CliffyB: Microtransaction is Not a Dirty Word, EA is Not The Bad Guy

[Irridium]

Valve isn't charging $60 for TF2 along with a $10 online pass. You can also get most of the items from TF2 by just playing the game. And any crates you don't want you can sell for real money on the Steam market. Also, where were you when people flipped their shit when Valve implemented the hat store?

But you're right. EA is not the bad guy. They are losing money and doing all they can to stop it. The problem is that their primary business model is broken, and they're trying to stop losing so much by pushing their old business model even harder. Until their core model changes, they'll keep losing money. John Riccitiello even said, six years ago, that $60 for games was too expensive. He said they would have to change in the next five years, or be left behind. It's been six years, EA now has their own store where they can charge any amount of money they want, and they still charge $60 for games. And now EA is being left behind.

They're not the only ones in the industry who think $60 is too expensive these days either. Yet nobody is willing to change. The AAA market is broken at its core. It requires huge, bloated budgets which in turn require ridiculous amounts of sales to break even. That's a busted model, and it needs to change. Putting in online passes or season passes or micro-transactions will not fix it. At most it'll just delay the inevitable.

 

[Legion]

Everybody on this thread has pretty much said everything that needs to be said already.

All I can add is that a guy who once said that he'd like to have his licence plate on is car as "D Nozzle" (short for douche nozzle), is not the kind of person who should be giving out advice on people's opinions.

 

[Andy Shandy]

The reason Valve gets away with it because they sell novelty items, stuff that isn't particularly helpful, just stuff that's sort of neat.

EA's way of doing it on the other hand come across as trying to grab as much money out of people's wallets as quick as they can. So long as EA keeps treating their customers as money harvesters instead of actual people, they'll be seen as the bad guy.

 

[Lono Shrugged]

Jeez Cliffy, since you love EA so much why don't you drop that 100 bux and ask it to freaking marry you.

I swear...

 

[L337CAT790]

I don't know if I find the man's ignorance amusing, infuriating or just saddening. Tell me, Mr. Blezinski, has the thought ever occurred to you people do like and even love the games published by EA? Has it ever occurred to you that they despise having strings attached to a product they have all ready purchased for full price? Has it ever occurred to you that people, as Jim Sterling once put it, love their games as games, but hate them as products? Have you once thought about any of these things, Cliff, you detestable troglodyte.

 

[Findlebob]

Cliff Bleszinski is tired of EA being seen as "the bad guy," while Valve can "do no wrong."

Well you have to admit their is a certian hap hazard logic to that conclusion.

 

[Erttheking]

Oh boy here we go, the CliffyB hate is coming back in full force.

 

[Kmadden2004]

Yeah, sure the games industry is there to make money, but something that Cliffy seems to have forgotten is that a key component in any industry is customer service.

Customer confidence is a very delicate thing to handle, and if your consumer base feel they are being sh@t on, taken for granted and/or being taken advantage of, then you're doing something seriously wrong.

Valve include microtransactions in Team Fortress 2, a move that's perfectly justifiable in a game that's free-to-play, and don't generally intrude into the core game itself. EA putting microtransactions into a game that you've already spent $60/£40 on just looks like a massive middle finger from the publisher, and feels like a little goblin sitting on your shoulder throughout the game, periodically poking you in the side of the face.

Yes, I can try to ignore it, but it's still there. And it still bothers me.

That's the difference between EA and Valve.

 

[bz316]

Valve has done wrong. But they learned from their mistakes, got better, and stopped doing wrong, which is why we love them. EA did wrong, then continued to do wrong, and will likely continue to do wrong until time stops, which is why we love to hate them. Get over yourself Cliff Bleszinski. If you are defending them on the basis that someone else has screwed up in the past, then you must realize, on some deep primordial level, that EA is screwing up RIGHT NOW.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Get off the soap boxes... said the man firmly placed on his.

He has a point to some degree, but when you go out just to argue the arguing instead of addressing the problem it all gets lost on meaningless finger pointing.
The core problem of microtransactions is price vs content, if you broke down a triple A game into the tiny parts these guys sell you at $5 each the sum of it all would end up at over a grand, heck one might not even be enough.

 

[Raggedstar]

So...I'm guessing the Bleszinski x Sterling wedding is off?

I want to like this guy. I really do, but this shit keeps happening and it's making things really difficult. Valve's microtransactions aren't standing between the consumer and a full product. TF2 also ain't $60 and a lot of Valve's DLC is free (well, Portal 2's are at least if you don't count the hats).

 

[bafrali]

Only thing that I can say is Cliff will get much more support from this site after his claim

 

[Canadamus Prime]

WRONG!! If Valve pulled this microtrasaction bullshit I'd be condemning them just as much as I'm now condemning EA. The difference is that EA is infamous for this kind of bullshit and Valve isn't. At least not to my knowledge anyway.

Videogames can cost upwards of $100 million to make and market, says Bleszinski

And whose fault is that? Well actually probably equal parts the gamer's fault and the industry's fault. All I know is I didn't ask for the excessive focus on graphics technology that led to that.

"EA has many smart people working for them ... and they wouldn't attempt these things if they didn't work. Turns out, they do," says Bleszinski, mirroring comments from EA that gamers actually enjoy microtransactions.

Yeah, it seems far to many gamers don't have brains in their heads or just don't care 'cause if they did they'd avoid these microtransactions like the plague, at least the ones in $60 games anyway.

