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Are EA a bunch of greedy b******s?

Started by Depressed Beyond Tables, September 18, 2010, 06:27:17 PM

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Depressed Beyond Tables

http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/sports/tigerwoodspgatour11/news.html?sid=6261856

This online pass essentially costs $10 to gain access for second hand copies of games made by EA. It'll apply to the upcoming Fifa11 too and subsequent EA releases. No doubt it'll drive second hand game prices down as each new owner will have to fork out the tenner to go online. Will places like Gamestop feel the pinch or will this come back to bite EA in the ass? If other game developers refuse to use this tactic could they potentially nab a whole host of consumers to their brand?

I think so and hope so. I'd imagine it'll last a year ot two and then they'll abandon it. Greedy bastards.

It's funny to read all the "positive" reviews to this on the net, no doubt reviews by EA themselves.

jutl

Quote from: Depressed Beyond Tables on September 18, 2010, 06:27:17 PMIf other game developers refuse to use this tactic could they potentially nab a whole host of consumers to their brand?

Surely they'll just get many more second-hand owners who use their server resources without actually paying them?

Neil

That's a real pisser, considering you even have to pay just to get access to online gaming with Xbox.  DLC has become an intrinsic part of gaming now too, where they just seem to specifically hold back content, so they can charge extra for it. 

Most second-hand games tend to be quite useless for online gaming, anyway.  By the time they come down in price enough to afford, most people have moved on to the newest games, and all that are left are fanatics that have been there since day one, meaning you get the snot beaten out of you. 

mobias

I'm afraid you're going to have to get used it folks. I know EA have started doing this but I've read that other companies are going to follow them. EA have said for a while now they're pissed off at not making anything from the large second hand gaming market whilst stores like Game etc make a pile of dosh. Thing is EA have been brave or brash enough to speak publicly about it but its actually how a low of games producers feel. As games get ever more expensive to produce games companies are going to want to scrape back more and more money. Unfortunately I think its going to be the future. 


madhair60

Who exactly is that gets the money from second-hand game sales?

Subtle Mocking

Off-topic slightly but this isn't the first time EA have been greedy bastards. Anyone familiar with NFL games will know about how much fans were fucked over by Madden's deal with the NFL. The NFL 2K games were some of my favourite games on the PS2, I got through 2 copies because I played them half to death, and between 2003-2005 I swore by them.

Everything about it was perfect, the physics were fantastic, the extras were actually fun, the graphics were incredible. This is compared to Madden, which at the time was clunky, dull, littered with problems, and double the price of 2k5, which was only £20. So EA Sports decides that they want the NFL all to themselves, so they obviously just take any rights to use it's name and tell the rest to fuck off. Madden 2006 comes along, back up to £40, and it's still shit. Despite this, critics still seem to wank themselves to death over Madden, even in this years edition in which fuck all has changed.

So in short, fuck off EA Sports.

Aren't most online multiplayer parts of games pretty much deserted after a short few months? (I'm not justifying this move from the likes of THQ/EA.)

mobias

Quote from: madhair60 on September 18, 2010, 07:28:15 PM
Who exactly is that gets the money from second-hand game sales?

The retailer and the retailer alone and as we all know there is a huge market in second hand games.

In reply to Subtle Mocking.  EA are generally considered to be the most vile company in all of gaming. I think in the last couple of years they've improved slightly but within the industry they have a dreadful reputation and throughout a lot of the Noughties they lost a lot of key games designers to other companies as they were renowned for having dreadful working conditions compared to other studios. Go to the wiki entry and scroll down to the criticism section http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EA

They're similar to Microsoft in that they're also renowned for buying up smaller companies that make perfectly good products and then utterly shafting them. Hence there was utter dismay a couple of years ago when they tried a hostile take-over of Take Two games the owners of Rockstar. Luckily it didn't happen.

Anyway I've never forgiven them for giving the boot to my all time favourite games series SSX. That was a classic case of all the games key talent deserting the company to work elsewhere so basically they decided to can it.

ps you may interested to know one of the biggest shareholders in EA games and good friend of its CEO is none other than Bono.

madhair60

Activision are way worse now.  EA have redeemed themselves, at least in my eyes.

