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EA Outs Battlefield 4, Plans To Charge $70 For New Games
Justus writes "Posts at NeoGAF and IGN show that a quickly-removed Origin advertisement for Medal of Honor: Warfighter reveals plans for Battlefield 4 and a new-game cost of $70. With Battlefield 3 DLC promised through 2013 and PC games cheaper than ever with things like the Steam Summer Sale, are gamers ready to buy Battlefield 4 at next-gen pricing?"
"Outs" Battlefield 4? What, are they going to be in rainbow camouflage or something?
Loved the series before it so I preordered. I finally get the game and find it has created the most elitist and troll infested cesspool of a game I've ever encountered. Between the stat padders on Operation Metro and the server admins kicking me for outscoring them, I got fed up. I think the final straw was when forum 'discussions' degenerated into the person with the highest KD ratio automatically being right about everything. The community killed that game.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
Quit your bitchin'
Episodic content can be done well if you can push episodes out on a schedule. Game devs should take a page from TV and code ("film") all their episodes in advance then release them every 2 months or something. Basically, buffer the entire "season" and release it incrementally.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
I stopped buying EA games when every single one started having a web interfaced that required me to download a browser plug-in to launch a windows EXE on my local hard drive.
I don't want to download your shitty browser plug-in and be forced to use a shitty browser just to launch the game. I want to click one button to launch the executable and be in the game.
I won't spend $70 on any EA game. I won't even play a Free to Play EA game because of this.
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It was $70 at Target. That was almost 20 years ago. Now games have better graphics, better replayability, on-line multiplayer, etc. and they sell new from $40-$60. That's not bad given the progression since then. I'd ask you to get off my lawn now, but it's been paved over with concrete.
that was 20 something years ago, and hell if you dont want to pay 70 2012 bucks for a game that has higher production quality than most movies from 20 something years ago and gives you months of entertainment, wait
yea OMFG wait, by Christmas it will be in the sub 30$ bin at walmart and still have thousands of players.
of all the things people can bitch and whine about new games, cost is not really one of them
a 2600 game would cost you 77 bucks today
a SNES game would cost you 79 bucks today
Metal Gear solid would cost you 84 bucks today
(and we haven't even left the 90's yet)
so please STFU that game prices have not inflated equally with everything else, they have actually gotten cheaper!
I play PC games through steam, and I'm patient. Haven't paid more than $30 for a game in years, and I'm not about to start.
Current PC Game prices here in Australia have been in the $70-$100 range for years, yes even this year where our dollar is worth more than yours.
I'd say it's nice to see you finally playing catch-up if it weren't for the fact that it's only going to translate to $150 games here.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Your argument is flawed. Back then, games were a niche market. Less people were buying them, the industry was just getting started, and games came with manuals.
Today, games are prevalent, the market is understood, and the industry has been around a while. They also have no manuals.
However, cost is going up because industries are getting greedy and are creating a false environment of "games are in trouble thus we must raise prices".
Price points to me are irrelevant and should be for any semi-intelligent buyer. Look at the product, look at the price and see if it's worth it. I'd be happy to pay $200 for a game that was worth $200. BF4 however I doubt I'll pick up even at $10 as that series (and CoD) have been downhill since BF1942 and CoD4. However I'm not naive enough to think that most people will take that stance. Many people happily go to get fleeced at a local, highly over priced store rather than shopping for physical copies online, or getting a digital copy - ie. steam specials. The more EA gets hammered pulling silly stunts like this the better it'll be for gaming as it's bound to sink in sooner or later that they're being idiots. "Here's the same thing we sold you last year, but you get to pay an extra $10 on top of what you paid last time, whooooo!!!"
It is in Australia. Even when our dollar buys more than the US.
Of course I'm not ready for "next gen" prices. I'm not even willing to pay the current gen prices. If I can't wait it out for the price to come down by at least 50%, I won't buy it.
It doesn't help that almost all commercial PC games come in the form of sloppy console ports these days. I wouldn't even consider pirating them. If there wasn't such a strong indie game market I probably wouldn't buy any new games at all.
eg. a "new release" shooter from ebgames (gamestop) $68AU, which is about $70 US.
https://www.ebgames.com.au/pc-150873-Spec-Ops-The-Line-PC
In other news, US companies overcharge foreigners.
