Ultratwinkie said:
Nocturnus said:
Ultratwinkie said:
Nocturnus said:
Alright, i'll bite. From a few posters above me.
[ ] Stop treating your paying customers like criminals and remove your B.S. DRM.
-Good idea. Thankfully, they've started in this direction. We'll see if they continue, though.
[ ] Stop buying up dying companies and gutting them
Activision, sadly, is worse in this sense. How many studios have been gutted to make CoD? Way too many.
But this practice in general is kinda crappy.
To EA's credit, though, they continue to support smaller studios like FunCom in their development of Niche MMO's like "The Secret World", which is a diamond in the rough.
[ ] Fix your quality control standards
SimCity? Yeah...
[ ] No more on-disc DLC. EVER.
Agree.
[ ] Remove microtransactions for anything except DLC characters/expansions.
Not just a fault of EA. This seems to be an industry issue, now.
[ ] Get rid of Origin requirements for games. In fact, get rid of Origin entirely. Nobody's going to use it in its current state.
In favor of what... Steam? I think i've posted this more times than I care to count, but it really is no secret that Valve takes 30% off the top of every sale that it makes just for having it on Steam itself. They don't have to do anything other than have it for sale there. Why wouldn't a company want to put together their own alternative to sell their games and keep their money? 30% is a LOT.
That, and Origin, as a platform, is stronger than Steam. May not have the catalogue or sales that Steam has, but as a program, it's coded much, much better.
[ ] Cut down on your bloated advertising budget. Seriously.
Ugh. I hate this. Even companies as awesome as Bethesda spend a lot of money on stupid TV Spots.
[ ] Give your workers reasonable timeframes for finishing games so we don't have more rush jobs.
Again, another industry standard.
[ ] STOP USING PUNKBUSTER FOR ALL OF YOUR PC GAMES. Seriously. STOP.
In games as competetive as Battlefield, how does the industry curtail cheating though? There aren't many other solutions out there that can be easily uninstalled and what not.
Where is the source that steam takes 30%? Hell, how is that different from XBl, PSN, or any store ever?
In fact, consoles are worse because you have to be milked dry so the consoles can make their money back.
and lastly, dedicated servers prevent cheaters. Dedicated servers have admins, not punkbuster which was PROVEN to be useless years ago, causing more problems than solutions.
Which is why dedicated servers are demanded, if the players don't control servers then its up to a fallible easily gamed system.
Hell, punkbuster doesn't recognize all hacks, it only recognizes old ones. A human admin can recognize a hack regardless of what code it uses. Because its visible.
And by the way, steam wasn't the one trying to lock down games. Steam doesn't care if you sell elsewhere. It was EA that had a shit fit when steam asked for its DLC to be sold there too.
EA walked away from steam, not the other way around. Steam isn't the one locking down games.
Google it. But, just in case, this is straight from the Escapist, regarding Notch putting Minecraft on Steam.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.383139-Notch-in-No-Hurry-to-Bring-Minecraft-to-Steam
And... yeah, they pulled their stuff from Steam. Again, the PC is not a closed ecosystem. With that, publishers and companies can say: No, Valve, i'm not paying letting you have 30% of every sale of every game I sell. I will keep that 30%, thank you very much. Thus, Origin.
Think about it: Every game that sells for $60.00 on Steam, $18.00 goes to Valve. Every One Million in sales? 300 grand to Valve. Just for having it on Steam. Any honest company would say: We have no reason to sacrifice 300 grand when we can design a non-intrusive platform, and Origin in its current incarnation is just that.
And quite frankly, that's healthy. I would hate to see Steam continue to be the only place that people can buy games, and will hope that more competition continues to open.
You do know that 30% mark up is average right now right? Even in physical stores? Stores will charge that regardless.
and origin is non intrusive? Have you seen their platform? Everything is social networking this and micro transactions that.
EA thinks its customers are the scum of facebook, they think the only reason they exist is to broadcast their lives and have stated so. They don't respect their customers.
Steam never popped up demanding 4.99 for a microtransaction in the way EA does. Steam never popped up a huge box asking to "post to my friends."
That's why origin exists. Its an evolved version of their old DRM and microtransaction system dating all the way back to the Dragon Age 1 era.
