EA gonna EA

Electronic Arts started out so differently. The best, highest quality games, sold in album cases like vinyl records. They wanted to make their devs into rock stars. M.U.L.E., Seven Cities of Gold, Archon. Every game was innovative in every way.

Much later they'd changed, shifted toward the dark side, slipping way. But they still managed to bring us two of my favorite MMOs of all time: Motor City Online and Earth and Beyond.

MCO was online multiplayer Need For Speed with real classic American cars with real hot rod parts, the real engines, everything. I've not seen anything like it since. Hardly no one wants to pay to license real world cars any more. And you certainly don't get the real engines with the real hot rod parts.

EAB was a crappy FPS but somehow 2D space game, but it had the best crafting and leveling system. You take things apart eventually learning how to build things. Player built stuff could possibly go was high as 200% quality so other players would want to buy your wares. The leveling system had three distinct lines: exploration, combat, and trade. Play the game how you wanted to having fun your way not how they think you should.

Anyway, EA killed them both, turned off the servers, refused to release the server code so player servers or single player modes were impossible. They sent me a coupon for their new Sims game, though.

So fuck EA. Haven't bought a single one of their games since.

Satisfactory for me personally, I enjoy factorio but I like the first person vibe more

BG3

It is cheaper. All the money saved just goes to the publishers.

I feel you, friend

Trying to learn a new language and my friends keep recomeneding duolingo. But my zero tolerance for ads makes Duolingo dead on arrival.

I have removed alot of advertising on tv by self hosting my dvd/br content. Best decision i had in a while, its like netflix but content is there forever and always accessible from anywhere in the world (if my upload can keep up). Fair amount of work but no subscription chargers

I don't know, I have removed close to 80% of ads in my life. None on my pc, none on my phone, none when I listen to music, none when I play games. Adblocking, Linux and a dash of the old yarr matey worked like a charm

Then this one should give you nightmares: https://youtu.be/YJg02ivYzSs

I share your sadness, but also avoid games that do this. There are many many games out there that aren't doing this and never would. Reward those developers with your time and money.

and finally, ads inside your mind

What are you talking about? There's already ads everywhere and there has been since the beginning of the industrial revolution.

I don't mind having the choice at least, years ago Amazon did this with their Kindles (or maybe they still do, dunno). You were given a choice on their Kindle order page, save 40$ on an ad supported version or full price and ad-free. It even stacked (At least once anyways) with other sales they might have been running.

I chose the ad supported model... and then proceeded to root it and remove the ads LMAO

Yes, but also the star wars and sims franchise

Only ea games I can think of that I've bought are jedi: fallen order and jedi: survivor. And I only bought them because they're actually good games that aren't monetized like a casino.

Bold of you to assume the games will even be available to play years later.

Hence all games should only work while online to keep commercials up to date and measure user interaction..., I mean, to provide the best user experience possible. /s

There is literally no reason to hardcode the ads in the game. They need a placeholder that will show ads fetched from an API, like Google ads. The ads will always be up to date and targeted

There is literally no reason to hardcode the ads in the game. They need a placeholder that will show ads fetched from an API, like Google ads. The ads will always be up to date and targeted

There is literally no reason to hardcode the ads in the game. They need a placeholder that will show ads fetched from an API, like Google ads. The ads will always be up to date and targeted

They needed to sell that turd of a movie somehow. 🤣

They're also using YOUR bandwidth to download these ads.

Yeah seriously; I've been seeing ads like this in games since at least the 6th generation of consoles (PS2/GameCube/XBOX). I distinctly remember seeing Napster and Cingular Wireless ads in Tony Hawk's Underground 2, for example.

Hell, in the 90s we had entire games that were basically ads, like Chex Quest, Cool Spot (7-Up), and M.C. Kids (McDonald's).

It's the implementation that will probably annoy me the most. If the ingame radio station in GTA tried to sell me coke or Pepsi I probably wouldn't even notice since it fits in with the world. But knowing EA they will probably put them in as additional loading screen that you can't skip.

hear hear. best games i play are significantly cheaper than 60 bucks, and are compete packages.

I'd agree with you if the devs were being treated better, games should cost more and be shorter. But the price hikes aren't that. They're pure greed.

That extra money isn't going to pay the developers. EA just shut down multiple studios, including the studio responsible for the critically acclaimed AA game High-Fi Rush, and are already talking about shutting down more. EA has closed more studios than they've released games this year, and the past 3 years have seen record high layoffs - even worse than during the 2008 financial crash. All this while companies brag about record-breaking profits.

And with the rise of digital media, production costs saw a significant decrease. There was a short period of time where physical copies were $60 and digital were $40. Now digital are averaging $70 and execs are already talking about increasing the price to $80-100.

Considering how complex modern games are from a software standpoint, they are fucking cheap as hell

Frameworks, ready to use engines and props and less care for efficiency (see Ark Survival) make it less effort for more results.

Wasn't there some asian guy who made a whole action level in Unity just for fun?

You realize that it's much easier now to make a game than it was two decades ago (see other comment)? That digital platforms make it more accessible for buyers to get your game? That the overall trend in the industry has been to get a game out as fast as possible then try to patch it after the fact, when that wasn't even an option two decades ago (internet existed, sure, but not everyone had good internet)? Sure, the quality of graphics may have gone up, but everything else has been left behind.

Also, saying that people complaining about price is out-of-touch, is itself out-of-touch. Most people have even less purchasing power now than they did two decades ago and you want us to pay even more for a product inferior to what we would've gotten years ago?

I guess some thing about it, like a game costs less than a big budget Hollywood movie to make, and Hollywood movie tickets don't cost $80

that would be fair if these companies weren't incredibly profitable, only increasing that profit, and only using that profit to pay the executive and shareholders.

it's just greed. they don't need the money.

What about DLCs? And micro-transactions? And lack of optimisations? Base games these days are more like beta versions of what used to be provided in the past... It kinda feels like shrinkflation, price is the same but you get a lot less, both in quality and quantity.

I think we can find better things to bitch about than the price of games.

I'm sure you're right about that. But this topic isn't about games being too expensive. It's about ads being forced on people with no compensation. (Many people don't want ads under any circumstances, while some people say they would accept ads if they get financially compensated.)

I agree with the first part (not that it should mean they can just extract more money out of us), but the second part is something I simply don't believe.

Don't get me wrong, I know budgets have increased, but the dev cost definitely didn't by remotely the same amount. Devs wages are pretty stagnant since the initial silicon Valley boom and new tools at our disposal have made it a lot easier to create games, be it for indi devs or the corporate giants. Sure, graphics got fancier, but so did the readily aviable stock assets. High end work stations cost maybe a bit more, but they are a drop in the bucket in the 100+ million budgets of today.

What has increased on the other hand is the amount of executives/managers and their wages. In addition to that marketing has gone up a lot, probably over half of most budgets go there. The growing corporate overhead with its archaic structures also eats up a lot.

If we go purely by dev cost, prices should go down since the overall profit would increase with the greater amount of players. Everything else is corporate overlords throwing shitloads of money at a mediocre game to make it seem worth something.

Have production costs increased or has marketing/publishing costs gone up dramatically as gaming attempts to get a greater demographic and introduce predatory monetisation methods? Tools and techniques for game development surely improve over time making development easier and more cost effective.

Market size has also gone up. 30 years ago and selling a million copies is mind-blowing. Today it's on the lower end of big game launch. Lower profit per unit, but many more units sold which really helps balance out the difference.