Your argument is flawed--$35 of that $70 price was for the media itself because cartridges were expensive little buggers. Today DVD's cost pennies.
SNES cartridges carried a much higher cost than a plain stamped optical disc or downloaded content.
This is the same EA who recently said that they were going to a full-on digital company too, and cutting out the middleman(aka retail boxed stores) eventually. Well, isn't that interesting. You'd think, maybe, just possibly, they'd take the reasonable approach and sell something for less and in turn make more money by selling more copies. Instead of charging more money, and selling one copy.
Om, nomnomnom...
Have you ever heard of this thing called "inflation"?
If your statement is true, how come stuff like food and cars are not getting cheaper, although I'm pretty sure their market is also quite understood?
>ubi
>activision
>worse than EA
Yeah nah. EA are scum, always have been. Activision just rehash their crap and charge $15 for map packs without shame but they know that they provide a service and at least respect their paying customers. EA are the worst kind of hypocrites, flooding the market with crappy sports titles and generic cod-clones and then claim to be "a driving force of innovation". They say they will never do sales like steam sales, because it devalues games. Have you seen Origin lately? Sale Sale Sale Sale. Not only that, you try getting support on your title. I'm sure if you've kept up with gaming news you know all about EA's retarded banning policy, and how they handled people criticising Bioware. EA spit in the face of their customers.
Ubi just have crappy drm and price gouging. They aren't actively malicious like EA.
Sales of games have gone up as well. More people buy them, and marginal cost has gone way, WAY down. Console cartridges had a fairly high marginal cost. Those chips weren't that cheap. DVDs cost next to nothing, a full boxed game costs $1-2 at most to make. Digital distribution is even cheaper, costing only a few cents for a download at most and the cost is borne entirely by the company running the DD service.
Also DD allows for more profit per title. Steam, Impulse, etc take less of a cut than retail. Standard retail markup is usually 100%. So if you want a retailer to sell your product for $60, you have to charge them $30. Just the kind of margins required to make money with all the costs of retail. DD charges less, Steam doesn't reveal their specifics but it is more around a 30/70 split (70% to you) than the 50/50 of retail.
Of course if the DD happens to be owned by the company then all they pay is the cost to host and transfer it to customers (usually they outsource that to someone like Akamai) which as I said is only a few cents.
So really it seems to make sense that maybe games should be costing less. Yes the product cost is higher, but distribution costs are very low and of course we all know from ECON 200 that lower prices equal more sales.
The question is all one of value for the money. If they want $70 for their game and other companies will sell them on sale on Steam for $20, then maybe they don't get many people paying $70.
Remember when Street Fighter II came out for SNES? It was $70 at Target. That was almost 20 years ago.
A large part of that $70 price tag was actual manufacturing costs. Street Fighter II was the first 16MBit SNES game, and producing ROM cartridges that large was not cheap at the time.
I don't really want to pay more for a product, no one does, but I'd be one of those people who'd pay more for BF4. Why?
Because I've had more hours out of it than just about any game I paid $60 for by quite a margin. The cost relative to the amount of entertainment I'd get out of it would still be better than most $60 titles - to me, $70 for 120hrs of entertainment is still far better than than the average $60 for maybe 10 - 20hrs of entertainment I get out of most games.
In contrast I don't pay $70 for CoD anymore, because it just got ever shitter since World at War culminating in the abysmal fuckup of a game that was Black Ops. If it started to get better again I might, but the franchise has just dropped to the level of a A shooter rather than an AAA shooter, and I can pick up any number of A rated shooters released over the years for fuck all - they're 10 a penny.
I don't have a problem paying a bit more for something that's actually worth it, what I wont pay more for is shit.
* use standard media instead of hardware media (DVD/blue ray vs cartridge)
* Better distribution channel.
* Bigger market
* Development cost (code) lower due to library / engine / plug in software solutions
* re-usage of some artisitic/texture
* better software practice, standard, and sof forth
That made game much cheaper to produce than it was a long time ago. In fact, you have to wonder why the price stay fixed at 50$ rather than go lower, seeing the poor quality of certain products and obvious , VERY obvious reusage of assets (dragon age 2 for example).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
GP didn't call him/herself a customer. (S)he said they don't know how to treat their customers, so it makes sense (s)he's not interested in spending $70 to become one.
