So, amid all the wild shenanigans that Xbox and PlayStation have been wading through creating, EA decided that they had been quiet for far too long. EA, once voted the worst company in America for two years running in the tens. Watching PS and Xbox get so much pub f or self-imploding must have really gotten on their nerves. “I got to get me some of that!”–some muckety-muck at EA, probably.
Why do I say that? Because they did something so bonehead and unfathomable (well, it’s fathomable when you remember that companies are souless entities who only care about making a profit and not at all about people or their customers), people are calling for a…boycott of sorts.
In a nutshell, they released their new college football game and took out the “easy mode”. I have included a video down below from SnowBike Mike who works at Kinda Funny Games in which he explains what the issue is. As I understand it, there was a slider that allowed you to adjust to how much experience points you earned in two of the offline modes. Andy Cortez read from an article written by Lewis Parker at Kotaku that outlines the problem. Spoiler–microtransactions. It’s microtransactions. Actual, there’s nothing micro about it. It’s just transactions, really. There’s more to it, but basically, they’re saying you have to pay actual real life money to get the XP rather than use the slider–which no longer exists (at least the easier side of it).
Now, you gotta pay a hundo to get your coach leveled up properly. Someone calculated that you would have to win something like a hundred championships to do it ‘naturally’.
Well, well, well. Reading through the article, it seems that EA has backed down. I don’t know if it’s enough for the people who want to buy the game/bought the game, but at least understood that what they did was not cool. So very not cool.
Some content creators were really upset, too, because they promoted the game and played a demo of it that did not have microtransactions in it. In other words, EA knew what they were doing was shady, and they deliberately hid it forom the very people they were depending on to promote their game.
Which is astoundingly short-sighted. Content creators can generate so much good will for your game–or, by contrast, call for their followers to ‘play, not pay’–which one content creator did in response to the news of the microtransactions. Also, it wasn’t as if EA could have hidden it for very long–and, indeed, the outcry was swift and vicious. The reviews on Steam are mostly negative (we’ll see how that changes with the new news from EA), and all of them are clear about the fact that it’s because of the greed and not the gameplay. Most people think the actual gameplay is great.
It was such a massive fail on so many levels.We know that corporations are not people (despite what the US Supreme Court decreed), and they only care about money. Maybe not all of them, but the vast majority. I’m not even against them caring mostly about money because that is, by definition, their job.
What I am objecting against is the deceit, the shadiness, and the outright greed. Look. We know that certain companies (EA) will stuff as many microtransactions (EA) into a game as possible (EA), especially their sports game. Do I know that for sure? No. It feels like it, though. Am I going to look it up? Also no.
This is the worst of the AAA scene, and it was just another shit sandwich to chomp on along with Xbox layoffs and PlaySations no physical discs bullshit. By the way, as to the physical disc announcement, I’ve read up more about it. I can see why people are so concerned about it, especially as it means that there is nothing tangible to literally (and I mean literally literally) hang onto.
As I’ve said, if at any point, they shut their doors, I have nothing to say that my games are mine. They have stated in the past that if that happened,, they would remove the DRM, so the games would actually be in the hands of the players. So they’vee said.
Do I believe them? Yes. And no. I believe that they would intend to do that. I believe that they are one of the better companies (in some ways. In other ways, very much not so, but I’m not getting into it). However, they are still a company, which means doing what’s in their best interest. If it makes sense for them to do it, they will. If it doesn’t, they won’t. I will say that I don’t think they will shut down any time soon, but still.
In addition, they have pulled games from the shelves and made them unavailable to play. It doesn’t happen often, but it has happened. Which means they could do it to any game. Not to mention games they refuse to publish at all (not getting into that, either).
You could say it’s similar for movies and music, but there are still discs for both. And they are fairly readily available. Blu-rays, too. I think the last is stil fairly popular? I would say that music-wise, people aren’t listening to discs so much. Mostly Spotify and such.
So it’s not a surprise that video game discs are almost nonexistent, too. But it does make me uneasy because I have the weird feeling that a hundred years from now, people won’t even know that some games existed. Or be able to play them.
I’m not saying that every game needs to be preserved (or every anything, realyl), but I feel uneasy that vast swaths of games could disappear in a blink of an eye, and no one would notice or care. Again, I know that’s how it goes. Many ephemeral things are permanently lost to the annals of time. But it’s different when it’s deliberate at the time it’s created.
Things are really bad in the gaming industry right now. However, it’s more a reflection of what is happening in the world in general than anything else.
I have more to say, but I need to sleep. More tomorrow.