EA Launches Latest Cash Grab: 'Season Ticket'

[Rob Williams]

Whether or not you are fond of the 'downloadable content' idea that game publishers have clearly embraced, it's not going to go anywhere. In fact, while DLC was limited to just a select few titles a couple of years ago, there are very few games released today that are not built from the ground-up to support it. In some ways, DLC can be a great thing for gamers, but it does prove to be a cash sink, one that makes it easy to spend more money over time than most people even realize.

Read the rest of our post and then discuss it here!

 

[Kayden]

Is it just me, or does it feel a bit odd that EA is selling a service here that includes things we considered a given just a few years ago?

It's not just you. I am getting seriously annoyed that were starting to pay for thing's that should be there, just so they can nickle and dime gamers to make a quick buck. This goes for other things like punishing gamers who actually pay for their games, when pirates get what they want anyways. It short sighted and only there to serve as a comfort for fat investors who want to know their investments are being safe guarded, when they really aren't.

 

[marfig]

Pay to try before you buy? Now, that's something!

This and all other amazing (not!) things made available to us because folks really embraced online shopping. Retail is evil, really? They charge you more off the shelf, really? How about that?

It's been close to 10 years or something like that, but I can never stop thinking of a certain post I made back then on Usenet in which I was debating with someone being all religious about online shopping (and me being all religious about not shopping online). Without any capacity to predict how exactly, I was nonetheless pretty sure then, and warned about it, that online game shopping had the serious potential to bring in new business models that would make game consumption more expensive. Meanwhile the false convenience of not having to go to a retail store would be shadowed by the inconvenience of having to now manage these games.

I was, at the time, thinking of games that could be sold in parts or features that could be bought separately, while not really sure how. I don't consider myself a visionary. Quite on the contrary, but if you believe this story to be true, you can see how close I was. And how we actually (excuse the french) fucked ourselves by all this online shopping and gaming portal craze that, at the end of the day, whether one likes to admit it or not, only served to help us sit our lazy asses on our chairs while being had by an industry that -- not by chance -- is today as large, or larger, than the movie industry; an industry once thought unreachable.

 

[Kougar]

Gotta hand it to EA, they can always find a new, inventive way to charge their customers.