(I'm not taking any position on whether (s)he should or not download the game illegally)
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I guess they'll release Battlefield 4 before "the future" then, as it is the same EA that predicts that in the future all games will be free.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
I bet those crooks will sell or allow the evil aussie ozziesoft or who ever, have country wide exclusive distribution rights, and have their own 40% markup for zero work.
EA, please dump/ignore ALL au middle men, setup your own EAAU HQ, and use it to bring in all games at true true true wholesale prices ($40USD) and sell them to AU shops at 65AU, so they can retail for $70AU in shops, below every single retailer selling competitors products in AU for $110+.
Screw the middle men, the exact work they do is nothing special that EA cannot do themselves in AU.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
If they've upgraded the game engine significantly, opened up the world (or at least removed the artillery insta-death wall around all the levels), and made the enemy take wounding damage and react accordingly, then yes, that's a distinct improvement over previous iterations of the franchise. If it's just what amounts to a map pack for the same engine with a short-ass totally linear single-player campaign bolted on, then it's Doom with extra shiniez and they can go phuq themselves.
I'm going to use my awesome psychic powers here to predict that it's a map pack with a 10-hour campaign bolted on, and a handful of obscure weapons added to the multiplayer. Because that's much, much cheaper than actually doing any work.
Most games companies (excluding Valve) are no longer in the business of providing top-quality entertainment. Their job now is to figure out precisely how little they can give you, and how much they can charge you, before you finally vote with your wallet and go somewhere else. You know that if the game makers came up with a 16-hour campaign, the publishers would release an 8-hour campaign, and 2 x 4-hour DLC.
I haven't bought anything in the last 6 months that wasn't on Steam. Still working through Arkham City, Psychonauts, Serious Sam 3, Braid, Rock of Ages, and Assassins Creed. I don't need or want to buy any new games at $70 or UKP equivalent - I'll just wait until they show up on Steam in a year for half that.
Stop complaining about game prices, you only make yourself look stupid.
$50 in 2002 = $63.86 today
$50 in 1992 = $81.82 today
$50 in 1982 = $120.04 today
Games have actually gotten cheaper, not more expensive over the decades, because their prices have not kept up with inflation.
We typically get charged $130-150 for new console games. The PC equivalents are around $100 so a bit cheaper. The NZ$ is currently worth 80 US cents so you do the maths.
The part that really disgusts me is that NZ salaries are significantly lower than the US and yet entertainment costs are way higher. Heck, I can buy Blu ray discs from the UK for half the cost delivered than I can just by going to JB Hifi down the road. Shame that Amazon UK won't sell us games too because the UK prices on those are typically half the cost of the same game here too.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
I wont be. Why?
Because Battlefield 3 was shit. Because they made the unlocables too lopsided, because after they charge you the US$70 which translates into no less then A$150 they still want $20 odd a month for premium which like unlockables, will be so lopsided as to make the game unplayable if you don't pony up the monthly danegeld, sorry, subscription fee.
BF 1942 and BF2 were works of art, BF Bad Company 2 was good, BF3 was just a huge steaming pile of unbalanced crap that I stopped playing after 3 days.
I haven't paid for COD since COD United Offensive back when CoD was a decent game.
I do have a problem with paying more, games are overpriced as they are but there's always some numpty that doesn't think when handing over money for the latest call of halo or whatever. To be frank, it's what is killing the games industry by rewarding publishers who release mediocre sequels with a large percentage of the budget dedicated to marketing.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
is 2017... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mV-gnh1En6E
I, for one, probably won't be. Battlefield is getting worse.
-BF3 has, in general, meh maps. Flags are clustered in the center rather than spread out. Map design compromises for multiple game types make them mediocre for Conquest AND Rush. So, there might be lots of space, but no reason to be there.
-Login/usage issues with Origin and Battlelog.
-Taclights I could light my whole house with.The blinding factor would be tolerable, if it only did that in dark environments. But even in bright daylight, its just as blinding.
-Being able to fire through cover as long as your hairline is above it. Meaning the shooter is visually all but unexposed, usually including the muzzle flash.
-No squad voice comm. You must do this either by Battlelog party or third party software. I do so love stopping to type to my random pub squadmates.
