11 ms·

I'm continually fascinated by the gaming community's relationship with EA. It's like, "Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me 37 times. . . ahh, what the hey, let'

I'm continually fascinated by the gaming community's relationship with EA. It's like, "Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me 37 times. . . ahh, what the hey, let's throw another 60 quid in this hole. I'm sure this time it'll be different."

arkh 9y ago
The gaming community get new fools to pay for this kind of things every day. Fool me once shame on me. Fool my neighbor's teenager then.
- jasode 9y ago
  The "new fools" theory sounds plausible but then I see that EA releases new games far faster than the replacement birthrate for gullible teens. E.g. I count 13 games from 2016: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Electronic_Arts_games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Electronic_Arts_games Therefore, there has to be a significant quantity of repeat buyers who were already burned by EA. (E.g. EA can't wait ~20 years to fool the Millenials after milking the GenX buyers.)
  - kbenson 9y ago
    > I count 13 games from 2016 Well, there are a lot of market segments to exploit, and some might not overlap that much. Also, there's 6 games listed for 2017, but each is targeted at multiple platforms so shows up 2-6 times. Finally, with the sports titles, in some cases if you want to play with a roster of real players you don't have a choice but to go with EA.
avar 9y ago
Everything is like this, just earlier today there was a "Air Travelers Resisting the ‘Incredible Shrinking Airline Seat’" thread[1] here where if the comments are to be believed a huge number of people simply don't travel anymore because the seats are so horrible. Surely nobody would want to fly anymore! Meanwhile the airline industry has been growing consistently for decades. Similarly, surely nobody would ever pay $80 for some in-game feature in an EA game. If you aren't selling EA stock now in anticipation of their inevitable demise you're a fool! Stated preferences are very different from revealed preferences. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15684552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15684552
- Retric 9y ago
  These things are relative. I 'don't fly' specifically because airlines are so terrible. But, that just means I will drive instead of take short flights, and avoid vacations that require flying. There are not a lot of options to get to say Hawaii in some reasonable time frame for work.
- Nursie 9y ago
  In the case of the seat, the revealed preference is "I still need to get from A to B, so you can abuse me all you like". Like airline food, there's no effective way to reveal that you might prefer to pay a little more for something a little better, and your choice is usually limited to paying a lot more.
  - hyperpape 9y ago
    There are a number of airlines that have made their name on being more pleasant than others. Virgin was one. Largely the financial results seem to have borne out the status quo.
    - Nursie 9y ago
      I suppose so. It's difficult to see this stuff on any comparison website, and most airlines try to sell themselves on comfort. So you end up relying on experience or word of mouth. FWIW I try to stick to airlines I know I'll have at least a half-decent experience with. So far that's Singapore, British, Virgin, QANTAS and a few others.
- speby 9y ago
  > Stated preferences are very different from revealed preferences. Maybe better worded as "Stated preferences are very often different from actual behavior." On the other hand, it is worth noting that I am sure _at least some people_ probably really would boycott the game. Or in the case of the shrinking seat, surely _some people_ will stop flying. But this is just an example of some segment of potential customers opting to forego a good or service while simultatneously a new customer segment actually doesn't mind it (or they'll say they mind it but then like paying $100 for a roundtrip air ticket instead of $129 more than they like a slightly bigger seat). "It's all relative" is probably applicable here. Bottom line: Just because thousands of people don't like the $80 in-game feature, enough other people, including some that don't like $80 in-game features, continue to play and/or buy the game anyways.
bjt2n3904 9y ago
Gamers aren't known for their resolve. I remember when Modern Warfare 2 came out (eight years ago) without the option to run private servers, which resulted in this rather famous image: http://i.imgur.com/MLZ0bMu.png http://i.imgur.com/MLZ0bMu.png That being said, 40 hours doesn't seem like an awful amount of time to sink into a game to unlock a character. Heck, I'm ashamed to talk about how many hours I've put into CS:GO, and it's only triple digits.
