Jimquisition: EA Access ... Denied
- Thread starter Jimothy Sterling
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Subscriptions are just one more piece of the dark service-centric Hell that gaming will become if the market doesn't retain its spine.
I'm already wary of a service-centric game future, and the last thing I want is yet more financial validation for it.
(wary in spite of services that are largely considered to be upstanding like GoG and Steam)
Just like how the acceptance of DLC eventually lead to the extinction of feature-complete AAA games, so will the acceptance of Subscriptions lead us closer to the dark hell of Always Online, since a service is required for a subscription to have any meaning.
If there's any one common element to these schemes: It's to create a less-for-more scenario by changing the "game" part of the relationship into an opportunity that only leads to more opportunities to spend. Rather than what it used to be: a simple transaction of "I give you money, you give me your game."
Instead, AAA continues to try and push gaming away from that.
Imagine if the market had no spine at all, and it caved to AAA's every whim.
Within a decade, gaming would look something like this:
-Behold, AAA's Paradise-
Where the Gamer will...
1) Buy games at full price via pre-order or on launch
2) Pay a subscription fee to "support" the always online service required for the games
3) Buy DLC content as it's trickled out
4) Engage in social media to develop habits and attachment to the system (for the publisher to best gather personalized market data, and to discourage the gamer from using any competing service)
5) Engage in competitive/multiplayer activities (multiplayer is not only easier to develop assets for due to its nature, but competition provides a means to introduce a Pay2Win scenario for even more profit opportunities)
6) Be willing to grind for hundreds if not thousands of hours to maximize exposure time.
(grind-based design offers too many possible benefits for the publisher to be omitted; microtransaction opportunities, addictive conditioning ala Skinner psychology, and the content is more cost-effective to develop since grind-based content can be expanded by copy-pasting similar/existing assets with minimal effort)
7) Repeat the entire process for when the next self-derivative game/content is released
(Call "slippery slope" if you wish; the above is already too close to reality for my tastes. Take a look at China's online game market. Most of those are already implemented, and it makes megabucks.)
I'm already wary of a service-centric game future, and the last thing I want is yet more financial validation for it.
(wary in spite of services that are largely considered to be upstanding like GoG and Steam)
Just like how the acceptance of DLC eventually lead to the extinction of feature-complete AAA games, so will the acceptance of Subscriptions lead us closer to the dark hell of Always Online, since a service is required for a subscription to have any meaning.
If there's any one common element to these schemes: It's to create a less-for-more scenario by changing the "game" part of the relationship into an opportunity that only leads to more opportunities to spend. Rather than what it used to be: a simple transaction of "I give you money, you give me your game."
Instead, AAA continues to try and push gaming away from that.
Imagine if the market had no spine at all, and it caved to AAA's every whim.
Within a decade, gaming would look something like this:
-Behold, AAA's Paradise-
Where the Gamer will...
1) Buy games at full price via pre-order or on launch
2) Pay a subscription fee to "support" the always online service required for the games
3) Buy DLC content as it's trickled out
4) Engage in social media to develop habits and attachment to the system (for the publisher to best gather personalized market data, and to discourage the gamer from using any competing service)
5) Engage in competitive/multiplayer activities (multiplayer is not only easier to develop assets for due to its nature, but competition provides a means to introduce a Pay2Win scenario for even more profit opportunities)
6) Be willing to grind for hundreds if not thousands of hours to maximize exposure time.
(grind-based design offers too many possible benefits for the publisher to be omitted; microtransaction opportunities, addictive conditioning ala Skinner psychology, and the content is more cost-effective to develop since grind-based content can be expanded by copy-pasting similar/existing assets with minimal effort)
7) Repeat the entire process for when the next self-derivative game/content is released
(Call "slippery slope" if you wish; the above is already too close to reality for my tastes. Take a look at China's online game market. Most of those are already implemented, and it makes megabucks.)
This is a beautiful summation and, well, consider me scared shitless. I'm a Chow Hound gamer like a lot of other folks, so I don't stick to the AAA pastures or to the Indie studios in any exclusive fashion. I more or less jump from game to game, and stick to whatever genre and approach interests me at the moment.Atmos Duality said:
I don't have time to devote myself to a single game and all of its ancillary content, despite what my Steam count of Skyrim hours would suggest. I don't have time to grind. I don't have time to whip out the credit card for each and every pack that's suddenly required to stay abreast of multiplayer servers.
I play games for fun, obviously, and I don't consider my Steam account as being some kind of altar connecting me to the AAA gods or allowing me to somehow pay my dues.
I keep hoping the consumers will wake up as a whole, but it really does feel like the bulk of the gaming scene is acting like the frog you've stuck in slowly heating water. They won't move until it's too late and the industry's greed and insistence to keep going for the graphics race causes it to collapse for the second time.
Actually, I should clarify that statement. There's those of us who care, and then there's the masses who go "Duuuuh, I don't care! Where's my preordered cash cow at?!"
Jim, while you're video does raise some interesting points, I cannot agree that EA Access is a good value at all if you're a person who pays attention to sales.
Any game that comes out these days goes on sale at various outlets for 10% or more in both digital and physical formats as a preorder (the typical price I see is $47.99 in the US, which is a 20% discount). If one wanted to argue that you can't find a 20% discount after launch, I would remind them that most EA titles are rehashes of the same thing and you should have preordered it. I know you're against preordering in general but Battlefield is Battlefield. FIFA is FIFA. Madden is Madden. We know how these games play. We know their launch quality history. This alone will tell someone if they want a game or not, and the obligatory incoming patch to fix the problems will come out within a few weeks. Preorder the thing, save 20% while getting a salvage value (on non-PC platforms) and leave EA Access in the dust.