-Oh, and the love from EA/DICE: if you were one of the pre-order crew, thanks for supporting us! We'll show you consideration by making you pay for Back to Karkand like everybody else when you buy Premium. If you -bought- Back to Karkand.. bahahahahhahaha, we love you even more.
On less egregious notes:
-"decline revive" does not solve the issue of derpfibrilation. Fixing that would require something more like a short (~2 second?) timer during which you can accept a revive. If you accept, then you revive. Cannot extend revivability past your normal respawn timer. If you do not accept, you respawn as normal and no points are awarded to the medic.
-Jumping should not be a part of faster infantry movement.
-Vaulting still not great. Windows that you can vault.. on to. And then you have to crouch walk to get through. Really, DICE? Other objects that look like you should be able to vault, but it just jumps and won't let you over. Awesome.
-Randomly get "caught" on nothing, making you let go of the movement key and hit it again to move.
-Wonky hit detection declaring headshots that don't look like they hit the head. Other shots not being declared headshots, despite the blood spray from.. the head.
I bought Mass Effect 3 and you wouldn't believe all the hoops I had to jump through just to play the game. One of them was as silly as downloading the game files from the EA server even if I had them on the DVDs I had bought. The Origin client was a beta version, and when I contacted EA support to ask for a stable, they said they don't have one. I also asked if I could play the game if Origin network is shut down. The answer was that it's a new network and it's constantly expanding, so I shouldn't worry about it shutting down.
Never again.
Only dumb birds land downwind.
I've never paid more that $30 for a game, normally won't buy a new game for more thatn $20, and usually wait for sales or other discounts. I've got the money, but I find games rarely deliver the entertainment value for the cost. I've never purchased a game at the current $60 price point, so I'd expect more gamers to start passing on the triple-A releases, or DLC driven games.
I'd suggest Binding of Isaac, that's GREAT value for the money. It's like $3 and I've played it for 40+ hours while others have gone past the 100 hour mark!
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
It's a typo, he meant EA. Because in the EU you pay 70€ for console games.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
I can not even remember the last time I paid $60 for a new game, let alone $70. Thank goodness Walmart exists to keep game companies honest, because gamestop certainly does not put up much of a fight in the price department (new releases routinely are $60 or $70 on Gamestop pre-order, but on actual day of release, Walmart puts em out at $49.99
Please stop using the term "next-gen" for every goddamn thing.
"Next-gen pricing" is an abomination. Overcharging is not even "next-gen", it's old fashioned "squeeze consumers for every penny", early 20th century greed. The kind that makes your customers lose enough respect that they wait for SKIDROW to come out with the unofficial demo.
Anyway, Battlefield 3 was overpriced by about $20. At $39 I would have felt like it was a worthwhile purchase. At $59 I felt ripped-off. The additional customers EA would have gotten at the lower price point would have more than made up for the lower price-per-unit and maybe your customers wouldn't hate you so much.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I paid 70$ for Super Mario Brothers 3 when it came out. It was totally worth it! I bet this game won't be as good though.
Gas Guzzlers Combat Carnage is the one I'd recommend. It's a hoot. You can race and you can kill. That covers everything.
It's made by these really nice guys who care about it and will someday be making AAA games. They are helpful and have made some adjustments when the game was a little unbalanced early on.
It's cheap, it's fun and you will get your money's worth many times over. If such things matter to you, on the hardest level it is almost impossible to win.
Seriously, there are tons of really good games out there that don't cost $70. And the list of reasons to hate EA is so long I don't know where to start. Why not support developers who care about PC gaming?
You are welcome on my lawn.
The only time I was kicked from a game was in Metro.
And guess what: All of Xbox Live has been Metro since December 6, 2011.
I don't want it and won't buy it. After the farce of 6Gb+ of "updates" being required for B3 I'm completely off buying anything from EA again. Why should you have to download the DLC you have no intention of paying for just to continue playing the game? No thanks, I'll stick with 1943 and BBC2 (both brilliant games), and switch to MW or whatever when the servers are finally turned off, EA have lost my custom for good. I did try to get in touch with them regarding the "updates" but they wouldn't talk to me because I "didn't have the right date of birth". I used the data protection act to get hold of all of the data they hold on me, and my DOB was correct, so that's two big fails.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
They should price the games according to the country being sold, like it's happening for years now with drugs. The can't complain for piracy when they sell a 70$ game to someone gaining 7$ a day. All these lost profits have the potential to lower the price for everyone.