- PeachPlum 9y ago
  There's not really a thing as "gamers" I don't think my 48 y.o. self who's been playing PC games since before VGA would share many opinions or habits as an 18 y.o. Call of Duty player.
- bbatha 9y ago
  > That being said, 40 hours doesn't seem like an awful amount of time to sink into a game to unlock a character. Heck, I'm ashamed to talk about how many hours I've put into CS:GO, and it's only triple digits. Its not the 40 hours. Its the fact that its 40 hours or $10 In previous iterations of the series these types of characters were only available for free, and to every player with in a couple of hours.
  - bjt2n3904 9y ago
    > Its not the 40 hours. Perhaps, but the ridiculous and disproportionate controversy over Cuphead makes me think otherwise. There's a fine line between "achievements" and "play to win", and I'm sure this is testing this boundary. I just think the response is ridiculous. We're talking about entertainment, not health care.
- ant6n 9y ago
  > which resulted in this rather famous image What am I looking at?
  - sydd 9y ago
    60% of the "boycott Modern Warfare 2" Steam group plays Modern Warfare 2 when the screenshot was taken.
CydeWeys 9y ago
Exactly the same with me. I never buy games at launch and I tend to stay away from F2P games entirely. There's way too many games coming out compared to the free time I have available to play them, so I've accepted that I'm never going to play the vast majority of releases. Others need to come to that same realization -- it's perfectly fine to skip a game if the company's practices suck. As for what I have been playing, I'm really putting a lot of time into Factorio at the moment. It's an indie game that costs $20 for the entire experience and is an amazing value (I'm at hour 70 with no sign of slowing down yet).
- platetone 9y ago
  I don't really play games at all, but I've had Factorio bookmarked for a while, thinking I wanted to try it. Think you've just convinced me.
  - falcolas 9y ago
    Well worth it. Active developers, huge modding community, and gameplay that appeals to engineering minds.
    - nulagrithom 9y ago
      I wish I could make people play Factorio as some kind of training. My son (9), who showed me the game, spent the longest time building parts manually. I kept showing him how to automate, but it didn't really "click" until I was pumping out solid lines of green potions in front of him, then he understood the magic of automation. It felt oddly similar to interactions with various business departments. "Look, we're never gonna leave the planet -- I mean, make a profit unless we automate. Otherwise the aliens -- 'er, our competitors are going to rip us to shreds."
      - smallnamespace 9y ago
        I mean, expecting a 9-year-old to grasp a production process completely, then conceive of automating it seems a bit optimistic.
choward 9y ago
It annoys me when people complain about something and then keep doing it (like buying EA games). The solution is really simple: stop buying/playing their games. It's not like they are a monopoly you are forced to give money to.
- mysterydip 9y ago
  There’s a ton of indie games out there willing to give players what the AAA’s aren’t, but the discoverability problem is such that most can’t be bothered to sift through the pile to find the gems, so they just go with whatever games everyone else is playing, which is usually whatever has the biggest advertising budget. It’s a frustrating problem.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    It's not just the discovery problem; for a multiplayer game like Battlefront, there's value in the concentration of players. You want to have full servers, friends that also play it, etc. As a W:ET fan that still occasionally fires up the game, I can tell you that it's no fun seeing a desolate server list, filled only with bots.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
falcolas 9y ago
It's understandable, at least to me. EA makes good games in franchises people want to play. The problem comes in how the games are changed (often forcefully) to include additional monetization opportunities. People want to play good games, and by all accounts, Battlefront is a good game; it has solid core mechanics and lots of Star Wars fanservice. EA just mucked it up with the shoehorning of the gambling, pardon, loot crates into the progression system. So, what's a player to do? If they boycott the game, they are depriving only themselves of an experience they would probably enjoy for 40-60 hours. Add to that the fact that EA is looking at the huge profits they get out of lootboxes from a few "whales", and the loss of even half of their playerbase would barely touch their bottom line. Voting with your wallet only works when someone else isn't voting with their orders of magnitude deeper wallet (for example, one player put $15,000 into Mass Effect 3 multiplayer cards). And in the end, how can you really fault those big spenders? They're just out to have fun too, and $15,000 could easily qualify as someone's 10% entertainment budget?
