EA's 'Star Wars' PR Disaster Finally Pushed Gamers Into Open Revolt Against Loot Boxes (rollingstone.com) 307
Gaming company Electronic Arts is not having a good week. Bowing to pressure from early players of Star Wars Battlefront II and the historically negative reaction over the weekend to the company's response to complaints on Reddit, the company has now detailed significant cuts in the cost to unlock characters in its game and promised to continue to listen to player feedback. From a report: Most importantly, Electronic Arts today announced that they are reducing the number of credits needed to unlock top characters in the game by 75 percent. Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader will now cost 15,000 credits. Emperor Palatine, Chewbacca and Leia Organa will now cost 10,000 and Iden will cost 5,000. Mashable reports on the outcry that took place over the weekend: Battlefront II isn't technically out until Nov. 17, but fans that subscribe to EA Access or Origin Access -- which give Xbox One and PC players, respectively, a five-day, 10-hour window to play EA games before they launch -- are discovering how those changes feel. And it's a bad scene, friends. "At the current price of 60,000 credits it will take you 40 hours of gameplay time to earn the right to unlock one hero or villain [in Star Wars: Battlefront II]," Reddit user TheHotterPotato wrote in a post. "That means 40 hours of saving each and every credit, no buying any crates at all, so no bonus credits from getting duplicates in crates." The Reddit post produced such a mind-blowingly negative response that an agent of EA actually responded. Unfortunately, that response made things even worse. EA's Reddit account is plastered with a barrage of downvotes, with one particular response receiving over 600,000 downvotes -- a record.
Well (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the inevitable result of microtransactions.
Long gone are there days of just making a game and shipping it.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah, but that can actually be a good thing. I am playing a few early access games that change every other month, get better and better, get more and more features, some of them being a totally new game every half year or so, all for the price of a pizza.
Granted, sometimes I get a stale pizza, but in the end, I come out ahead. And way ahead of any AAA titles I ever bought.
Re:Well (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd take the witcher 3 over just about any game I've ever played (and there's been a lot, going back to the early 90's) -- and definitely would take it over a pizza, stale or not.
Good games that are fun and have artistic merit are out there; just sadly not as common as they once were
Re:Well (Score:4, Interesting)
I worked at gamestop about 10 years ago. Kids would bring in their entire collection, would get $10 for 20 games. Well worn copies of good games they obviously loved and had value "I can only give you $2 for this game you've obviously put at least a hundred hours into." They just stood there, either staring at me waiting for me to give them the shiny new game in exchange for their memories or staring directly at the game waiting to play it.
Kids have more money than taste. I was that way when I was buying "Hootie and the blowfish" or "Ace of Base" CDs with my money from mowing the lawn, my parents were like that when they were trading baseball cards. It's just a fact of life that kids make dumb decisions with their purchases.
That it's messing up entertainment for the rest of us isn't even new. Music has been catering to the young and dumb crowd again for generations. See my above musical tastes.
What is new is that gamers are starting to age to a point where we're whining about the good old days, AND have a forum to whine about it collectively.
Re:Well (Score:5, Insightful)
No... games without micro transactions are the only ones I play - and there are plenty of 'em coming out.
If you support micros, that's the road you've chosen. There are plenty of others.
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They have them in the mmo I play. But they don't affect gameplay much, and subsidize the game for those who can play from start to end for free. It's a choice for players to decide to play free versus buying microtransactions versus subscribing.
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So just don't buy the game, don't pay for the microtransactions. if a game *requires* microtransaction to "win" then boycott it. Granted, some players have bizarre definitions of "win" though. But if you need to buy a crate or unlock a character just to enjoy the game then it's past time to go outside and take a deep breath. That's far simpler than going on a rant and sending death threats - if you have that much energy then please spend it doing something useful. Of all the injustices in the world that ne
-665k points now (Score:3)
They've hidden the refund button (Score:5, Interesting)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
I don't play free-to-play games, or games with those mechanics in them - but according to the very latest from Jim Sterling, they've hidden the refund button on EA's page for this game after the mentioned user outrage.
