>> Very well, in fact. How does 5 million units sound?
They have this huge 100 meter ad in town covering the whole side of a walled building. 5 millions sounds great, but they are probably also beating marketing records.
For me, the game quickly went from much anticipated to "meh!" status with the beta release. I guess that bit of marketing strategy didn't work with me. What worries me isn't the game success though. Good on them. It's the lack of proper criticism of game decisions that have the potential to greatly influence gamers in a negative way:
- The Origin digital distribution system seems like the result of a piss contents between EA and Valve that resulted in us, the consumers, losing. Losing because we now have to have two game clients installed on our machines and losing because Origin so far is nothing extraordinary. And neither EA seems to care about it being anything extraordinary.
- The web browser game launcher and setting is the weirdest decision I've seen in maybe a decade or two and should be included on a
list somewhere. That gamers should be treated with HTML-based game launchers seems to be a devolution of the already popular (and likewise annoying) software-based game launchers. Not an evolution. It's like starting an excel spreadsheet to watch a movie. If gaming studios keep de-investing in a game lateral content (intros, launch screens, settings screens, etc) and we keep generally ignoring it, does anyone really expect it to not come and haunt us one day? There's already too many things about games these days that we regret having lost and that today we just think it didn't need to be this way, it wasn't this way before. DRM, anyone? DLCs, anyone? Always Online, anyone?
So, the game is great indeed. It sure seems to be and everyone generally agrees. Totally worth the money and that's perfectly fine. But I'd hope the gaming press didn't concentrate only on the technical aspects or the game design, but also considered what of new BF3 brought to the gaming community and how that can impact us in the future. Because, this whole silence.... it's what companies introducing these type of changes like and it's how we get into trouble.