We need less geo-restrictions, not more.
except people won't buy a game that makes you pay for each of its 12 'episodes'. i think its better if they just start making longer games.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
Commodities like food and transportation has already reached its base point - they are sold at just barely above material cost - sometimes below when subsidized by outside sources such as the government. The profit margin is miniscule, which is part of why food costs the same and farmers are making such piss-poor money compared to 10 years ago, and why auto makers are constantly getting bailed out.
If the video game industry charged just over cost of programmer time, API licensing, and distribution costs, we'd be left with a $10 game, online distro only. Hm, it's almost like it has been done before.
In an open source community where you don't usually pay the devs and digital distribution is free, you can theoretically create full commercial products for free. Look at OpenOffice. Do you think they're making money like Microsoft? Of course not.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
Not released yet, but soon. Free to play (not pay to win) FPS, 2000 players in 64 sqkm maps, combined arms, 10 person squads, huge customization options, the list goes on.
That was the Theban sacred band. Thebes is in Greece, not Italy.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Never stopped from the sounds of it.
========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
Hey now, this has been a part of BF since the beginning. Used to be really fun back in those 1942 days base jumping off some of the bridges above the canyons.
"Dre don't get as high as me.... I'm Cheech and Chong" - Snoop Dogg
They tried charging $70 for new games in Canada a few years back - everyone scoffed until they dropped the price back down. Besides, I don't remember the last time I paid more than $20 for a game.
I don't know about that, I used to buy a ton of EA games, especially the MoH series and after they moved to Origin and cranked up the douchebaggery to 11 i haven't bought a single thing from them, and I know several people who have done the same.
Sure like Madden you'll always have the hardcores, like my friend Dale who actually has a deal set up with the local gamestop so every Madden and NASCAR game is dropped off at his house on release day so its waiting when he gets off work, but you're certainly not gonna grow if ALL you get is the hardcore. Since EA has cranked the asshole meter I'd love to see the before and after figures because i wouldn't be surprised if they are running off all but the hardcore which will limit the growth and longevity of the series. compare to valve that actually treats customers decently where I've already dropped a good $150 on the sale for me and my boys and its just getting started.
In the end if you support pricks? You deserve to get fucked. While I know the 3 sales that would have gone to me and my boys won't be noticed by EA if enough guys get tired of being treated like dirt by these corporate asswipes then we CAN see a difference. I bet the guys that are making Torchlight II are quite happy for example at the douchebag behavior surrounding D3 as i bought copies for my whole family and I know many that joined me in buying TL2 over D3. Support those that treat you right and be sure to send an email to EA telling them why you won't be buying from them. if they see sales drop enough they'll have to rethink being giant pricks or get into another line of work. I agree with Jim Sterling that EA is "A prime example of the bloated, wasteful, shitting mess that is triple A gaming" and frankly we should all give assholes like that a big piss off and go elsewhere.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
EA seems to really like DLCs. I propose a solution to pay $60 and DLCs to enhance a barely-functional game.
Separate DLC packages at $1 minimum for:
1) knife
2) handguns
3) rifle
4) a playable character
5) explosives
6) Ammunition
7) being able to run
8) crouching option
9) first-aid packs
10) ability to chat with others
These 10 packs would bring the cost back to $70. If you're the peaceful type and want to play the game without killing anyone, you only pay $1 to purchase a playable character.
I paid $23 for The Orange Box, which had 3 games. My total play time across all of them is around 1,000 (thousand) hours.
Sorry, your explanation makes some sense, but in the end, you are paying for overpriced product and more profits are going to EA's exec pockets.
BF3 required an investment of 500eur for a GPU to just make the game playable.
You can play the game easily with a nVidia GTX460 or with the ATi 4870, either of which you can get for less than $150 in the US. I'm confident that even with the Euro markup, you can do it for under 200 euros.
Wow ... I didn't realize Peter Moore posted on slashdot! How's the stock holding up these days :) Maybe you need more ads in your premium mobile games?