- scotty79 9y ago
  15k is more than my whole entertainment budget of the last decade including all the hardware and electricity and transportation.
- hawski 9y ago
  Many of those "whales" have certainly a gambling problem. Of course there may be a few rich enough people, but they also probably have some problems. It's sad that their weakness is exploited this way.
  - falcolas 9y ago
    Well, when you consider that gambling (or opening loot boxes) hits some very primitive reward centers of our brain... is it any surprise? Video games are simply abstracted skinner boxes to begin with; loot boxes with their carefully tuned Vegas-esque lights, sounds, and reward percentages just amp up the "push a button, maybe get a reward" to the Nth degree. And yeah, it is sad. It's probably even worse than sad.
campuscodi 9y ago
And that's why I stopped playing any EA games this summer.
darklajid 9y ago
I just bought a AAA title - Destiny 2. Humble Bundle seemed like a decent store, right? I made so many purchases with them in the past. 60 dollars later I had a key that Blizzard wouldn't accept. My Battle.Net account (years old, ooooold) was created in Germany. I lived in different countries since then and currently live in SG, the key that I purchased was locked to the US/Asia Pacific region. Now .. I certainly can change my account's region, right? I'm in good standing with Blizzard, I just moved. Well.. Prepare to hand over a government issued ID including your address or - if that ID doesn't include an address - said ID and a utility bill. For an effing game. For a gaming network that knows me by a handle#randomNumber and an email address. Oh - you can create a brand spanking new account from here. No ID required of course and now I have an account in the EU (my .. 'real' aka 'old' Blizzard account) and an account here (for Destiny 2, because eff you Blizzard: You don't need my ID). It makes no sense. My point being: EA is bad, EA is crap, but even companies like Blizzard - often considered good and exemplary - are insane sometimes. We tend to forget that EA produced great games and focus on the negative parts. For others (Valve, Blizzard) we tend to focus on the positive parts. I think it's rather easy to overreact in one way or another.
- kbenson 9y ago
  > For others (Valve, Blizzard) we tend to focus on the positive parts. Well, people have been focusing on the poor policies of blizzard, especially with respect to battle.net, for decades now.[1] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd
  - berbec 9y ago
    I remember shortly after WoW was released, there was this huge hubub over Cosmos and other add-ons, which led to one of the funniest WoW posts ever.[1] 1: http://www.lordaeron.org/WoB/ http://www.lordaeron.org/WoB/
- bharris62 9y ago
  I think I would rather this happen, than have someone in another country steal my account and easily be able to transfer regions. with the current system, if someone steals my account, its basically useless.
JabavuAdams 9y ago
$80 or whatever it was was well worth the entertainment I received from Battlefront. Meh, a lot of gamers are loud cheapskates.
minimaxir 9y ago
For non-multiplayer games from EA, the games community is learning a bit, which is part of the reason why Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst and Mass Effect: Andromeda sold poorly (neither were bad games, just average) The risk-adverse solution publishers are now finding is to just double-down on multiplayer and/or microtransactions.
danso 9y ago
For better or worse, EA owns a lot of the big studios and brands. They have an exclusive agreement with Disney on producing the realistic Star Wars games, so it's not as if diehard SW fans have a choice. Though looking at their Wikipedia page [0], I think I overestimated how much of gaming they own. Personally, I don't play any of their franchises (some of that due to being a Mac user, and how few of EA's games are ported over to Mac). As a PS4 owner, Sony and Sony's affiliates (such as Naughty Dog), and the other big publishers (Activision, Take Two) give me enough choice to not have to play any of EA's games apparently. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Arts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Arts
- kendallpark 9y ago