If only the retailer gets money from pre-owned sales, then this whole move kind of makes sense to me.

Neil

Why should the games companies actually expect to get income from second-hand sales?  Since when is that acceptable?  Once you sell the game on, you are no longer using their online service, someone else is.  Either way, a payment has been made for that copy of the game, and that should be an end to it.  Once this becomes the norm, then I'd bet that the online pass simply won't even be bundled for free anymore - it's only a matter of time.

vrailaine

Yeah, I dunno, 2nd hand games are hideously overpriced in general.

Surely the developers will have to accommodate for larger traffic levels due to people buying the second hand games and giving them potentially twice the amount of online usage?

Puffin Chunks

To be honest, I don't see this as a long term issue. I would have thought that in the next console generation or two, the premise of actually buying a physical copy of a game will have fallen by the wayside and it will all have moved to digital distribution. Look at the success of Steam on the PC and to a lesser extent XBLA and the PSN for smaller games. 2nd hand games will no longer exist, as they will just be a string of 1's and 0's on your hard drive.

PS3 still hasn't been hacked (at least not to a level that allows you to play copied games), so it is unlikely that these games will be able to be copied from one console to another. You will probably have some kind of license that comes with a game that enables you to bring it with you if/when you upgrade your console. I would imagine they'll even lock out games so that if you were to sell your console the installed games will not work for the new user.

This is all supposition, but it seems to be the natural progression for me.

Famous Mortimer

Compare this behaviour to behaviour for other second-hand products and see if it makes any sense or seems so reasonable.

Luckily, the sort of games EA put out aren't the sort of games I like to play (I tried Tiger Woods '10, and it was difficult to the point of impossibility - computer players regularly getting rounds of 57 and 58 to beat you) so this won't affect me. There is a rather obvious solution to this problem, it seems. Stop playing EA games until they get the message. 

mobias

#13
Quote from: Puffin Chunks on September 19, 2010, 07:54:08 AM
To be honest, I don't see this as a long term issue. I would have thought that in the next console generation or two, the premise of actually buying a physical copy of a game will have fallen by the wayside and it will all have moved to digital distribution.

We're still further away from that than most people think but you're right it will come eventually. However as Sony have said, the network infrastructure isn't there yet in a fair few conountries for the next generation of consoles not to have an optical drive and most people think the next generation is about 2-3 years away now. With every generational leap in gaming games sizes go up hugely. Its been leaked that Sony are looking into putting a Blu-Ray BDSL drive nto the Playstation 4 and that's a disc capable of holding 100GB of data.

There's no doubt that digital distribution is the future for a lot of gaming but its whether or not the actual hardware infrastructure in a lot of countries including our own can keep up with the growth rate of the data needed for each generational leap. And before anyone says its in Sony's and Microsoft's interests for everyone to keep on buying physical copies of games. I can assure it it most certainly isn't. Sony are still massively loss making with the PS3 and that is almost purely down to the inclusion of blu-ray. If they could ditch the optical drive from the PS4 and go purely digital from the playstation store they would in an instant.     

Father O`Blivion

Quote from: Puffin Chunks on September 19, 2010, 07:54:08 AM
2nd hand games will no longer exist, as they will just be a string of 1's and 0's on your hard drive.
I doubt they'll even be on your hard drive. If they give out the 1's and 0's in any form then there's always the possibility that someone will figure out how to feck with them.
I was under the impression that the games industry are working towards a full 'Cloud' type solution where all games are stored on big server farms and punters are charged a per hour fee for access.

The way it's going I reckon that eventually all Sony TV's will come with a built in Playstation and the likes of LG and Samsung will do a deal with Microsoft to launch competing models with a built in Xbox.
If all the content is stored and accessed remotely then all you need to add is an Ethernet port, a basic OS chip and a graphics chip, the only thing currently holding them back is the woefully inadequate broadband infrastructure in countries like the UK.

mobias

Quote from: Father O`Blivion on September 19, 2010, 03:01:34 PM

I was under the impression that the games industry are working towards a full 'Cloud' type solution where all games are stored on big server farms and punters are charged a per hour fee for access.