Its an industry wide behavior (Score:3)
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It's gotten to the point where I no longer buy AAA games when they are 5+ years old and on GOG or steam, because they are inevitably broken in some way. There is no thought towards "how can we make sure people are still playing this in 5-10 years" - it's all short-term profit now. The servers go away, the DLC or in-game currency is designed to essentially be required, and we're never going to port this to another platform, because why bother?
The last couple I bought were also utterly crippled and broken by
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Re:Its an industry wide behavior (Score:5, Interesting)
I can think of a good example of DLC done right: Rocksmith 2014. If you haven't heard of Rocksmith it's basically Rock Band or Guitar Hero with a real guitar and you're actually playing the song. Every week they release a song pack, 3-5 songs. They're up to about 1100 songs total. I've shelled out several grand over the years on this and am happy to do so, it's worth every penny to me. I get to cherry pick the songs I like and they all fit in a single game. I can start a random list and play till my fingers bleed (feels so good)
They're lucky (Score:4, Interesting)
I actually consider EA lucky to be getting away with just consumer backlash on public forums and emails. I'm just waiting for the inevitable lawsuits of "whale" users to expose microtransactions like these for what they are - unregulated gambling. I have no respect for a company who builds a business model around exploiting addictions.
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For instance I don't consider Overwatch's version of loot boxes to be anywhere near gambling. Nothing you can get affects gameplay or winnability (unless you wanna count being stunned momentarily in game by a "whoa - awesome skin" moment *BLAM*) just bragging rights stuff. Sure there's randomness to the collectibles but nothing more than you'd get out of a toy vending machine at the grocery store - and those aren't unregulated gambling.
That said, yeah, th
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Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm just waiting for them to try pulling the "death threats and sexual harassment" bullshit to try and deflect from their shit-tier garbage. I doubt though, that lawsuit will happen in the meantime. On top of that, getting people to realize and agree that it *is* gambling seems to be an upward climb. The number of people who will argue that it isn't gambling is staggering.
Re:They're lucky (Score:4, Informative)
And speak of the devil. [archive.org] EA is now trying to shift the narritive to "omg, woe is me, we've gotten death threats." bullshit to try and derail this. Of course no proof is offered at all.
Re:They're lucky (Score:5, Insightful)
And speak of the devil. [archive.org] EA is now trying to shift the narritive to "omg, woe is me, we've gotten death threats." bullshit to try and derail this. Of course no proof is offered at all.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Game creators / studios receiving death threats? -- that's not extraordinary. That's become so sadly common, almost par for the course, that at this point it would be extraordinary if they hadn't received death threats.
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This is no more gambling than putting money into coin operating vending machine not knowing whether a gumball or a candy ring is going to come out is gambling.
It only matters if.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Also I believe things will get worse for gaming and not better in the short term. Just wait till major AAA games are only subscription based only which EA has indicated on their sports franchises.
Re:It only matters if.... (Score:4, Insightful)
My general observation with this stuff has been that someone stumbles across a new model that seems to work, all the companies jump on it like a fat kid on a Smartie, then some company pushes the idea to some egregious point where it blows up and permanently taints the model.
Loot boxes are particularly egregious imo since they aren't posting odds and definitely are targeting people who are vulnerable to gambling.
Re:It only matters if.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think where they're f**king up is in making the game pay-to-win. People will buy this as per usual, they'll feel the deep unfairness of it and not buy the next pay-to-win game I expect. For EA it doesn't matter if 90% of the user base abandons them as long as the remaining 'whales' make them over 10x more.
Hopefully Indie companies will spot gaps in the market and keep making good games that don't stink of micro-transactions.
I put my money where my mouth is, I don't even buy games with season passes.
The EA greed machine (Score:5, Insightful)
EA first started milking customers with DLCs which were really portions of the game they purposefully removed, not added. Is it not enough to pay $50 for a bloody game? -Are they not profitable enough??
It's painfully obvious that they are using basic psychology techniques to frustrate gamers into buying more.
Shamelessly trying to squeeze every penny out of gamers that are ALREADY PAYING A PREMIUM is really bad for anyone involved in this project & the Star Wars gaming universe in general.
This is not to "create a sense of achievement." You do that with complexity, length and difficulty. This is a cheap money grab plain and simple.
EA just stop being a bunch of dicks. It's fucking Star Wars, IT'S ALREADY A CASH COW.
