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EA Tests Subscription Access To Game Catalog
An anonymous reader writes: Electronic Arts has announced a new program called "EA Access," a subscription-based service that will grant Xbox One users access to a small catalog of EA's popular games, as well as early trials of upcoming games. They're beta testing the service now, and the available games are FIFA 14, Madden NFL 25, Peggle 2, and Battlefield 4. (More titles will be added later.) They're charging $5 per month or $30 per year. It probably won't ever include their newest releases, but it's interesting to see such a major publisher experimenting with a Netflix-style subscription service.
no guarantee that
a) the game you want will be available,
2) the game you want will EVER be available
3) the game you do play remains available for the duration of your subscription
4) the rate you pay today will at least somewhat resemble the rate you pay tomorrow.
Sign up to give EA money on a subscription basis? There is nothing in the world that will make me authorize them to charge my account at will. EA has established itself as a company that views customers as the enemy.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
Just expect them to charge you extra for new releases or something. There is nothing that says the prices will be fixed.
I'm cautiously optimistic about this news. I'm just a casual game. I suspect that the vault will contain games that are 8-10 months old or older and have negligible sales. I don't mind paying 30$ a year to play older games. What this will do is eat into the secondary used game market (Gamestop, EB Games, Future Shop, etc..) as it will be cheaper to rent these older games than to buy even one used game, putting money in EAs pockets instead of these types of stores.
This being EA however, I wouldn't be surprised to see something like online multiplayer being a paid for DLC or something crazy like that, but time will tell.
The fine print also states that they can drop games from the vault at any time, so you can be SOL if you're in the middle of completing a game and that game is pulled. And the fine print also makes it very clear that this is a rental service. Stop paying for your sub and you lose access to the games that you downloaded.
It's better to burn out than to fade away
As much as I've already posted my support for this idea, there's no friggin' way Madden.Current will be available at launch for $30/year for year after year.
Madden fans are a slam dunk lock for $70/year.
All I want is Sims 4 that works standalone, Standalone Complex that works in doll mode, and Second Son: inFamous that works in Grey Hat mode.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
... was already subscription based? :p
I would consider buying a bundle outright, but I don't see for whom this is going to make sense. The whole point of Netflix is that you can continuously watch new movies and don't have to buy many from other sources. Here I will only like a portion of already small catalog and will still need to keep buying non-EA games. This kind of offering should really be done by Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft with games from many publishers.
When you can't make new stuff anymore, rent out what you have accumulated. Money has to circulate or it's pointless. This isn't criticism (just look how "well" the alternatives went). It's an observation. I'm sure somebody smarter than me wrote a book on the topic at least a century ago :) but rent, subscriptions and planned obsolescence are pretty much the same thing. Services (as opposed to manufacturing) are probably in the same ballpark. With everything pretty much already invented, we need _something_ to churn all that cash which is our sole reason to live :)
Question for religious people: where do unrepentant masochists go when they die?
I like this better when it was called Sega Channel
Given the "always online" nature of most games, it's pretty much an expensive subscription model anyhow, and per-game at that!
Seriously, when they decide to cut the servers from [favorite game X] in favour of their latest incarnation, then your game is fairly worthless, and it likely cost more than a $30/year subscription.
That said, it's EA. I'm sure they'll find a way to make this equally awful, if not more.
2-3 dollars an hour is interesting at best for people who play games with zero replay value and no long term ...
Ok, it would actually be a steal for contemporary games.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"You can buy our products individually"
"You can subscribe to all our products for one fee"
"You can buy our special title by subscribing and paying a premium for that one title"
"You can buy our products individually"
Sorry. I don't "subscribe". The value of it rarely lasts long enough to be of any value at all to me.
Magazines? They tend to repeat themselves after a year, then you realise that all the "new" stuff, you now know where to find out. (Did this for PC magazines, Linux magazines, Astronomy magazines, even New Scientist is ludicrously expensive for what it is).
Movies? You get all of the crap, nothing that you actually want. I did the test subscription to Amazon Prime Instant Video. 30 days of "free" movies. We watched 4. Stopped one within ten minutes. Spent HOURS looking through what they had. All the interesting ones were "not included" so you had to buy them anyway. The subscription didn't make it out of the trial period. Was the same back when video rental was the thing - the good movie that you'd been waiting for was unavailable or more expensive, all you could book out was the dross you'd seen a hundred times.
Games? I have Steam. But I don't have a single subscription game. There are even Steam games that I regularly plug money into for DLC and extras, and I have my own personal "monthly Steam allowance". To be honest, not one of the subscription games (or software) have I even looked at past the word "subscription". Nope, never played WoW either. Sorry, but I invest enough back into games I play (by running servers, helping out on the forums, bug-fixing, or buying DLC / extra copies for friends), I'm not paying every month "just because".
I tried OnLive, mostly to prove that it wasn't a sustainable business model to be honest. I played a full-price game on there for free, then went and bought it cheaper elsewhere. The technology worked but was nowhere near the claims they made. And the "lifetime" (3 years only) pass to the game cost more than my buying it outright on Steam.
I don't see any subscription as worthwhile. Once they have your first month of money, they can destroy the value of what you have overnight and you'll feel obliged to keep paying until renewal. It's just not worth it.
If you want to subscribe to EA games, stick some money in a tin every month. Then when EA only have the same crap as usual, you can go elsewhere, and when you have a month without playing, you're under no obligation, still have your money and can play twice as much next month.
This sounds a bit like Sega Channel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Channel). I was one of the morons subscribers back in the day. Unfortunately, actual did not equal expected. I thought I'd have access to a lot of fun and popular games. In fact, they provided neither.
This tastes the same.
So when/if they extend this to PC, I predict the fee will be $5 per month or $30 per year for SecuROM versions or $500 per month or $3000 per year for non-SecuROM versions. That way they can say that they heard their customers and are offering non-DRM versions of their software. When no one subscribes for the more expensive service, they can drop it and claim "We tried, but no one wanted the non-DRM version! Back to DRM for us!"
I think its telling that Sony has decided to not provide this service. If they don't think its good value, then there must be something very wrong.. http://www.eurogamer.net/artic...
3-4 years ago I subscribed to Metaboli (http://www.metaboli.co.uk/ ) who offer a tiered subscription service.
I got good value for money, and only really unsubscribed because I started building a good Steam library that grows as quickly as I can play the games.
As people are predicting with EA the games aren't the latest/greatest versions, but they've been around for a few years now and they're still in business so it's clearly a sustainable model.
* Old Dune and old C&C games that allowed LAN multiplayer
Just so you know, there's a multiplatform open source modern remake of the C&C engine with Dune, Tiberian Dawn & Red Alert supported called OpenRA . Westwood/EA released C&C and Red Alert as freeware (link has now disappeared) and OpenRA uses the original assets of the game with added functionality like better screen resolution support, multiplayer via Online TCP/IP and LAN with lobbies, and more.
I'll like to play some BF4 with friends but I'm pretty casual and I'm not a huge FPS player so I don't play it often so I rather shell out $5 instead of 60 plus whatever expansion pack