Probably will go that way eventually especially for certain types of games. But again it comes down to network infrastructure and whether or not peoples broadband can handle the data needed and speed required. If you're an avid online gamer you'll know how annoying lag can be. As games get more and more complex and resolutions get higher and higher the data needed to be transferred could well out race the rate at which the network's performance is updated. If high resolution cloud gaming was as close to being a viable reality as its makers insist it is then Sony and Microsoft would be taking it a lot more seriously than they are. There will be gaming consoles for a long time yet I think

Shoulders?-Stomach!

Here's another idea- would it be possible in the future for it all to be dealt with online? Not only the games but the actual hardware too. What if all the kit to run the game wasn't even in a console or a tv but all managed online on their big-ass servers while the games files were stored virtually too?





jutl

Quote from: Shoulders?-Stomach! on September 19, 2010, 03:58:57 PM
Here's another idea- would it be possible in the future for it all to be dealt with online? Not only the games but the actual hardware too. What if all the kit to run the game wasn't even in a console or a tv but all managed online on their big-ass servers while the games files were stored virtually too?

OnLive are touting an as-yet-unreleased service that works like this. It sounds like bollocks to me, given current infrastructure.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-onlive-lag-analysis

The problem with attacking EA over this is that - in the current model - publishers are incentivised to close down their multiplayer servers asap. As time passes after release, the proportion of players who have given the publisher any money for the game gets lower and lower, while  the 'responsibility' to keep the servers open potentially extends a long time after no more money is actually coming in. If new 'online' players chip in regardless of whether their copy is second hand or not, there's a revenue stream associated with keeping the servers up and it will only taper off when actual interest tapers off.

mobias

Quote from: Shoulders?-Stomach! on September 19, 2010, 03:58:57 PM
Here's another idea- would it be possible in the future for it all to be dealt with online? Not only the games but the actual hardware too. What if all the kit to run the game wasn't even in a console or a tv but all managed online on their big-ass servers while the games files were stored virtually too?

That's exactly what cloud gaming is. All the processing is done in the cloud so all that gets pumped to you is the game image, a bit like television. Trouble is, that's a lot of data that needs to go to a fro. Cloud gaming is already out there http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive  its just no where near being able to be mainstream.

Neil

Quote from: jutl on September 19, 2010, 04:10:33 PM
The problem with attacking EA over this is that - in the current model - publishers are incentivised to close down their multiplayer servers asap. As time passes after release, the proportion of players who have given the publisher any money for the game gets lower and lower, while  the 'responsibility' to keep the servers open potentially extends a long time after no more money is actually coming in. If new 'online' players chip in regardless of whether their copy is second hand or not, there's a revenue stream associated with keeping the servers up and it will only taper off when actual interest tapers off.

That doesn't really make much sense, because it totally overlooks the people who play the game from day one, and then never really stop playing it.  For instance, people still play Quake 3 Arena on the PC, and it came out in 1999.  I'm sure people still play the original Gears Of War on Xbox too, and not all of them will be people who have picked it up second-hand.  All this does is tax the poor.

I was under the impression EA had already started closing down servers, anyway, simply so they could force people to buy that years Madden game, with its slight updates, rather than just continuing to play the old ones which are only superficially different. 

jutl

Quote from: Neil on September 19, 2010, 04:37:00 PM
That doesn't really make much sense, because it totally overlooks the people who play the game from day one, and then never really stop playing it.  For instance, people still play Quake 3 Arena on the PC, and it came out in 1999.  I'm sure people still play the original Gears Of War on Xbox too, and not all of them will be people who have picked it up second-hand.  All this does is tax the poor.

Over time, though, the proportion will certainly start to include more and more second hand owners. You might still have some hardcore first-hand owners in there, but that doesn't actually help keep the servers up. Quake III has the crucial difference that end users can run their own servers.

QuoteI was under the impression EA had already started closing down servers, anyway, simply so they could force people to buy that years Madden game, with its slight updates, rather than just continuing to play the old ones which are only superficially different.

Yes, and in the current model that's the best way of keeping revenue coming in to support the servers - it's just what I was saying in the previous post. Kill the last one, sell the next one.