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Why do you think EA gives a shit about Star Wars? To them, it's just another franchise with a fanbase that will pay them money. They will milk it dry and throw it on the garbage heap as soon as the brand is tarnished beyond repair.
Like every single time before.
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You want to know why they are "EA" now and no longer "Electronic Arts"?
They wanted to get rid of the quickly catching on moniker of "Electronic Rats" before it got into widespread use.
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SNES games were ROM cartridges, which are more expensive to produce than pressing DVDs or offering digital downloads. Also the gaming market as a whole has grown since then and multi-platform releases are now easier to do, which allows the development costs to be spread over more players. So inflation isn't the only factor to consider when comparing prices.
And while I doubt that a game with such a mass-market appeal like this one cannot be sold cost-effective at $60, for the sake of the argument let's assum
Didn't change a thing (Score:5, Interesting)
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"But the hill looks smaller."
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It is smaller. But so are your steps. Now get to walking. Unless you want to pay for bigger shoes. We can give them to you. For a price.
This is the problem with hero-type MMOs (Score:5, Interesting)
I think this is why the CRPG genre has gradually shifted away from MMOs back to single-player instanced games in recent years. It's hard to make players feel special in a shared-world game with thousands of other heroes running around. Though a good compromise might be a shared-instance CRPG which you can play together with a few friends.
Egalitarian PVP MMOs or deathmatch-type games, where everyone plays "characters" with the same abilities or picks from a subset of fixed choices with quasi-balanced abilities, don't have this problem.
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There is a very simple way to make people feel "special" in a multiplayer environment like MMOs: Special loot that you have to "earn". Whatever "earning" it may mean. Throwing insane amounts of time into grinding the same mob until it drops it with its 0.0000000000001% chance, besting some tough dungeon that you need a very well equipped and cooperating group for, winning many PvP battles (and more than 90% of the playerbase), whatever. What's important is that everyone thinks they can get it but only a han
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> What's important is that everyone thinks they can get it but only a handful really can.
I've played a few games in pre-release status with bonuses for being near the top. It doesn't take many players before that mountain top is too high to climb.
It's so easy to get to the average, because there's always people who sign up and give up. But there are also people out there who obsess over the new game and put ungodly hours into it... and they're the ones who will be in the top 0.01%.
Essentially, if there
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You needn't be unique. People are quite able to accept that they're not "on top" if they invest less time than those that are. But they still need some kind of reward for their time. MMOs make this perfectly.
Most contemporary MMOs offer rewards in tiers, depending on how much time and effort you're willing to throw at the game. If you're just wandering around, you get zip. Which is fine, people who do that don't care about wearing the gilded mantle of the lesser little demon slayer. But they are someone to
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There is a very simple way to make people feel "special" in a multiplayer environment like MMOs: Special loot that you have to "earn". Whatever "earning" it may mean. Throwing insane amounts of time into grinding the same mob until it drops it with its 0.0000000000001% chance, besting some tough dungeon that you need a very well equipped and cooperating group for, winning many PvP battles (and more than 90% of the playerbase), whatever. What's important is that everyone thinks they can get it but only a handful really can.
Oh wow, I had a flashback to another story when I was reading your comment. Does anyone else remember when Star Wars Galaxies tried this very idea [slashdot.org]? As I remember it, people hated it because of how big of a time sink it was to achieve and how practically nobody would ever do it (and if they did, they'd be so burned out by the game they would just sell the account once they got a Jedi). So SOE later made a change that made it way easier to be a Jedi (I don't remember the details as I never actually played
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I think this is why the CRPG genre has gradually shifted away from MMOs back to single-player instanced games in recent years. It's hard to make players feel special in a shared-world game with thousands of other heroes running around. Though a good compromise might be a shared-instance CRPG which you can play together with a few friends.
The death of MMOs had nothing to do with that - every genre has a finite lifespan.
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Nethack is still going. WoW is far from dead.
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This is why I stopped gaming altogether (Score:4, Insightful)
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So you stopped gaming because you had shit buying decisions? You've missed some pretty good games then like Pillars of Eternity, Wasteland 2, The Witcher series then. None of those games were purposely crippled, and in The Witcher series the developers gave content away free.
