Wow, one way you can tell arguments are stupid is when they assume the world consists only of extremes:
"If you make games for money, you work for a corporation like EA where you don't have to worry whether your next pay check bounces. If you're in it because you love games, you work for an indie company that may or may not ever make it because of the shoe string budget they often have to work on."
So you can either be a money-grubbing soulless person, or you are an artisté who is willing to risk and/or sacrifice his financial security and quality of life for his art. There is no inbetween.
Even forgetting the one-dimensional view many people have of EA as some greedy corporation like we see in TV and movies, LordZ makes another laughably extreme point that EA only makes "crap games" except when they do make a quality game, it's by accident.
Of course, these successes only happen because the people working there are only in it for the money. There can't be any other reason.
I myself am a programmer in a business that I don't have a particular passion for, but I think the things we build are very important and impressive. Sure I wouldn't want to do this job for free, but I'm proud of my company's work, and I feel bad and a little ashamed when something I've worked on causes a problem for our customers.
You don't have to work at an indie shop to care about your users or have passion for quality.
Nobody here knows what goes on inside EA, so it's not fair to judge their motivations taht you know nothing about. What is fair is to judge their output and its impact on you. Review their games, complain about features you don't like, etc.
For instance, if some company releases a game with some DRM that really sucks and hampers your ability to enjoy the product, then by all means, complain. Let them know how you feel. But don't call assume they're evil and hate their customers. That's stupid.
There ar emany other problems I have with the arguments agains this article. The first problem I have is with people saying that games are expensive. I understand people have different perspectives, but relatively speaking, games are not that expensive. I understand that it takes a lot of money to buy lots of video games. All this means is that most people will never be able to have everything they want. I will not begrudge people who want to buy used games. It is a system in place, and people are going to take advantage of it, but you can't blame publishers from trying to incentivize people to buy new games.
First let me explain why I don't think games are that expensive. Compare them to other forms of entertainment. Movies are usually less than two hours long and the movie studio gets to sell the movie multiple times in different markets. First they get to sell them to movie theaters, then they get to sell them on DVD/Blu-ray and license them to rental stores, and then they can also sell them to premium cable channels, and then they can sell them to cable networks, and finally they sell them to broadcast networks. Further more, more people watch movies. They can charge $8 for a movie ticket because many mor emillions of people are going to see the average movie than buy the average video game. A studio sells a few reels or whatever format to a theater and that theater can charge anywhere from $3 (cheap matinees) to $15 per ticket, and they'll show that same movie hunders of times to thousands of people. Many of those same people, plus some new ones will later rent/and or buy those movies again.
A typical $60 game delivers anywhere from 10 to 100 hours of content. I just don't think there's really a comparison. Compare hours of entertainment provided versus cost for other activities and tell me where you'll find a better value than video games. I would argue that the only things that can beat it are classic toys like a ball, Legos, a deck of cards, etc. And those things are all made extremely cheaply. Meanwhile, games, like movies, need to be made by many highly skilled people, at significant financial risk. Many games these days also need to maintain online services as well.
You can't even test a game to see how it fares without hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in sunk development costs.
Finally, there's the fact that the price of video games has not inflated that much. SNES games used to be $40 to $60, and sometimes as high as $70. Furthermore, these days, there are many more budget titles and sales than there used to be. There are more options for buying games.
I'm not saying, "Hey games are actually cheap! You're a loser if you can't buy them all new!"
All I'm saying is that the price for games is not unreasonable.
This brings me to the last thing which really annoyed me in this thread.
"The gaming industry seems to think that consumers are made of money and that everyone can afford to drop $60 for a game constantly."
"I'm also not really with you on the whole 'developers deserve to make as much money as they can from their games' position. The industry exploits gamers year-in year-out and EA is one of the guiltiest parties. Look at their sports franchises and you'll see occasional innovation (e.g. FIFA 10 was a big step forward) but most years it is just a case of updated stats and rosters."
It seems to me that these statements come from a sense of entitlement, like EA or any other publisher owes it to the world to sell games for less. These are video games, people. They are pieces of entertainment. They are toys. Nobody needs these and no game company owes you anything. Furthermore, you don't have to buy them, andmany don't, at least not at normal prices.
There are a lot of people, but not the type of consumers who would be foudn on gaming message boards, who never buy games when they're newly released.
The fact is, people can afford to buy games at $60 and they do it everyday. Then there are those who are patient and only buy games after they're a year old. There are others who only buy used games. The fact is, if consumers were'nt willing to pay $60 for a game, then games wouldn't cost $60.
As stupid as most people thinkthe horse armor was a lot of people still bought it. As stupid as I think paying for avatar clothing is, a lot of people love it and buy that stuff.
If you love games then you'll find a way to deal with it. When I was a kid, sure I couldn't afford every game I wanted, especially newly released ones. So guess what? I didn't have every game I wanted! What a concept!
As soon as I turned 16, I got a job, and I've pretty much bought every game I wanted whenever I wanted since. I cared a lot about video games, and so I spent money on that. If there's something you love, then you'll find away to support that passion. If you have other priorities, then you have to pick and choose. Unless you're one of the few, you're not going to be able to have the best of everything you want in every area of life. No company, not EA, or anyone else, should be obligated to try to make their products more affordable to you.
Instead, they should make the products affordable to them, in terms of what it costs to make, and affordable to the market, in terms of what consumers are willing to pay.
And right now, it looks like consumers are very willing to pay $60 for new games, and whether you like it or not, people seem to love DLC.