Tell me, if current games are truly worth sixty dollars a pop, then why do they plunge in the value within the first six months? There are only a handful of titles that can maintain that price for over a year while a vast majority of them fall to the toilet. That tells me that the majority of games are over priced and guess what ... they are. God - duke nukem forever went from sixty dollars to ten dollars - new - in six months. Overpriced much?
Comparing two prices from two different decades without taking into account other factors is incredibly naive. The gaming market has exploded in that time. It's gone from a handful of millions to billions of paying customers. Computing power has gone through the roof. The necessary skills to build these games has substantially dropped and while budgets have increased so has the profits by a wide margin. By all accounts, these games should be far cheaper than they are. Not the silly inflation math you are using. The used market would not be so out of control if this were the case.
A funny thing has also happened in this time period. Sequels are pushed out faster, content is held back in the form of consumables, we're watching the rise online passes, and now the most odious of all - free to play games that end up becoming quite the cash cow (75% of apple's top twenty grossing games are free to play). Games like Call of Duty, Mass Effect, Assassins Creed, and lets not forget Madden are repurposing the same technology, the same assets what would arguably called expansion packs not twenty years ago. And the hilarious thing is that some of these "AAA" games are just flat out broken on launch.
Now look - if you feel you are getting value for sixty bucks, all the power to you, but seeing as you hitting the Walmart bargin bin, I'm guessing you don't. Well the real bad news is almost upon us. Digital distribution completely screw us. Whereas games drop like a rock on retail shelves to make way for other games, digital games can stay high in the upper fifties or sixties as long as they like with an occasional "deal" of five dollars off or some other nonsense. I'm not talking Steam (they get it) but stores like xbox live, origin, and I'm guessing the playstation store (I never use it so I don't know). And this is without any distribution costs except bandwidth which is dirt cheap. The last game I bought for sixty bucks was Battlefield 3 last year. I played it for a month and will probably sell it on Amazon in a few weeks. Meanwhile I buy a ton of games on my iDevices. If they suck, I hardly bat an eye. That's how it should be.
Buying games should be an impulse purchase, not a saving money purchase. Hollywood got this with dvd purcahses. The real question ... when will game publishers?
Your comment loses its umph when you cite Braid and Minecraft (Indie games -- not AAA titles by a long-shot) as examples of games that cost ten dollars.
You're comparing something that two people worked on to something that around a hundred people worked on. Give me a break.
Everyone seems to be installing spyware and shit that calls home constantly including software which can't be uninstalled. Games requiring you to "login" to play even when not playing online. In game advertising. Ominous license agreements enabling collection of your first born from your computer.
I can't buy new games anymore. In the last three years every single time I have seen a game I liked.. each time I have look up what "klingons" are included...sighed and moved on.
All I want to do is play.. not have to deal with vendor bullshit. For $70 people are not going to fork out that much cash and also put up with any bullshit. Who knows maybe they will have learned their lesson from what went down with previous battlefield titles but I doubt it.
You realise that The Orange Box was distributed retail by EA too right?
I agree The Orange Box too was a brilliant bargain for the amount of content in it, but it doesn't make BF3 overpriced, nor did The Orange Box stop profits going to EA's exec's pockets.
I don't really want to pay more for a product, no one does, but I'd be one of those people who'd pay more for BF4. Why?
real first-person-shooters nowadays. I recall a time when Quake and Unreal ruled the scene, where skill and accuracy mattered, and you could create and download free content to your heart's content... Then consoles hit it big with frat boys across the world, who think that the genre began with Halo.
Do your Mom a favor and tell her you just want some nice pants for your birthday. Don't make her waste $70 buying you some shit military "sim" each year. She has to work for that stuff, 'yknow?
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
The problem is that defeats the purpose of episodic gaming which was touted as being not a big a financial liability for companies and they could tailor future episodes to appeal to the gaming audience based on past reactions.
What you're suggesting is that they'd have invested just as much as a normal release, but instead of one game to make it a hit they'd have a half dozen that'd need to be hits; and if as it turns out people did not like a character or aspect, they could not change it.
TellTale is the only company I can think of doing any real episodic gaming, Valve tried but that's kind of petered out.
Your comment loses its umph when you cite Braid and Minecraft (Indie games -- not AAA titles by a long-shot) as examples of games that cost ten dollars.
You're comparing something that two people worked on to something that around a hundred people worked on. Give me a break.