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So you stopped gaming because you had shit buying decisions? You've missed some pretty good games then like Pillars of Eternity, Wasteland 2, The Witcher series then. None of those games were purposely crippled, and in The Witcher series the developers gave content away free.
You forgot Factorio. If you rank all games in Steam by ratings Factorio is like #5. Seriously think about that? I think The Witcher was like #12.
It used to be $50ish was a lot of money (Score:2)
Is 40 hours really that unreasonable? (Score:2)
Is 40 hours really that unreasonable for this sort of game? I'm not interested in this genre of game and so I'm not aware of what the expected play time is. And the games I play don't usually have earned currency that you can spend on new characters and loot crates. That said I can, and have, put in 40 hours of gaming over the course of a long weekend. So is that kind of time investment to unlock what I presume to be one of the best characters in the game really unreasonable? It sounds like at least 600,000
Re:Is 40 hours really that unreasonable? (Score:4, Interesting)
Not really, though I don't play these types of games anymore. I did way back in the Quake/RoTT/etc era though. People who are into the pvp-mmo style stuff can sink hundreds or thousands of hours into it. The top 5 games in my steam list are Skyrim, Fallout:NV, Stellaris, Civ4 and Star Trek Online those each top out between 400-1k hours each. A few of my friends have 600-700 hours in various CoD games.
What's happening though is people are having enough with the microtransactions, and then developers blaming gamers when there's a backlash, along with the gaming press screeching that "they're entitled brats" or some other type of garbage. There was a similar backlash against the ME3 ending for good reason, especially when game sites called gamers entitled. Same with the stuff over Kane & Lynch and then there's the Dorito Pope. People got a taste of that whole incestuous backlash with gamergate and sites screaming "gamers are dead, they don't have to be your audience" and so on. This is likely going to be just as big at the rate EA is doubling down on it.
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It's not really my genre, but the problem is that it's 40 hours before you can even play as even *one* of the characters they are likely to have bought the game to do at all (unless of course you pay out some cash to accelerate things).
Basically, it's trying to avoid the backlash of incremental const of DLC, but making the 'free' path so painful as to not be viable.
DLC started as a way to extend a nice game with even more stuff, but has devolved to being a paid-for demo which manages to avoid having any of
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I think there's a couple of factors at play.
One is that if this is anything like the first Battlefront EA did then heroes are for one life in a match and they try to distribute them among players because honestly, it would be freaking stupid if there's 20 Lukes vs 20 Vaders. Not only are you grinding 40hrs to unlock a hero you are spending 40 hrs grinding to unlock a hero that you will get to use only some of the time.
The other thing to consider is the opportunity cost of the grind. If you jump in and grind
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So is that kind of time investment to unlock what I presume to be one of the best characters in the game really unreasonable?
Best characters? I think you're misunderstanding. It's just a character. Not only do you need to grind to get him, but if you do so in the 40 hours chances are you going to have a cool character and absolutely nothing to keep that character alive.
I don't think the backlash is as much that it takes 40 hours to get an awesome character, it's that it takes much more AND you can bypass that all for a small fee.
They illegally removed the refund button (Score:5, Informative)
Wow (Score:2)
Okay, i have very mixed feelings about EA and in general i'm fine with people expressing displeasure over them trying to pull off crappy behavior like this. But it's kind of sad that the most unpopular thing on Reddit is because a bunch of people got upset that a company was trying to charge too much for a video game. I'm proud to be a geek, but our tendency to get tri
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It might simply be a case of enough people being involved in that one topic, rather than being blind to twenty other issues. If those twenty issues are spread out over the 600k all angry at EA, at maybe a couple of issues of interest per person, that still leaves 60k interested people per issue. We can't ALL argue against pollution, abuse, racism, hate, bigotry etc.
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And to be fair i guess Child's Play is the one case where we do manage to collectively do something big, because you'd have to have some pretty extreme views to think that helping sick children wasn't a good thing.
.
I have a GREAT idea (Score:2)
This is technically online gambling.
Let's get the fucking gaming commissions in on this along with the Feds, since this lies within the jurisdiction of both. You want to see how fast these nickel-and-dime pay-to-win loot boxes go away? CA and NV gaming commissions are the state-based people you want to complain to.
