EA's Schappert shares five money-making tips

7. Never laugh at live dragons.

8. Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line.

Always good advice.

7: Dont be total dicks to your core fans.

9. Plagiarize!

8. Steal underwear
9. ?
10. Profit
11. Never fight a land war in Asia
12. Never go up against a Sicilian, when death is on the line!

9. Sell a $60 game with online support. Host the servers for online play. Wait six months, shut down the servers, and sell the sequel for $60.

Mirror's Edge 2 this year please.

7. Don't try and tell your customers you are giving them "free" DLCs with a game release and act like you are doing them a favor

8. Don't buy good developers (Bioware) and them force them to rush short or unpolished games to market (ME2 was way too short, graphics on Dragon Origins was not polished).

9. Don't blame Gamestop for all of your problems (losing money to used games) and then turn around and give them exclusives over Target and Wal-Mart.

10. Don't become experts are ruining game franchises

Clearly EA has decided not to employ this strategy on the Wii.

I thought it said 5 monkey-making tips. I think I'm going bananas.*jumps out window

@ christian ------------8. Don't buy good developers (Bioware) and them force them to rush short or unpolished games to market (ME2 was way too short, graphics on Dragon Origins was not polished). ---------------------

I played through Mass Effect 1, five times. I did almost every side mission, in 3 of the playthroughs. One of those playthroughs was played on Insanity, the hardest difficulty in the game. This playthough took the longest, to complete.

My first Mass Effect 2 playthrough, on Veteran, the third highest difficulty in the game, took 10 hours longer, than my longest ME 1 playthrough.

Before you even say it. No, I did not spend 10 hours scanning planets. I used a scanning shortcut for the vast majority of the game. Where I very quickly jump in and out of scanning mode, while moving my cursor around the planet. Increasing my scanning speed by at least 50%. I purchased the scanning speed, ship upgrade, as soon as I could. Well before the first disc swap, I didn't bother to scan, planets unless they had rich amounts of resources. So I didn't spend very much time scanning at all.

Meanwhile with the First Mass Effect, I often spent an excessive amount of time, exploring the unmarked corners of the map, on uncharted worlds. Looking for anything to mine. I would even go so far to say, I spent a comparable amount of time in resource acquisition, if not more time, while playing the first Mass Effect.

To highlight the significance of this. The second Mass Effect is a longer game, than the first Mass Effect. But the first Mass Effect was already gold, when EA bought Bioware.

Marketing tactics don't make me buy good games. Good games make me buy good games.

10. Slap as many famous sports genres and names on games.

10. Charge $60 for annual roster updates for football, basketball, soccer, and hockey, and new course selections for golf.

11. Type all replies quicker than your fellow joystiq members.

Dead Space was under marketed?

What the hell was that Sci vs Fi episode, the commercial, the movie, the animated comic series, etc. etc.etc. then?

Didn't Mirror's Edge have a bunch of commercials too?

I guess I have different standards. I actively turn off the TV when ME2 commercials come on now because I'm so sick of seeing them on TV and Gametrailers. Wish I could do it passively though.

Kotick really needs to take a lesson from this guy.

A final tip, don't alienate half of your customers. In other words, don't create DLC for one platform and not the others. As in the Need For Speed Shift Ferrari DLC for the 360 but not PS3 and PC.