 

[Mirrorknight]

Yes, Valve did put a $100 DLC ring in their game. The ring does nothing except broadcast a single message to everyone that's playing the game. It does not effect the actual gameplay. None of what's sold on the TF2 store is needed to play. Some of the equipped items are nice to have, but they're well balanced so, while the functionality might be different, the penalties make them balance out when compared to the default kit.

Their Mann vs. Machine mode was a **completely free** game mode they added. Yes, there are "tickets" you can by to play on special servers that can earn you special items if you win, but again, these items are merely cosmetic in nature. If you can't make it through, it doesn't consume your ticket. You can still play the standard Mann vs. Machine mode without spending a dime, though. Unless you bought it when it came out on the Orange Box. Which cost $40. Which came with 4 other games.

So in TF2, you have your ability to compete be based on your skill as opposed to how much real money you spent on your kit and you have access to all maps and gamemodes. You don't have to spend a single penny.

EA (and, lets be honest, Ubisoft and Activision deserves flack for this, too), on the other hand, requires you to pay money for extra maps, extra game modes, extra weapons (that are usually NOT balanced to the standard kit), cheat codes, ect ect that DO effect gameplay... AND they still charge the full $60. They leave out sections of the game and then make it Day 1 DLC. They charge for crafting materials for crafting weapons in their SINGLE PLAYER MODE. Yes, you can get the materials without paying, and there's a exploit to get unlimited materials, but I get the distinct feeling that they did that as an out in case it blew up in their face.

EA is basically pushing and pushing and pushing the consumer, slicing bits off of their game and selling them, which over the course of the game's shelf-life, can add up to 20-100 extra bucks, and still expecting people to pay $60. Valve, on the other hand, sells hats in their free game.

On the subject of Origin and Steam, yes, Steam was kinda crap when it first came out. However, they have the excuse of being one of the first companies to really make a dedicated game downloading platform. Mistakes were made, but they were fixed, and now it's the most popular one by a long-shot.

By the time EA came out with Origin, Steam was working at full...well...steam. All the pioneering is done. All they had to do is copy what Valve did and make some small improvement on it. They failed horribly at this. Now, it is better now then when it first started, it's STILL not quite up to snuff, and they don't have an excuse.

EA says they need to make money, but you know what? Valve's making money, and they're doing things that, by Ciffy B's accounts, should've put them out of business. Meanwhile, EA's bleeding out money like a hemophiliac, and one day, they're going to find consumer's "Oh, HELL no." point. CliffyB and his ilk should be fearing that day and doing whatever they can do to get publishers to avoid it. Due to the corporate mindframe, I think it's inevitable, and I'm eagerly making popcorn in preparation. The video game market crash in the 80's was due in part of corporate greed and heavy handedness, and you know what they say what happens if you fail to learn from history.

 

[Johnson McGee]

If videogames cost too much to make then it's the responsibility of a game company to find efficient ways to lower those costs. An example of an efficient way is to create a good, reusable game engine (e.g. Valve) an inefficient way is to repeatedly rehire and fire your development teams at the start and end of your projects (e.g. EA).

Costs are not an excuse to try to bilk your consumers out of more money. The music industry already learned that lesson the hard way with people flocking to itunes or piracy to get their music rather than buy CDs just for one track.

The fact that CliffyB and people like him can't see the difference between TF2's micro and Dead Space's is I think a major reason why EA keeps slipping. TF2 charges a premium for status items to show off to other people where in Dead Space people are handing over money to cut out a tedious part of the gameplay. If people are willing to hand over cash to skip part of your (single-player) game (i.e. resource gathering) maybe that should be a clue to fix that part of the game rather than announce victory for your revenue model.

As for voting with my wallet, I used to be happy to give my money to people like Westwood, Maxis, Origin Systems, etc. but for some reason these companies keep disappearing somewhere...

 

[teebeeohh]

Slave traders needed to make money. And a lot of people worked in that industry. Does that make them not evil?

imagine you grow up in a time and place where your parents, teachers and the priest on Sunday tell you that slavery is good, you never meet anyone who gives you another point of view and you become a slave trader because you need to feed your family. does that make you evil? i mean unless you are some kind of sadistic bastard who gets his kicks out of treating people horribly, that makes you evil even if you raise puppies.

 

[Akexi]

While I don't see Valve as a company that can do no wrong, I also see EA as a company that willing screw it's customers for the sake of making more money off of them. The whole thing of charging full price for video games and then nickle and diming the players at every turn is what is driving the hate train to EA. Now EA isn't the first developer to do this of course, but they are the publisher that is now making it a requirement of every game they produce along with everything to have a multiplayer component.

As in regards to Bleszinski once again doing his best job of being a douchebag, his little speech reminds me of Colin Moriarty, another douchebag who takes up residence at IGN (big shocker). Cliffy is out of touch with gamers and it shows with his main statement toward those who have problems with EA's business model to be "just don't buy their games." The big issue is that gamers like the developers of the games that EA publishes, but they hate all the nonsensical components and actual parts of the game being stripped off to be sold separately that EA requires of them all for the sake of bleeding the customers of more money.

The only thing Cliff Bleszinski seems to have accomplished from his little blog is to reaffirm that he is still a douchebag and he looking for a job at Electronic Arts.