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To boot, EA is HQ'd in Redwood City, California. They're doubly-fucked in this instance. The e-mail to contact is complaints@cgcc.ca.gov
We'll see on Saturday... (Score:2)
They're right, of course, microtransactions are ruining gaming.
But they're all going to play anyway and the launch week numbers will turn out fine, just like every other time gamers have looked like they were about to rebel against EA's anti-consumer bullshit.
EA is propped up by sports (Score:3)
EA has a core base of suckers who will buy the same madden/fifa game every year, even better most are "non-gamers" who don't give a shit about what happens in some star wars game.
fifa was the best selling game of 2016, they can afford to take loot box risks on "niche" titles which are full of whales.
Grinding in videogames is pretty common (Score:2)
Teach EA a lesson (Score:2)
Drop their games and play something else. Go outside and kick a soccer ball around.
EA is evil (Score:2)
EA is about milking every cent they possibly can out of your pocket.
Boycott (Score:4, Insightful)
Looks like my 5 year long boycott of EA is going well for me. It started with Origin, and realized that they've gone off the deep end for me.
As a side note it's not JUST EA I don't play, but I'm pretty picky with my games now. They have to have feeling. I've played Breath of the Wild, Odyssey, and quite a few indie games lately, and that's fine with me.
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and the worst part is the population just eats it up.
^^ This.
There are SO many good games out there to buy which are not DRMed at all leave alone constant-online-DRM, let you play locally without entanglements, and the company can't deny you the ability to play the game you bought later on just because they feel like it that day. They have no "microtransactions" or "pay to win". They're just good games.
Stop buying shit from companies like EA, you sheep. You keep giving them money, you are teaching them you will bend over for anything.
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Care to explain how this story has anything to do with copyright in general or Steam in particular? Or were you just looking for some story that has remotely anything to do with games so you can rant?
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Um... the entire state of software, games and all, is due to how copyright law is structured.. you do know that, right?
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So... this DLC-at-release day nonsense, pay-to-stay-competitive multiplayer, microtransactions for content that is required to play the game, that's all due to copyright law?
I think I need more information, for some odd reason I can't make that connection.
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Here's a clue - in the 90's they had to give you the entire game physically to run on your computer. Post mass internet penetration they started coding games were they hold one of the game discs hostage inside a computer at their headquarters - they give you part of the game and keep another part of the game at their HQ. That means it's multiplayer functionality can be destroyed at the push of a button on their end - they control whether your game functions or not because the game is not self contained pr
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I will type this very slowly, hoping that this will improve the chance of you understanding the question: What does this have to do with copyright law?
They can (and most likely would) do this no matter what copyright has to say about it.
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Huh. I get the MMO part - the monthly fee was a logical precursor to microtransactions. Once game studios realized people were willing to pay for ongoing game access, they realized they could monetize the speed of unlocking content.
But what does Steam have to do with this? Steam doesn't even make games these days - they're a distribution platform. They don't even require DRM (other than their own account authentication) for games to be on their platform. That's up to the developer/publisher. There are
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"Steam doesn't even make games these days - they're a distribution platform"
Steam was DRM when it launched it BECAME a distribution platform much later, steam was forced into half-lfie via a patch that nobody wanted and would never have flown if gamers were close enough to valves offices to kick gabe newell in the nuts.
You don't seem to understand "steamworks" got rid of dedicated servers, many dedicated servers are now not controlled by gamers and are hosted in "the cloud" and not by gamers - aka they can
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This is a little like getting into a discussion with a religious nut, they spout SO much bullshit that you waste 90% of your time talking for debunking it...
This is why I refuse to debate religious zealots. Or people on a crusade against something in general.
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Yeah, nobody wanted online matchmaking, MMORPGs or any other functionality tied to global servers. It's all a conspiracy. Okay, so I can't play Overwatch without the central servers but I also wouldn't play Overwatch without the central servers. If there was a standalone/LAN version for tournaments, road warriors, hermits, service disruptions and software archaeologists it wouldn't bother me, but it also wouldn't give me anything. Don't get me wrong, I was angry too at the tying of obviously single player g
Re:Come on, come on (Score:4, Interesting)
I think we are currently witnessing it.
