fucking waste of money?
soundrave @ Feb 1st 2007 11:27PM
"#2 Dork, hey dork! No other reason to get a PS3? Ever heard of Blu-Ray movies in 1080p? Oh, that's right, there's no 1080p or HDMI on 360 or Wii. Jackass!"
this is a blue ray game dumbest ass... not a movie.. 1080p? yeah right bonehead... i bet this game will be 720p only as with majority of PS3 games... good luck upscaling that to 1080p coz the PS3 has NO hardware scalar... except for wii, the 360 CAN do 1080p, albeit through VGA or component. it wont have much problem upscaling this game from 720p..
dumbest ass ever dude... dont be such a stupid fanboy.. and dont u ever think i'm a fanboy, coz i'm planning to buy a PS3 in the near future... already own a 360 and i like it a lot...
Aex @ Feb 2nd 2007 1:27AM
@soundrave
Actually the PS3 does have a hardware scaler. For some god-only-knows-reason, Sony just plain "forgot" to include it into their SDK ::rolls eyes:: I think Sony was pushing publishers to make native 1080p games so they "accidently" left out mention of it. Either way, It is either in the SDK now, or will be shortly.
Also, as much as you may not like it, the ability to watch blu-ray video on the ps3 is another reason why some people buy it. You might not like it, but it doesn't make it not a reason to get a ps3. Hell if the price was $400, I would have broke my rule and purchased a launch system because of it... Too bad Sony missed the price point slightly...
JJ @ Feb 2nd 2007 1:46AM
Well EZ if all the game makers ONLY made games for the system with the highest sales... nobody would ever buy new systems... everything would still be made on Xbox/GC/PS2 forever and ever.
You need to start somewhere. Its not like 360 sold 10million at launch, took them a year, several countries and MANY MANY games to get that far.
If no one took the risk of developing for it... no one would ever buy one and thus sales would never grow.
Think about it. If no one ever made games for the Xbox/GC because of low install base compared to the PS2, we'd never have great nintendo games, or halo, brute force, Jade empire, Bioware RPGs on xbox, etc etc.
Metalmurphy @ Feb 2nd 2007 5:48AM
@ #5
"what are you going to say if (and when) Mercs 2 gets announced for 360? seriously, i'm just curious."
Hum... i couldn't care less? I just find it funny that Joystiq thinks pictures of the studio with 360 controllers means its evidence that the game is going for the 360, when they're making many other games, some not even annouced yet, and the video blogs show them playing Halo on the 360 lots of times...
WizarDru @ Feb 2nd 2007 11:00AM
Did I miss the point where releasing a game on multiple platforms became 'greedy' instead of 'good business sense'? EA is a company...a pretty crappy company at times, but trying to get a game to the most customers is hardly being Scrooge McDuck.
If the cost of adapting a game is relatively low (and with the cost of creating new games for HD content and an engine being far less trivial than they used to be), why wouldn't they do it? The days of one man making a console game are long over, except on XBLA or PS3 downloads...and even there, not really. Most of these games are the product of large teams, developing the intellectual property, writing the story, creating the art, sound and music assets...and then a whole team to code the engine and then the game logic, AI and so forth. The actual effort involved to translate a game from one console to another (especially if it uses a common engine, like Unreal or Havok) is significantly less over the overall effort than it used to be.
Vidikron @ Feb 2nd 2007 1:53PM
The first Mercenaries games was fantastic. It was like GTA but with much cooler vehicles and without all the boring missions (e.g. like going to spray graffiti in rival gang's turf). GTA is a good game, but I always grow bored of them half way through. I loved every minutes of Mercenaries.
If I hadn't already received a PS3 as a gift, this would have been a system seller for me were it to remain exclusive. But now that I have all the systems I don't really care if it winds up on the 360 also or not. If it winds up on both I'll have to evauluate before the release which version I want.
chimp o death @ Feb 2nd 2007 2:08PM
My impression of the way exclusives work are as follows:
1) The system that the game is designated for has an install base of a size that makes porting the game moot. If the cost of accessing the smaller install base by porting exceeds the profiting of accessing same install base, then no port.
2)A particular hardware manufacturer offers incentives to keep the game exclusive. A lot of posters imagine this as a huge back of money delivered to the developer/publisher simply for these exclusive rights. But this more often than not includes specific funds for development costs, advertising etc. For example: Hardware manufacturer promises to "subsidize" the costs of ads shown in movie theatres, online, or in print. This serves two purposes in that a) the publisher spends less, making the game more profitable, and b) shows of a hot exclusive for the hardware manufacturer.
Now the reason I expect an 80% chance of Mercenaries 2 showing up on the 360 is that I don't see it meeting the top two criteria.
Even by the most optimistic projections, PS3 install numbers will lag behind 360 until 2008. This means that up until that point, you'd be cutting out 50% or more of your potential customers. EA, like most publishing giants, would much rather access the largest pool of buyers. This would even include some sort of Wii version, an in-name-only version looking more like Mercenaries 1.
And as far as Sony themselves wanting to maintain exclusivity, I really don't see it as a priority. It's now the accepted wisdom that Sony slept on tying up exclusivity for some big franchises (GTA, Assasin's Creed), and so far there hasn't been a real sea change in Sony's thought process.
And if they are more actively protecting exclusives, those dollars will be going to MSG4 and Square-Ennix. With the next Dragon quest going to the DS, previous assumptions can no longer be assumed. Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear, White Knight Story are the titles thatwould demand the dollars that Sony has to offer.
Mercenairies on the other hand is a sequel to a 3-year old game that did well, but not spectacularly well. It's also more of a western skewing title.
So yeah, I expect to see Mercenaries 2 on 360. Though I have to say that my new definition of exclusives includes games that don't come out for a system for 6-9 months after gamers are already playing it on another systemd. If 360 gets MSG4 long enough after the PS3 release for the game not to feel fresh anymore, and requiring a seperate advertising campaign from Konami, then for all intents and purposes the game is still "exclusive".
Gaming is all about the "now" factor as well as the "wow" factor. It's not to say that the games aren't still good. Oblivion will still be the same great game when it hits PS3, and A lot of people still haven't had the chance to play it. But it definately doesn't have the heat or spark of something that's "now", and that can have an impact on sales and perception.