EA GameShow Goes Live

Games
1

This will be the last thread I start on this - honest. Apologies to the Qt3 entity if this pimping is not allowed.

Thanks to the people who have helped us with the closed beta test, we quietly went live with GameShow yesterday. Nearly everything about this game has been completely different than what I’m used to at EA. It’s a small team working on a small, casual, download-only, ad-based, online game that we’re going to give away for free. Even marketing has given up on the usual “go big or go home” mantra which often leads to overpromising and underdelivering, and let us quietly roll out and try and build an audience organically.

I realize most people here are hardcore PC gamers and non-sports fans, so the low-fi graphics and subject matter will not appeal to many. We had to go with what we knew, so it’s North America-only, English-only, sports-only to start. However, we do a “happy hour” every friday at 5pm ET that is pop culture trivia, and we’ll have more and different “pilot” shows in the coming weeks (sci fi, music, video game trivia, etc.)

If you’d like to check it out and provide feedback here or in our forums, I’d be glad to hear it as I am the entire production/design team. Just go to the EA GameShow website and create an EA Account and EA ID, (use the reg process we built ourselves, not the one at ea.com), just download the client. The client itself is around ~170MB, and some people are reporting good throughput, while others have taken over an hour to grab it, so we’re still working some of the kinks out.

Right now our hours are:

Live-Hosted Session
Monday 7pm - 1am
Tuesday 7pm - 1am
Wednesday 7pm - 1am
Thursday 7pm - 1am
Friday 5pm - 2am
Saturday 6pm - 2am
Sunday 6pm - 1am

Music-only Sessions (no host)
2 hours before and 1 hour after every normal, live-hosted session

No Programming Session (no music or host)
All other times

Thanks.

2

re: the registration page –

Is the EA ID something I might already have from ea.com, or is it something I make up for the gameshow site? Not sure what to put into that box, although I know it’s required :)

Edit: hmmm, my email address is already in use. I guess I can just log in with my ea.com account, which I seem to already have? (yay, time to play guess-the-password)

3

On the one hand, it plays like NTN trivia and I LOVE NTN trivia so that is a good thing.

On the other hand, and I’ve only played the tiniest bit, will all games follow the same format with the one question/four answers? The nice thing about playing NTN is that on the weekends during prime they have ‘special’ games that involve typing in years when events took place and guessing answers based on scrambled clues.

4

Awesome idea though as I said in the last thread, I’m not much of a sports trivia person.

I can’t wait until you guys support more than just sports and/or Microsoft realizes the potential for something like this on XBL.

5

Thanks, CCZ. Yes, new platforms and channels are in the works.

We can do smaller number of answers, but less isn’t really more fun. The game wasn’t originally built for the PC, so we didnt’ want to require any typing as typing with a gamepad is a pain. Instead, we’re going to do different session types rather than different question types. We can certainly more modes in the future, but for launch we’re going with the pick 4 variety.

Ok, get ready for some pain, LT. The EA reg/login process is a mess partly due to the fact that we’re trying to centralize all our customers under their email address. So this single umbrella concept was meant to house your Gamertag, your PSN user name, you C&C/Gamespy Login, everything. However, the concept of EA ID is not used by any game other than GameShow, that I am aware of. As a result, creating an EA ID is not exactly what I would call “easy”.

Basicall, here are the steps:

  1. Go to www.ea.com
  2. Log in by clicking on the little red Log In button
  3. Log in
  4. That little red Log In button is now replaced with your email. Click on the little down arrow to the right of your email addy
  5. Choose “My Account”
  6. Then click on the “Personas” button on the left nav bar
  7. Then select the tiny little “Create a Persona” blue button
  8. Select EA ID from the dropdown box
  9. Think of an EA ID that somehow hasn’t already been taken. This is the name you will use to actually sign in to GameShow with.
  10. Once you are back to the Account Managment screen, click on the tiny little gray “Select” button next to the EA ID you just created to make it your default EA ID.
  11. Sign in to GameShow with your EA ID and the password you used to create your account.

It’s just that simple! 11 easy, straightforward steps!

Enough sarcasm. That’s what it takes to get in. If you’re still having problems, let me know and I can see what I can do. Thanks for checking it out, though.

6

I absolutely love the idea, but know nothing about sports and was quite embarrassed with my attempt. :( Hope to see some non-sports version soon.

7

Just giving this thread a poke because we launched our December update to GameShow yesterday. We’ve added quite a bit to this update, so I’ll just summarize here:

6-player VoIP in rooms
3 new power-ups
Streak logic fixed
Streak animations in game room
Poll results screen
Variable question scoring (e.g. questions 10 - 15 count for 2,000 pts per)
Wager screen now shows total number of questions for that round
Mouse wheel support
New full star animations
Intro and exit animations for avatars
Tally animations
Full Screen button moved to Mappings page
Numbering added to leaderboards because idiot designer forgot them
In the shop, power-ups that are assigned but empty are now grayed out
Raffle summary page ordered by expiration date
Must fill out personal info before raffle purchase
360 Controller support
Avatar image added to certain screens
Dynamic game version # on sign-in screen
Added prizing rules to raffle screen
Rotate globe to show more of Canada
Minor changes, tweaks, updates (e.g. pallette icon in shop now animates)

If you haven’t tried the game, it’s free to download and free to play. You can grab it the EA SPORTS GameShow web site. Or if you have played the game, you can simply fire up the client and it will walk you through the upgrade process. Currently, our live hours are 7pm - 1am ET.

I know sports trivia isn’t the preferred subject matter for many on this board, but we also do pop culture trivia on the Friday “Happy Hour” from 5 - 7, and again on Saturday nights. We will launch different channels in the coming year, but right now we’re really trying to keep the scope down on this project and stick with what we know, and what we know right now is sports.

We’re also not promoting the game a great deal because we’re still experimenting with this a lot. EA doesn’t have a lot of experience making free games with a broadcast component, so we’re still in garage band mode at this point. I’d love to hear any thoughts or comments from this group, either here or over on wour web site forums. Thanks.