  There are some examples of parent publishers with less-than-exemplary reputations simply letting successful child studios/publishers do their thing. Activision, for example, owns Blizzard, but plays fairly hands-off with managing them. My understanding is that Ubisoft (based in France) gives a similar amount of independence to its subsidiary Montreal studio. On the flipside, I'm not sure about how EA manages all its subsidiaries. There was a apparently a lot of political pressure on Bioware to adopt EA's Frostbite engine leading to all sorts of headache in the development of Mass Effect Andromeda. And after all that dust settled, now there is no more Mass Effect for the time being. You can read more here: https://kotaku.com/the-story-behind-mass-effect-andromedas-troubled-five-1795886428 https://kotaku.com/the-story-behind-mass-effect-andromedas-t...
- JustSomeNobody 9y ago
  > ... so it's not as if diehard SW fans have a choice. Why not boycott? I mean it would suck for the diehards for sure, but how long would they realistically have to wait? If EA misses 1 quarter's revenue goal, they'll be singing another tune.
  - danso 9y ago
    I mean they don't have a choice in publisher unless they want to wait 2-3 years for a new deal by Disney to be signed. People do have a choice to wait to buy the game, of course -- I bought the first BattleFront when it went for sale for ~$10, which is about what it's worth. The risk of that is that multiplayer games have a certain shelf life -- generally you want to buy it when there's peak population, or at least when all of your friends are playing it. Waiting for a discount/out of protest results in greater risk of playing with a fractured player base.
simias 9y ago
I can't think of any way out honestly. You can say anything you want about EA but I'm sure they act very rationally. If despite the heavy backlash over the years they keep doing what they're doing then it must be working for them. That's the problem with these lootboxes, given how fast they spread to every AAA games these days (including single player games where they hardly make sense in the first place) it's obvious that the maths work out for them. The amount of principled gamers ending up not buying the game is probably more than compensated by the dividends of microtransactions. There are not enough gamers who care enough about the issue to stop buying the game. The marketing and network effect is simply too strong. A mob downvoting a comment on reddit won't change anything, it's nothing but slacktivism. Might as well sign an e-petition at this point. It's not the first time it's like this. "We don't want always online DRM! We won't buy your game!", "We want to be able to host our own dedicated servers for multiplayer! We won't buy your game!". And now it's the new normal, hardly anybody expects these things from new releases or even mentions them. Lootboxes and microtransactions are headed down the same path IMO. Here's my prediction: five years from now every big release will contain microtransactions one way or an other and nobody will find it surprising or inappropriate.
- bunderbunder 9y ago
  So there's a market for these kinds of games. I don't like microtransactions and what they do for gameplay, either. But I don't see the point in getting worked up about it like this. It's so much easier to just not buy those games, and spend my money on the kinds of games I do enjoy, instead. It leaves me thinking that maybe melodramatic wailing on Reddit is secretly a big part of the fun.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - dvlsg 9y ago
    That's part of the problem, though. For a lot of these games, the player does enjoy them - just not the loot boxes and how they have affected how quickly "free" players can unlock things.
fudgepack99 9y ago
There is no market in a post internet age. The average person is not technologically informed enough to even be a market participant and that is why gaming is such a disaster. The human mind did not evolve to make rational decisions regarding technology and hence the free market is a myth for those who don't grasp evolution did not make our minds to live in a high tech capitalist society.
davidkuhta 9y ago
I held hope based on the studio acquisitions that would allow them work independently and simply pocket the profits. Shuttering Visceral was the nail in the coffin for me.
Asdfbla 9y ago
A sufficient number of people seem to enjoy the games in the end. I guess mission successful for EA?
frik 9y ago
I recently attended a marketing conf, and Electric Arts employees were so pround of ripping of so called whales and their gamification and gambling features in their new Triple-A games. They guys I spoke with had no clue about games, they were not gamers. They said it's all about statistics, KPIs and marketing. Remembering the 1980s and 1990s era of awesome Electronic Arts games (their games were really arts), it's so tragic.