The only reason origin exists is to nickel and dime you and to make sure it only goes 1 way. Not for alternatives. Not for market competition.
PC has plenty of competition. Steam and origin aren't the only ones. EA left EVERY alternative to make sure it can try to nickel and dime you at every turn. They even came out and said that sales "cheapen" the IP.
Trying to hoard games on a store YOU OWN so you get ALL the POWER is the opposite of competition. Even then, the money you "saved" from steam is lost in the cost of setup and the cost of operation. Server farms aren't cheap/
Even though sales is what steam makes its main money from. Not regular price games.
And lack of competition? We have fucking plenty. Origin isn't the only one. Its only there to get money out of you in the most obvious way possible.
The fact is, you are so wrong I am beginning to wonder if you even play PC games at all. EA isn't there to enforce competition, its there to dominate everything so it can wring all the money out of your pockets with huge price tags. EA is not your friend, and it sure as hell isn't creating compeitition.
Its just holding all its games hostage. Its there to force consumers follow EA's rules.
Its even trying this crap with the PS4 for christ sakes.
Even if it were on Steam, Valve does not control the prices of the games that are there, nor whether or whether not they are on sale. That is on the publisher, IE: EA.
I get it. You like Steam. I like Steam too, and I have all but two to three of my games there. But i'm not blind enough to understand that companies will try to maximize the amount of money they make off of their products. They're not the only ones, either. Nintendo locks their stuff down on their hardware. Ubisoft requires uPlay. Amazon has a games client now, which i've used. GameStop, much the same. Valve has helped create a radically popular niche for itself in PC Gaming, and now that people are here, businesses are saying: Hey, I don't have to use Valve to sell my games anymore. Unless it's a SteamBox, PC Games are not restricted to a closed ecosystem. Any program can be installed to manage gaming software, and companies are understandably attempting to keep that large sum of cash to themselves.
Server farms and software development in trade for long term fiscal saliance is also a no brainer, especially if they get people into their ecosystem who like it.
Have I seen their platform? Yes. I own games on their platform. I've bought games on their platform: Mass Effect 3, The Sims 3, SimCity, and Battlefield 3. It's just as easy to buy games there as it is on Steam, and i've never been prompted for any social networking plugins or anything related. As a matter of fact, if I were to compare the two side by side strictly in terms of their coding, Origin is more modern, loads faster, and uses fewer system resources than Steam does. It installs quicker, doesn't insist on a DirectX install for every game, and has a "lite" client to run offline for games that don't require a full internet connection to run.
Steam is old. The way it handles games dates back to Windows XP/Vista, as Steam Games don't even recognize the taskbar. It takes a long time to load up, its first time installations require install of programs that are native to Windows Vista, 7, and 8, and it uses quite a bit of memory while shopping. It's clunky between pages, and its navigation is dated.
Both collect usage data, and
both exist to be DRM for their respective games.
This isn't to say that it's bad. It does what it's intended to do, and the prices are hard to beat when it chooses to run a sale. I do wish Valve would actually update their client, though, to something more modern. I know that they have the money to do so. Instead, they are choosing to build an operating system that closes off those who run it to Valve's ecosystem. Oh well.
Despite all that, though, Valve's catalogue and sales are extremely difficult to beat. It's one of the reasons being a PC Gamer is so great: Where XBox and Playstation are running new games at high prices, I get them stupidly cheap. Origin, while having its Black Friday sales and some pretty competetive offers, can't beat Steam's catalogue.
But is Origin bad? No. Would I expect more companies to move in that direction? Yup. Do I blame them? Nope, and I think that as PC Gaming grows, Valve is likely to lose its vice grip on the PC Gaming market as more various locations open to sell games to us. Microsoft, for example, is positioning itself to enter the market, as they have the guy who made Steam the program it is today on their team to build a client of their own to sell games.
For the record, I've been PC Gaming for 14 years, and console gaming for more than a decade before that. Just because I don't have this overwhelming vitriol for Origin doesn't mean that "i don't PC Game." It just means that I have not found the reason to be upset at a company I haven't done much business with, and when I have, it hasn't been the end of the world.