What we deal with here is something that is, essentially, an impossibility. A gaming corporation. The combination of "gaming", an activity that requires something that is fun, exciting, interesting, and engaging, and "corporation", which is the exact opposite thereof. The reason it managed to stay afloat is in the case of EA mostly that they keep hoovering up studios and franchises that actually give players fun, exiting, interesting and engaging games and "corporatize" them, i.e. milk them dry and shell out lines of rehashed sequels that are, essentially, the same game with some minor, insignificant gimmick, sold to fans of the line as new angle. That works for some time, and afterwards, they just throw away the franchise and studio and continue with the next.
All this only works if they up the technical angle. Better graphics. Better sound. Better physics. Better textures. Better AI. Because the game is still essentially the same. It has to be. They bought the franchise and players do have a certain expectation for it. Dare to make a RTS Battlefield spinoff? Remember how Command & Conquer: Renegade was received when Westwood tried the opposite? Don't even think about it. There is no way to "improve" the gameplay.
And all these things, graphics, sound, physics, textures and AI, they are prohibitively expensive. Note how those Indie-Games you like so much all come with mediocre graphics (if they're not even one of those "pixel graphics" rubbish that for some odd reason is so en vogue right now) and generally tech specs from the 2000s? Unlike EA, indies can actually go for "better gameplay". EA has to toss funds into the graphics/sound/physics/AI money sink.
This is why the 60ish bucks you can ask for a game isn't enough. Not even close. But 100 bucks isn't a price tag even the most devout fanboy would pay for a game. So they go for boiling the frog slowly. Pay 60 now, then 5 bucks here, 10 bucks there, 20 for the DLC (that is oddly available from day 1 and the game can't sensibly be played without), then every other month another 10 for the new guns that you need if you want to play online and don't want to be cannon fodder.
This does still work. Or rather, as we see right here and right now, it does not anymore. Gamers are not only fed up. They start voting with their wallet. They don't want to play games that cost them 200+ bucks only to find out that they threw that money into the gutter eventually because EA turns off the servers to play it because you're supposed to buy the successor for 60 bucks that is essentially the same game but with another 150 bucks of DLCs waiting to be bought.
I have this feeling that we're about to see this business model come to an end.
At the same time this could well be the death spell for corporations like EA. Their business model is, as stated before, watching which franchises work, buy out the studio, then milk it. This isn't viable anymore if people don't accept the "pay while you play" model with upfront costs that cannot be covered with a price tag of 60 bucks.
And corporations are like oil tankers. Hard to turn around once they have a course set.
Re:Come on, come on (Score:5, Insightful)
The combination of "gaming", an activity that requires something that is fun, exciting, interesting, and engaging, and "corporation", which is the exact opposite thereof.
That's kind of silly logic, isn't it? There are literally millions of corporations who successfully provide people with fun, by offering products ranging from bicycles to board games to ocean cruises to pogo sticks to software.
If EA can't manage to offer fun, it's because EA is screwed up, not because corporations and fun are inherently incompatible.
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Bicycles are hardly something that needs a lot of innovation, aside of better materials and some advances in technology. You don't have to put "fun" into them, that's something the user brings along himself. Board games in turn are suffering from pretty much the same problem computer games are, with most of the more interesting games that push the envelope being developed by independent developers that either kickstart their idea themselves or sell it to MB or Hasbro, who in turn only buy into it once they
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Nice post.
But I disagree on one point:
Gamers are not only fed up. They start voting with their wallet.
They really don't. Preorders and Early Access orders are still widely used.
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Preorders and Early Access orders are still widely used.
The "still" is the critical part in this sentence. If you take a closer look at sales numbers, you will notice that they are very much in decline.
What can be observed in the past year is that people get more wary of preordering titles. Too many crappy knockoffs have been littering the gaming landscape lately, the only things that still sell very well in preorder are multiplayer titles that entail some kind of early access which grants competitive players an edge by learning the maps and gameplay details bef
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Preorders and Early Access orders are still widely used.
Im actually ok with early access in some regard, some of my current favorite games were in early access phase a few years ago, and I got to pick them up for a fraction of the cost of what they are now that they are "released"
If early access means it costs less, its vastly superior to preordering, because when you preorder you pay the full price of the "release" version, while most if not all early access games only make you pay a little, and then dont force you to pay more later.