arkh 9y ago

The gaming community get new fools to pay for this kind of things every day. Fool me once shame on me. Fool my neighbor's teenager then.

jasode 9y ago
The "new fools" theory sounds plausible but then I see that EA releases new games far faster than the replacement birthrate for gullible teens. E.g. I count 13 games from 2016: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Electronic_Arts_games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Electronic_Arts_games Therefore, there has to be a significant quantity of repeat buyers who were already burned by EA. (E.g. EA can't wait ~20 years to fool the Millenials after milking the GenX buyers.)
- kbenson 9y ago
  > I count 13 games from 2016 Well, there are a lot of market segments to exploit, and some might not overlap that much. Also, there's 6 games listed for 2017, but each is targeted at multiple platforms so shows up 2-6 times. Finally, with the sports titles, in some cases if you want to play with a roster of real players you don't have a choice but to go with EA.

avar 9y ago

Everything is like this, just earlier today there was a "Air Travelers Resisting the ‘Incredible Shrinking Airline Seat’" thread[1] here where if the comments are to be believed a huge number of people simply don't travel anymore because the seats are so horrible. Surely nobody would want to fly anymore! Meanwhile the airline industry has been growing consistently for decades. Similarly, surely nobody would ever pay $80 for some in-game feature in an EA game. If you aren't selling EA stock now in anticipation of their inevitable demise you're a fool! Stated preferences are very different from revealed preferences. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15684552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15684552

Retric 9y ago
These things are relative. I 'don't fly' specifically because airlines are so terrible. But, that just means I will drive instead of take short flights, and avoid vacations that require flying. There are not a lot of options to get to say Hawaii in some reasonable time frame for work.
Nursie 9y ago
In the case of the seat, the revealed preference is "I still need to get from A to B, so you can abuse me all you like". Like airline food, there's no effective way to reveal that you might prefer to pay a little more for something a little better, and your choice is usually limited to paying a lot more.
- hyperpape 9y ago
  There are a number of airlines that have made their name on being more pleasant than others. Virgin was one. Largely the financial results seem to have borne out the status quo.
  - Nursie 9y ago
    I suppose so. It's difficult to see this stuff on any comparison website, and most airlines try to sell themselves on comfort. So you end up relying on experience or word of mouth. FWIW I try to stick to airlines I know I'll have at least a half-decent experience with. So far that's Singapore, British, Virgin, QANTAS and a few others.
speby 9y ago
> Stated preferences are very different from revealed preferences. Maybe better worded as "Stated preferences are very often different from actual behavior." On the other hand, it is worth noting that I am sure _at least some people_ probably really would boycott the game. Or in the case of the shrinking seat, surely _some people_ will stop flying. But this is just an example of some segment of potential customers opting to forego a good or service while simultatneously a new customer segment actually doesn't mind it (or they'll say they mind it but then like paying $100 for a roundtrip air ticket instead of $129 more than they like a slightly bigger seat). "It's all relative" is probably applicable here. Bottom line: Just because thousands of people don't like the $80 in-game feature, enough other people, including some that don't like $80 in-game features, continue to play and/or buy the game anyways.

bjt2n3904 9y ago

Gamers aren't known for their resolve. I remember when Modern Warfare 2 came out (eight years ago) without the option to run private servers, which resulted in this rather famous image: http://i.imgur.com/MLZ0bMu.png http://i.imgur.com/MLZ0bMu.png That being said, 40 hours doesn't seem like an awful amount of time to sink into a game to unlock a character. Heck, I'm ashamed to talk about how many hours I've put into CS:GO, and it's only triple digits.