That's the thing though, these indie games are better in terms of playtime and quality then the so called "AAA" titles lately.
Right now 2-10 people can create a game enjoyed by the fans, sell it for $10 and earn a profit.
Meanwhile 100-200 people working for a big name studio create a game, sell it for $60-$70, and manage to destroy any good will their fans have for them because of corporate decisions(always online, unbalanced micro transactions, game stopping bugs, telling us we don't know what fun is, deflecting criticism instead of learning from it, etc.)
I imagine I don't have to list recent AAA titles that turned out to be huge disappointments.
EA are the people which developed a paint program which had in its license terms that all images you designed with the paint program were owned by them. Needless to say when someone sent to court for this they lost big time but it still shows how shitty they used to be. Plus they have been around since like forever. They and Activision are probably the oldest games software publishers still around. Games software publishers have historically had a high tendency to go bankrupt.
they are raising prices because they can and they should.
why wouldn't you raise price if your customers kept paying them ?
Absolute statements are never true
There's a difference between someone who has been here one day and someone who's been here half a decade. Don't you think?
Isn't there something special about someone who registers as a member on a website and on his very first day complains about how things are done on that website?
I'll bet you understand that whether or not you're willing to admit it.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I have to believe that the premium packs are not selling well. I refuse to buy premium packs that is something they took away from their customers the ability to make mods. I'm inclined to pay the 70 but if they hook mods in down the road im just not going to pay anymore.
Jack of all trades,master of none
Both ubi and activision also charge $70 when they know that the game will sell.
Well they found my price resistance point. Actually, they found it at $60. I used to buy games three at a time when they cost $40. Now I just don't care any more and I'm awfully bored of sequelitis anyway. I'll go with Indie games from devs that actually care about their product, thankyou.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
the biggest problem I have with companies like EA is that they support draconian nonsense like DRM
What maker of living-room video games doesn't support such "draconian nonsense"?
Why should you have to download the DLC you have no intention of paying for just to continue playing the game?
In this case if you play online and other people have the new weapons/vehicles/uniforms you'll be able to see them (with the 6 gigs you downloaded).
BBC2
Agreed, it's a fun game.
I used the data protection act to get hold of all of the data they hold on me, and my DOB was correct, so that's two big fails.
Ha!
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
There is no "Microsoft tax" for PC games.
There are also no living-room PC games because there are statistically no living-room PCs.
You buy it and you're playing it in just the time it takes to DL it.
Which could be a long time if you live too far from the DSLAM to get DSL and no cable TV company services your address either. Would people on a 5 GB/mo satellite plan really have the patience to devote over a month to downloading a single-DVD-size game?
If there wasn't such a strong indie game market I probably wouldn't buy any new games at all.
What strong indie game market? According to CronoCloud, people give neither a damn nor a fuck about indie games.
That's it for me, no more Battlefield anything. I've had enough.
Explain New Zealand then? Our dollar is weaker, and we earn less than the average Australian household. And we're not just talking about retail, where you could explain away the difference as the cost of transport of physical goods to a small island country, we're also talking about Steam/Digital prices. Steam lumps us into the same region with Australia, by virtue of geographical proximity alone.
Secondly, can you explain why, with only a 20% difference between the average Australian and the average American household, rip-offs like these exist? Is it really fair that publishers are setting prices for Australia/New Zealand up to 80% higher than for America/UK?
They charge $70, I spend $0. Basic as that. Maybe if they'd make the games...you know...good, long, and not rehashed old ideas, then I'd considering paying $70. Until then, hell no.
I detect sarcasm in your post, and I assume that your point is that customers on satellite are an edge case not worth serving. So what video games should people stuck on satellite play instead?
so many on slashdot are moral crusaders, opposed to even the most basic of concepts (such as demand) when it affect them in ways they personally find undesirable.
many people think a game is worth $70 these days, so they'll pay that. many slashdotters will continue to complain about "greed" as they download copies of games they feel they deserve to play despite being above their price-range of below their moral high ground.
What an utterly stupid post.
My online FPS days actually stem from Quake too, not Quake II, not shit III Arena, actual Quake, the one where deathmatch was indeed highly competitive. I also worked on some mods during that era myself such as TF Bots, and AirQuake II. For what it's worth, whilst I did play Halo 3 a bit online, I never even played Halo 1 and 2, I'd moved more to MMOs at that point, mostly doing PvP in Ultima Online, and later Dark Age of Camelot.