Neil

Quote from: jutl on September 19, 2010, 04:41:00 PM
Quake III has the crucial difference that end users can run their own servers.

I know - I was using it as an example of 'brand loyalty.'

QuoteYes, and in the current model that's the best way of keeping revenue coming in to support the servers - it's just what I was saying in the previous post. Kill the last one, sell the next one.

So in other words, they don't really care that second hand gamers are playing on their servers, they just want to try and force them into buying the newest iteration by making the old ones more unattractive?  That's still just greed, and a way of taking gaming away from people who can barely afford it in the first place. 

Shoulders?-Stomach!

But for EA, particularly EA sports, that's all the yearly update is.

Subtle Mocking

Quote from: Shoulders?-Stomach! on September 19, 2010, 05:32:35 PM
But for EA, particularly EA sports, that's all the yearly update is.

Exactly. As I say, they've not bothered to change Madden at all for the last two years (rosters and the odd kit aside), but they can still charge £40 for it in the lead-up to Christmas.

Shoulders?-Stomach!

It gets especially bad when the consoles are several years old and there's literally nothing they can do more graphically or in terms of game interface (not without losing the fanbase anyway).

I always tended to buy FIFA every other year until the brilliant 2009 one came out. Now I have no idea what to do.

Subtle Mocking

Quote from: Shoulders?-Stomach! on September 19, 2010, 05:40:12 PM
I always tended to buy FIFA every other year until the brilliant 2009 one came out. Now I have no idea what to do.

Apparently this years is even better but I'm also a bit apprehensive, seeing as EA Sports games always get a good write-up, no matter how little has changed.

jutl

Quote from: Neil on September 19, 2010, 05:02:20 PMSo in other words, they don't really care that second hand gamers are playing on their servers, they just want to try and force them into buying the newest iteration by making the old ones more unattractive?  That's still just greed, and a way of taking gaming away from people who can barely afford it in the first place.

No, that's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying that they care a great deal about second hand gamers (as a problem) as they are people for whom they have to provide a service but with no accompanying revenue stream. Whether this is greedy or not essentially depends on how lucrative the whole activity is for them. Overall EA has been losing money until the last two quarters, when it's done OK on most metrics. Interestingly EA have changed their accounting practice in order to better reflect the ongoing costs of running online services associated with games:

Quote"Change in Deferred Net Revenue (Packaged Goods and Digital Content). Beginning in fiscal 2008, Electronic Arts was no longer able to objectively determine the fair value of the online service included in certain of its packaged goods games and online content. As a result, the Company began recognizing the revenue from the sale of these games and content over the estimated online service period. Although Electronic Arts defers the recognition of a significant portion of its net revenue as a result of this change, there has been no adverse impact to its operating cash flow. Internally, Electronic Arts' management excludes the impact of the change in deferred net revenue related to packaged goods games and digital content in its non-GAAP financial measures when evaluating the Company's operating performance, when planning, forecasting and analyzing future periods, and when assessing the performance of its management team. The Company believes that excluding the impact of the change in deferred net revenue from its operating results is important to facilitate comparisons to prior periods during which the Company was able to objectively determine the fair value of the online service and not delay the recognition of significant amounts of net revenue related to online-enabled packaged goods."

In the last quarter, the difference between using the old metric and the new one changed a $96m net profit into a $78m loss:

http://investor.ea.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=496057


glitch

Quote from: Puffin Chunks on September 19, 2010, 07:54:08 AM
PS3 still hasn't been hacked (at least not to a level that allows you to play copied games), so it is unlikely that these games will be able to be copied from one console to another.

http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/08/19/139235/PS3-Hacked-via-USB-Dongle

Also I swear I've seen PS3 ROMs for download on certain torrent sites for years.

Subtle Mocking

Although the most recent PS3 update has made it considerably more difficult to hack into PS3s, I'm sure they'll probably find a way around it.

Consignia

Quote from: glitch on September 19, 2010, 06:14:19 PM
Also I swear I've seen PS3 ROMs for download on certain torrent sites for years.

There's been rips for years, but no sod has been able to do anything with them. They were always there just for when it all kicked off.