PeachPlum 9y ago
There's not really a thing as "gamers" I don't think my 48 y.o. self who's been playing PC games since before VGA would share many opinions or habits as an 18 y.o. Call of Duty player.
bbatha 9y ago
> That being said, 40 hours doesn't seem like an awful amount of time to sink into a game to unlock a character. Heck, I'm ashamed to talk about how many hours I've put into CS:GO, and it's only triple digits. Its not the 40 hours. Its the fact that its 40 hours or $10 In previous iterations of the series these types of characters were only available for free, and to every player with in a couple of hours.
- bjt2n3904 9y ago
  > Its not the 40 hours. Perhaps, but the ridiculous and disproportionate controversy over Cuphead makes me think otherwise. There's a fine line between "achievements" and "play to win", and I'm sure this is testing this boundary. I just think the response is ridiculous. We're talking about entertainment, not health care.
ant6n 9y ago
> which resulted in this rather famous image What am I looking at?
- sydd 9y ago
  60% of the "boycott Modern Warfare 2" Steam group plays Modern Warfare 2 when the screenshot was taken.

CydeWeys 9y ago

Exactly the same with me. I never buy games at launch and I tend to stay away from F2P games entirely. There's way too many games coming out compared to the free time I have available to play them, so I've accepted that I'm never going to play the vast majority of releases. Others need to come to that same realization -- it's perfectly fine to skip a game if the company's practices suck. As for what I have been playing, I'm really putting a lot of time into Factorio at the moment. It's an indie game that costs $20 for the entire experience and is an amazing value (I'm at hour 70 with no sign of slowing down yet).

platetone 9y ago
I don't really play games at all, but I've had Factorio bookmarked for a while, thinking I wanted to try it. Think you've just convinced me.
- falcolas 9y ago
  Well worth it. Active developers, huge modding community, and gameplay that appeals to engineering minds.
  - nulagrithom 9y ago
    I wish I could make people play Factorio as some kind of training. My son (9), who showed me the game, spent the longest time building parts manually. I kept showing him how to automate, but it didn't really "click" until I was pumping out solid lines of green potions in front of him, then he understood the magic of automation. It felt oddly similar to interactions with various business departments. "Look, we're never gonna leave the planet -- I mean, make a profit unless we automate. Otherwise the aliens -- 'er, our competitors are going to rip us to shreds."
    - smallnamespace 9y ago
      I mean, expecting a 9-year-old to grasp a production process completely, then conceive of automating it seems a bit optimistic.

choward 9y ago

It annoys me when people complain about something and then keep doing it (like buying EA games). The solution is really simple: stop buying/playing their games. It's not like they are a monopoly you are forced to give money to.

mysterydip 9y ago
There’s a ton of indie games out there willing to give players what the AAA’s aren’t, but the discoverability problem is such that most can’t be bothered to sift through the pile to find the gems, so they just go with whatever games everyone else is playing, which is usually whatever has the biggest advertising budget. It’s a frustrating problem.
- icebraining 9y ago
  It's not just the discovery problem; for a multiplayer game like Battlefront, there's value in the concentration of players. You want to have full servers, friends that also play it, etc. As a W:ET fan that still occasionally fires up the game, I can tell you that it's no fun seeing a desolate server list, filled only with bots.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

falcolas 9y ago

It's understandable, at least to me. EA makes good games in franchises people want to play. The problem comes in how the games are changed (often forcefully) to include additional monetization opportunities. People want to play good games, and by all accounts, Battlefront is a good game; it has solid core mechanics and lots of Star Wars fanservice. EA just mucked it up with the shoehorning of the gambling, pardon, loot crates into the progression system. So, what's a player to do? If they boycott the game, they are depriving only themselves of an experience they would probably enjoy for 40-60 hours. Add to that the fact that EA is looking at the huge profits they get out of lootboxes from a few "whales", and the loss of even half of their playerbase would barely touch their bottom line. Voting with your wallet only works when someone else isn't voting with their orders of magnitude deeper wallet (for example, one player put $15,000 into Mass Effect 3 multiplayer cards). And in the end, how can you really fault those big spenders? They're just out to have fun too, and $15,000 could easily qualify as someone's 10% entertainment budget?

