News EA: "Pirates are a marketplace"

What do you mean rather than? EA and SecuROM are the biggest pains in the arse in the DRM world. They treat all their customers as criminals.

 

Well quite.

I play games when I want to a quiet evening in on my own (at least, those quiet evenings when I don't feel like engaging in the All-Time Number-One Solo Male Pastime). The last thing I want is to be forced onto some hideous online service filled with M0R0nZ who t@lk l1ke DIS!!!!1111 in order to spend some quality time watching a progress bar.

 

+1

i also would do that if i had a garage sized 3d-printer

 

+1. It's illegal, immoral and ultimately self-defeating.

My one worry with DLC is that it encourages publishers to lock down their games and not release any mod tools, so that they are the only providers of new content. Though Bethesda have in the past proved exceptionally resistant to this temptation, other studios are notably less generous a la Bioware and Activision.

 

Well I completed the game, I left the game on pause while I went to get some lunch so maybe 30 minutes. By the time I had completed the game steam said I had played it for a total of 4.3 hours on normal difficulty, which is the hardest until you complete it then you unlock hard. So basically I completed it in under 4 hours on the hardest difficuulty available. But for £3 you can't complain, under a pound an hour for entertainment.

As for this piracy row. I admit that I previously pirated a few games (when I was younger), now I either wait for them to be cheaper, or don't play them. I can always play through the entire half life series or garrys mod with some mates while I am waiting. I think piracy is a bit of a phase, I don't know many 21+ pirates. They are between the ages of 14 and 18 from my experience. Anyone who does it older than that is just a criminal. I know technically you are still a criminal within those ages, but it seems almost expected at that age to do it. A 14 year old with no money seeing that they can get something for free with seemingly no consequences, damn you would have to be a fool not to.

And why the anti DLC, if we had to wait for all the DLC for games to come out with the game then they would take a lot longer and cost more. It makes perfect sense to create DLC, you buy a game within a few weeks of release, finish it and are left wanting more a few days or weeks later and DLC is released, you might want to play through the whole game again and then have the DLC continue the story. If that was included you would not even notice the extra and would still be left wanting more. And you probably wouldn't play through it again.

Saying you want DLC included within the game at purchase price is like saying you want all the aftermarket mods pre installed on your car. Which leaves the people want a standard car spending more on something they don't want, and the people who would buy the parts nothing to buy.

 

If they are so confident this is the way forward, then why do we still have physical disks for games?

And if they are relying on DLC being the only thing to get pirates onboard, what does that say about the game in first place? I am sick and tired of games being released then charging for DLC, they used to give it away for free!

 

No they never gave it away for free, they called it an expansion pack And the reason we use disks is that a 10gb game takes a long, long time to d/l, whereas from a DVD it's less than an hour.

 

dragon age was pretty upfront with the dlc.. they even called it premium content until you got the addons then it unlocked those quests in the game.. the thing I didn't like about it was, the game was challenging and fun before the dlc- after the dlc they gave you so much swag you became the leobeater.. kinda diminished the effort you put into getting your overpriced slippers earlier

ea ceo is basically an idiot if that's what he believes.. I think he's just trying to net saddle pops- they probably look at the market like a botnet- there's so many people in this world, you just need to find that sweet chunk of clueless and your rich

 

E.A. can make all of the DLC they want, offer as many games as they want.

I bought my last E.A. game a while back. Why?
Because they don't fix the problems they create. 2 months to 3 years to fix minor to MAJOR problems? Excuse me?


Battlefield Heros is a game entirely supported by ads and DLC. Which is their new direction, however they need to keep in mind, in order for people to purchase DLC, you have to make it worth it to them and prove you are going to give them a good customer experience (and keep working on the game), BFH is not a good experience. The funny part it, the ones spending the most on the game, are the cheaters.


Sorry E.A., you have to do better if you want my money.

You have a history of a lack of support and terrible patch history. DLC is web based, so it requires servers. You just laid off 1800 workers. So I spend $200 on the game and next month you decide it's no longer profitable and pull the plug. Nope, sorry. At least with a normal game I can still play it when you are gone and re-install without your crappy patches and play solo.

Trust is a big issue with DLC, and you haven't earned it.

 

Of course, even in the pirate community, the game devs still get at least one sale - someone's got to upload!

 

I dont see it as clear cut as this though. Ill freely admit that i have pirated games, but at the same time if i like the game ill quite happily pay for a 'proper' copy, if i dont like it, it gets deleted. I can safely say hand on heart that i have no pirated games on my computers, just lots and lots of legit ones.

Im not a fan of piracy by any means, and im quite sure im in the minority with my downloading habits.

I dont mind paying for DLC as long as it adds something worthwhile to the game, Providing the game was complete without it.

 

I can see an easy annoying way to overcome that. In-game ads!

Full retail or steam doesn't get any ad. Pirated ones have them. Not sure how to accomplish this thou... Perhaps a legal download from the publisher's site with all the ads.

Yes you can! As easy as you can in PC. The only thing is that you need to burn a copy into a DVD, alas in PC all you need is the image.

 

this. +1 .. I think it's a step in the right direction.. certainly a better idea than increasing DRM.

 

"They can steal the disc, but they can't steal the DLC..."

If game pirates actually stole discs from your retailers, you wouldn't care and you couldn't stop them from obtaining the DLC's.

 

Ok so if piracy harms the games market how come none of the developers complain about the 2nd hand / preowned market for xbox and ps3 games?

The publishers / devs make no money out of that market and most of the people I know who game on xbox or ps3 rarely buy a new game...

 

no they complain about it loads In fact alot of these latest measures by EA are to screw second hand sales.

 

Who cares what EA think any more, they are only going to release more cheap sequels from now on anyway.

 

at last folk are making sense

 

How about they start releasing some quality games on pc...

 

you're technically not downloading the car, but an exact copy of it