Re:Come on, come on (Score:5, Interesting)
EA existed (and was hated) long before DLC and microtransactions were a thing.
Computer games designed and sold by corporations are an old thing, corporations isn't incompatible with fun. The idea is ridiculous - many old games that is still spoken about as innovative, fun by nostalgic geeks were in almost all cases designed by and distributed by specialized game development companies. Including EA.
And about franchises not being able to change: Fallout. Heard of it?
Re:Come on, come on (Score:5, Interesting)
The idea is ridiculous - many old games that is still spoken about as innovative, fun by nostalgic geeks were in almost all cases designed by and distributed by specialized game development companies. Including EA.
I'm reminded of older games, and even new games, when I read these.
The complaint is that it takes about 40 hours of gameplay to unlock. Similar multiplayer match games report that mainstream players often spend 15-20 hours per week for about a month, then settle to about 10 hours per week until the games fall out of favor. Their hardcore players can log 80+ hours per week. This means many players would be able to unlock one hero before the end of November, and hardcore gamer teens will likely unlock one or two before Thanksgiving. Most players will unlock two or three before Christmas, hardcore gamers could unlock all the heroes before Christmas under the old structure.
In the older games the high-end unlockables were not available until near the end of the game, often requiring 100+ hours to achieve. And those were single player games played once, not the online match games where statistically people replay them for over a thousand hours on average before moving on.
With the update math suggests they're unlocked with about six hours of gameplay. All of them can be unlocked with 80 hours of gameplay, meaning hardcore players will likely have them all unlocked before the Thanksgiving holiday is over, more casual players can have every character unlocked before Christmas. Far too easy for such a long-running game, in my view.
I think EA was trying to bypass the claims that only the unemployed teens devoting extended hours to the game could unlock those characters, so they added an alternate way to achieve them. Players have been calling for this type of unlock for years, and few games offer it. At 40 hours to unlock and $80 for Darth Vader, that's about $2/hour. Lesser characters were closer to $1/hour or $0.50/hour. While I rarely buy in-game content, those prices don't feel outlandish. Unfortunately and ironically, by providing exactly the thing the players demand, the players revolted.
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Unfortunately and ironically, by providing exactly the thing the players demand, the players revolted.
No one demanded locked content. When you pay $60 for a game, why shouldn't you be able to just jump in immediately and fly around in the Millennium Falcon as Darth Vader? What if I'm not looking for some sort of "sense of accomplishment" in my entertainment, what if I just want an escape?
You're wrong, no one asked for this.
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Oh come on, you should know that Star Wars cosplayers don't burn people at the stake. They throw them down a replica Sarlacc Pit.
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Yes, I do. And do you know the origins of GTA?
Franchises can change, yes. How often did they do it successfully? More important, how often did it happen with large corporations, and how often when they were acquired by large corporations? Because after the acquisition, they don't change anymore. Ever.
And yes, Electronic Arts did actually create a few memorable, great games.
EA hasn't.
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Since you use RTS as a base of your hypothesis, remember what happened when a game company turned a successful series of RTS games into an MMORPG?
Yes, I'm talking about Warcraft.
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Note how those Indie-Games you like so much all come with mediocre graphics (if they're not even one of those "pixel graphics" rubbish that for some odd reason is so en vogue right now)
Why would you call pixel graphics "rubbish"? Pixel art has a charm of its own, and many players prefer to have good, innovative gameplay over the shiniest and latest graphics. Indie-studios have limited resources, and emphasizing gameplay over graphics is what has made many of their games so appealing and successful.
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I don't find it appealing.
That doesn't mean I would throw it away on this (lack of) merit alone, if the gameplay is good, I don't care about graphics. I just still do not like the style.
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Hard to turn around once they have a course set.
Especially when there's a sociopath with an IQ of ~110 at the helm.
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And all these things, graphics, sound, physics, textures and AI, they are prohibitively expensive.
There's a world of difference between paying artists to create textures, meshes and sounds and paying programmers to work on physics/AI. While the former certainly means lots of man hours (oops, sorry, I don't want to offend the mediocrity police; perhaps "androgynous freak hours" would be more palatable), physics/AI are largely programming challenges that have been greatly reduced by the availability and ease-of-use of ubiquitous game-development environments such as UDK.