scotty79 9y ago
15k is more than my whole entertainment budget of the last decade including all the hardware and electricity and transportation.
hawski 9y ago
Many of those "whales" have certainly a gambling problem. Of course there may be a few rich enough people, but they also probably have some problems. It's sad that their weakness is exploited this way.
- falcolas 9y ago
  Well, when you consider that gambling (or opening loot boxes) hits some very primitive reward centers of our brain... is it any surprise? Video games are simply abstracted skinner boxes to begin with; loot boxes with their carefully tuned Vegas-esque lights, sounds, and reward percentages just amp up the "push a button, maybe get a reward" to the Nth degree. And yeah, it is sad. It's probably even worse than sad.

campuscodi 9y ago

And that's why I stopped playing any EA games this summer.

darklajid 9y ago

I just bought a AAA title - Destiny 2. Humble Bundle seemed like a decent store, right? I made so many purchases with them in the past. 60 dollars later I had a key that Blizzard wouldn't accept. My Battle.Net account (years old, ooooold) was created in Germany. I lived in different countries since then and currently live in SG, the key that I purchased was locked to the US/Asia Pacific region. Now .. I certainly can change my account's region, right? I'm in good standing with Blizzard, I just moved. Well.. Prepare to hand over a government issued ID including your address or - if that ID doesn't include an address - said ID and a utility bill. For an effing game. For a gaming network that knows me by a handle#randomNumber and an email address. Oh - you can create a brand spanking new account from here. No ID required of course and now I have an account in the EU (my .. 'real' aka 'old' Blizzard account) and an account here (for Destiny 2, because eff you Blizzard: You don't need my ID). It makes no sense. My point being: EA is bad, EA is crap, but even companies like Blizzard - often considered good and exemplary - are insane sometimes. We tend to forget that EA produced great games and focus on the negative parts. For others (Valve, Blizzard) we tend to focus on the positive parts. I think it's rather easy to overreact in one way or another.

kbenson 9y ago
> For others (Valve, Blizzard) we tend to focus on the positive parts. Well, people have been focusing on the poor policies of blizzard, especially with respect to battle.net, for decades now.[1] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd
- berbec 9y ago
  I remember shortly after WoW was released, there was this huge hubub over Cosmos and other add-ons, which led to one of the funniest WoW posts ever.[1] 1: http://www.lordaeron.org/WoB/ http://www.lordaeron.org/WoB/
bharris62 9y ago
I think I would rather this happen, than have someone in another country steal my account and easily be able to transfer regions. with the current system, if someone steals my account, its basically useless.

JabavuAdams 9y ago

$80 or whatever it was was well worth the entertainment I received from Battlefront. Meh, a lot of gamers are loud cheapskates.

minimaxir 9y ago

For non-multiplayer games from EA, the games community is learning a bit, which is part of the reason why Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst and Mass Effect: Andromeda sold poorly (neither were bad games, just average) The risk-adverse solution publishers are now finding is to just double-down on multiplayer and/or microtransactions.

danso 9y ago

For better or worse, EA owns a lot of the big studios and brands. They have an exclusive agreement with Disney on producing the realistic Star Wars games, so it's not as if diehard SW fans have a choice. Though looking at their Wikipedia page [0], I think I overestimated how much of gaming they own. Personally, I don't play any of their franchises (some of that due to being a Mac user, and how few of EA's games are ported over to Mac). As a PS4 owner, Sony and Sony's affiliates (such as Naughty Dog), and the other big publishers (Activision, Take Two) give me enough choice to not have to play any of EA's games apparently. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Arts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Arts