If you still live in your mother's basement then fine, but don't assume everyone else is like you. Some of us grew up, moved out, and are entirely independent. Those of us who did that are probably the same people who also recognise that yes, whilst we pine for the Quake glory days to return, recognise that aint going to happen, but that I can still get some real enjoyment from some of the newer games. Accuracy and skill still entirely matters though, as much as it did back then, though people tend to play bigger games, where this is masked, rather than for example, 1 vs 1 on a map like DM2, it's more about teamplay now sure and I guess if you're not a teamplayer you may not like that. I always was, whilst I did enjoy 1 vs 1 DM and general all out DM, I did always tend to prefer CTF and TF, so modern team based shooters suit me fine.
I'd still probably be up for a bit of Quake even now though if people started playing it again, and all the old problems that killed it off could be avoided (proliferation of aimbots and speedhacks). I know there are updated versions of the Quake source, but they seem to fuck around with more than just cheat prevention, I don't want fancy new graphics etc., I was quite content with the non-GL client, I just don't want the cheats that destroyed the game.
I can't stomach $60 for a game, either. Being a cheap bastard, I don't start buying games until they've been on the market for quite a while. The last title I bought at release for full price was C&C3:Tiberium Wars about 5 years ago (wasn't worth it). This strategy has worked well for me -- I have no plans to buy a "new" game anytime soon. In fact, I just bought The Witcher yesterday ($2.49).
Assuming a relatively low sales tax of 6% and actual retail price of $69.99 for BF4, the total price of BF4 would be $74.19.
For that money, right now on Steam I can get Fallout 3:GotY, Fallout: New Vegas, Dead Space, Dead Space 2, Saints Row: The Third, all 6 "X" games, 3 "Hitman" games, Trine 1&2, 5 "Prince of Persia" games, and both "Penumbra" games for a grand total of $70.90. No tax.
BF4 may actually provide quite a bit of good gameplay, but I have a hard time believing it would provide more hours of enjoyment (or higher quality enjoyment) than two Fallout titles, two Dead Space titles, and SR3. If BF4 has a pipboy and lets me beat pedestrians with a huge purple dong, I might change my opinion.
Some advantages other than price: major bugs tend to be patched, possible DRM removal by the developer or availability of DRM work-arounds (ex:no-CD), video drivers have had time to be optimized, reviews and community stabilize, user created content available (depending on title).
/*Insert boring sig here*/
Battlefield 7 is coming out in 2014, it'll cost about $100.
But it'll totally be worth it, right? Because it'll have (insert retarded extra content that 6 didn't have here).
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Your post was good, but EA does please a lot of gamers with their sports titles. Calling them crappy is a bit of a blanket statement: for example, I hate Madden, but I can see the quality of it and can see why a sports gamer would like it. And the boxing games are fantastic. Also, I refuse to totally give up on the company that brought us EA Sports BIG last gen. I really miss that company, and I refuse to pay any new "next gen price" for any game.
"Everything is worth what the purchaser will pay for it."
I'd rather wait for the game to drop in price a few months later than pay for the full priced game...
Oh wait. I can't afford the full price game right now. So my plan is the only way I can get games.
Besides I got two problems with the Battlefield series:
1) EA and it's penchant to mess up good titles.
2) The Battlefield series in general. Never cared for those games.
Right on. :)
I got a 4-pack of Torchlight II myself more because I wanted to support developers and not executives. One of these days, the zombified masses are going to wake up from their comas and realize what's going on. And they aren't going to like it.
I registered well after I lurked on /. I'm sure you understand that.
They are not getting more expensive, you just have a much lower tolerance for higher prices because you can easily get a game for free on the internet.
is TL2 that good ? I know D3 is that bad...sadly
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
$70 is too much. As it stands, I rarely buy a game at $60. I wait 6 months to a year, till it drops in price to $20-30. With the amount of DLC being tossed out, it gets easy to spend $100 or more in total on a game. Plus, with the various Steam sales, I've been getting a crap ton of good games and spending a fraction of the full retail price. They may not be from giganto publishers by EA, but if you enjoy the crap out of a game, does it matter who made it?