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I have this feeling that we're about to see this business model come to an end.
No it's not. This isn't going anywhere, it's just going to look different. If you think people are voting with your wallets, like that Mashable article points out, those people are a small minority. Based on the first game, the potential audience for this is somewhere around 12 million people. So, 600k people don't like some Reddit comment? OK, that's 5% of their potential market. And those aren't the people who matter, either. Again, like the article points out, there will always be the "whales" who
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"Remember how Command & Conquer: Renegade was received when Westwood tried the opposite?"
It's still going as Renegade X and even just recently had an update. Granted, it's totally out of Westwood's hands, now, but it's still well and alive.
Incorrect (Score:2)
You my friend brought the EA propaganda hook and sinker. Game with way better graphics than Battlefront 2 , say, witcher 3, cost only 60$ and are way richer in graphics. Battlefront 2 and other EA game are not THAT special, not even the servers and bandwidth. No the real reason 60$ is not enough have nothing to do with cost of production. The main reason are 1) the incredibly increased cost in marketing (sometimes can be as high as 1/3 of
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I didn't say that 60 bucks wasn't enough to make such a game. But it isn't enough to cover the expenses.
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"At the same time this could well be the death spell for corporations like EA. "
They aren't worried. They'll pay a bunch of sycophantic game journos to write another "Gamers are Dead" series that will turn the heat off them a little and bring in a few more gamers in the form of ideological sheep who want to support their cause by buying a few games here and there.
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"Note how those Indie-Games you like so much all come with mediocre graphics (if they're not even one of those "pixel graphics" rubbish that for some odd reason is so en vogue right now) and generally tech specs from the 2000s?"
Nah. A couple of examples: Kerbal Space Program, particularly with the community visual mods, is beautiful. Eve Online is also essentially an indie game, although admittedly from a more established company, and it's not only beautiful but has kept pace with graphics development ove
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I'm certainly not EA's target audience, caring more for gameplay and innovation than graphics. It just pains me that a company that I used to like for their games has turned in the past 20 years or so into something that does nothing but crank out one cookie-cutter copy of games that I used to like every single year, with zero innovation or any kind of initiative to improve.
Though I'd like to know where you see me putting up a strawman. What did I misrepresent?
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Yes, Westwood lacked the experience with FPS and it showed. But I dare say that even if they knew the "magic formulas" for making good FPS games it would not have changed anything. C&C fans expect a RTS game, selling someone something that pushes him out of his comfort zone is always a hard sell.
Personally, I'm a big fan of the Civilization series. At least until V, didn't look at VI yet because I'm not done with V yet. So I honestly don't know what VI will be like yet, but I can only say if they went f
Civilization still has modding take that out and (Score:2)
Civilization still has modding take that out and they will kill them self's.
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Interesting, engaging and witty games that don't follow the cookie-cutter scheme of "crunch out one per month" are still being made. Of course not by the likes of EA. Large corporations don't dare to risk something like this. We have arrived at the point where you cannot even expect a "new" kind of RTS, FPS or 4X game from a major studio. All they produce these days is the next installation of their established franchise.
If you want new and exiting, you have to turn to those that you dismiss: The game devel
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MGTOW, women are worse than EA
I'd rather masturbate until I die.
This says a lot more about you than it does about women.
Yes it does. He has a lot more disposable income compared to the person who made the original post who probably has buyer's remorse from being shackled to a debt creation tsunami.
Re:In other news, sales of peanut M&Ms reached (Score:5, Insightful)
People want long play and replayability. EA and many others have completely misunderstood and just added a bunch of pointless grinding exercises along with a monetary bypass.
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I was about to ask this. Why the fuck would anyone buy stuff from them? Or any other large game studio.
I have gone indie years ago and never even looked back. They are cheaper (way cheaper actually), provide at least as much entertainment, don't have any ridiculous DRM schemes (i.e. you can actually play them from the moment you buy them, not only after the initial rush makes the "always online" server actually available) and the good ones actually have an active modding community.
Yes, you can mod those gam
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I was wondering the same, but they make good games, they just treat players like gaming's version of Comcast constantly pushing the boundaries of how to abuse customers for more money.