kendallpark 9y ago
There are some examples of parent publishers with less-than-exemplary reputations simply letting successful child studios/publishers do their thing. Activision, for example, owns Blizzard, but plays fairly hands-off with managing them. My understanding is that Ubisoft (based in France) gives a similar amount of independence to its subsidiary Montreal studio. On the flipside, I'm not sure about how EA manages all its subsidiaries. There was a apparently a lot of political pressure on Bioware to adopt EA's Frostbite engine leading to all sorts of headache in the development of Mass Effect Andromeda. And after all that dust settled, now there is no more Mass Effect for the time being. You can read more here: https://kotaku.com/the-story-behind-mass-effect-andromedas-troubled-five-1795886428 https://kotaku.com/the-story-behind-mass-effect-andromedas-t...
JustSomeNobody 9y ago
> ... so it's not as if diehard SW fans have a choice. Why not boycott? I mean it would suck for the diehards for sure, but how long would they realistically have to wait? If EA misses 1 quarter's revenue goal, they'll be singing another tune.
- danso 9y ago
  I mean they don't have a choice in publisher unless they want to wait 2-3 years for a new deal by Disney to be signed. People do have a choice to wait to buy the game, of course -- I bought the first BattleFront when it went for sale for ~$10, which is about what it's worth. The risk of that is that multiplayer games have a certain shelf life -- generally you want to buy it when there's peak population, or at least when all of your friends are playing it. Waiting for a discount/out of protest results in greater risk of playing with a fractured player base.

simias 9y ago

I can't think of any way out honestly. You can say anything you want about EA but I'm sure they act very rationally. If despite the heavy backlash over the years they keep doing what they're doing then it must be working for them. That's the problem with these lootboxes, given how fast they spread to every AAA games these days (including single player games where they hardly make sense in the first place) it's obvious that the maths work out for them. The amount of principled gamers ending up not buying the game is probably more than compensated by the dividends of microtransactions. There are not enough gamers who care enough about the issue to stop buying the game. The marketing and network effect is simply too strong. A mob downvoting a comment on reddit won't change anything, it's nothing but slacktivism. Might as well sign an e-petition at this point. It's not the first time it's like this. "We don't want always online DRM! We won't buy your game!", "We want to be able to host our own dedicated servers for multiplayer! We won't buy your game!". And now it's the new normal, hardly anybody expects these things from new releases or even mentions them. Lootboxes and microtransactions are headed down the same path IMO. Here's my prediction: five years from now every big release will contain microtransactions one way or an other and nobody will find it surprising or inappropriate.

bunderbunder 9y ago
So there's a market for these kinds of games. I don't like microtransactions and what they do for gameplay, either. But I don't see the point in getting worked up about it like this. It's so much easier to just not buy those games, and spend my money on the kinds of games I do enjoy, instead. It leaves me thinking that maybe melodramatic wailing on Reddit is secretly a big part of the fun.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- dvlsg 9y ago
  That's part of the problem, though. For a lot of these games, the player does enjoy them - just not the loot boxes and how they have affected how quickly "free" players can unlock things.

fudgepack99 9y ago

There is no market in a post internet age. The average person is not technologically informed enough to even be a market participant and that is why gaming is such a disaster. The human mind did not evolve to make rational decisions regarding technology and hence the free market is a myth for those who don't grasp evolution did not make our minds to live in a high tech capitalist society.

davidkuhta 9y ago

I held hope based on the studio acquisitions that would allow them work independently and simply pocket the profits. Shuttering Visceral was the nail in the coffin for me.

Asdfbla 9y ago

A sufficient number of people seem to enjoy the games in the end. I guess mission successful for EA?

frik 9y ago

I recently attended a marketing conf, and Electric Arts employees were so pround of ripping of so called whales and their gamification and gambling features in their new Triple-A games. They guys I spoke with had no clue about games, they were not gamers. They said it's all about statistics, KPIs and marketing. Remembering the 1980s and 1990s era of awesome Electronic Arts games (their games were really arts), it's so tragic.