We know full well that EA is not going to put games in the vault at launch, so the vault only appeals to gamers who are deal finders anyways. They'll show up at least six months after if we're lucky. The problem is at this time, a game's price typically drops to two-thirds to half and continues to fall rapidly. If you wait an additional six months you can probably get the game for $20 or less new. When you start throwing in the secondary market on consoles and digital distribution sales on PC, the value becomes less and less. I picked up Crysis 3 at around a year after launch on an Origin sale for about $5.
I tallied up the price of all 7 EA games I purchased in 2013 and 2014, 3 (including BF4) at launch and 4 oldies and Battlefield 4 premium. Had I purchased those same titles with an Origin Access discount or playing aged titles in the vault, Access would've been about the same price. And that includes paying full price for Battlefield 4 by not preordering on sale. Again, that's seven EA titles and BF4 Premium. And not only would I not have saved money, but the prospects of adding more titles still doesn't look favorable for Access.
So the only circumstance I see where a person would see any value is if the EA vault was huge and you wanted to play older titles, and even then with the massive discounts and sales available it's still hard to mathematically justify.
It is hard to put a price on early access. Quite frankly I think $30 a year for 4 days early access is a complete waste of money, because as I've shown above, the other attributes aren't useful.
When compared it PS+, it really doesn't. One could make these same arguments to attack PS+ but they'd be forgetting PS+ has access to many developer's titles, not just EA's. This is the fatal flaw of EA's business model, with the only thing salvaging it is the fact that Xbox One/360 owners don't already have a similar service.
This is simply EA doing what EA does. They don't innovate, they copy everything the competition does, and somehow make it worse. Except this time people don't see it.
Any game that comes out these days goes on sale at various outlets for 10% or more in both digital and physical formats as a preorder (the typical price I see is $47.99 in the US, which is a 20% discount). If one wanted to argue that you can't find a 20% discount after launch, I would remind them that most EA titles are rehashes of the same thing and you should have preordered it. I know you're against preordering in general but Battlefield is Battlefield. FIFA is FIFA. Madden is Madden. We know how these games play. We know their launch quality history. This alone will tell someone if they want a game or not, and the obligatory incoming patch to fix the problems will come out within a few weeks. Preorder the thing, save 20% while getting a salvage value (on non-PC platforms) and leave EA Access in the dust.
We know full well that EA is not going to put games in the vault at launch, so the vault only appeals to gamers who are deal finders anyways. They'll show up at least six months after if we're lucky. The problem is at this time, a game's price typically drops to two-thirds to half and continues to fall rapidly. If you wait an additional six months you can probably get the game for $20 or less new. When you start throwing in the secondary market on consoles and digital distribution sales on PC, the value becomes less and less. I picked up Crysis 3 at around a year after launch on an Origin sale for about $5.
I tallied up the price of all 7 EA games I purchased in 2013 and 2014, 3 (including BF4) at launch and 4 oldies and Battlefield 4 premium. Had I purchased those same titles with an Origin Access discount or playing aged titles in the vault, Access would've been about the same price. And that includes paying full price for Battlefield 4 by not preordering on sale. Again, that's seven EA titles and BF4 Premium. And not only would I not have saved money, but the prospects of adding more titles still doesn't look favorable for Access.
So the only circumstance I see where a person would see any value is if the EA vault was huge and you wanted to play older titles, and even then with the massive discounts and sales available it's still hard to mathematically justify.
It is hard to put a price on early access. Quite frankly I think $30 a year for 4 days early access is a complete waste of money, because as I've shown above, the other attributes aren't useful.
When compared it PS+, it really doesn't. One could make these same arguments to attack PS+ but they'd be forgetting PS+ has access to many developer's titles, not just EA's. This is the fatal flaw of EA's business model, with the only thing salvaging it is the fact that Xbox One/360 owners don't already have a similar service.
This is simply EA doing what EA does. They don't innovate, they copy everything the competition does, and somehow make it worse. Except this time people don't see it.
Shouldn't gamers be skeptical anyway? Not everyone has $130+ to throw around for game subscriptions. I think the smart reviewer would ask which services have the best bang for the gaming buck. I'll agree that the game industry seems to want to suck gamers dry with poor games and DLC, microtransactions and preorders, but gamers don't have to do any of that. Support the games you really want and the games industry will change. I am an Escapist viewer, not really a gamer, and I will say the most I have spent on games in the last year is $25 on Shadowrun Returns.
Their is a point i would have liked to see addressed in the vid: with this kind of subscription, game are services.
EA tried to make this happen on PC with Origin and their numerous changes of policies, they failed. I really hope to see them failing again, because if this "Access" is a success, Ubisoft, Activision and some others (like Crytek: in their last announcement, they changed to be a publisher and, in their User Agreement, games are labelled "services") will make their own "access".
So, people will loose control of the products that should be owned, it'll be ranted without any kind of claim if the "service" is put down (Hey do you really think publisher will keep games running when they launched a sequel or a new sport game, do you think you'll be able to play Fifa 15 when the 17 will launch ?).
Just remember, in 2003, on the Xbox, Microsoft tried a new form of expansion with Mechassault. It was the first DLC... Today what should be included in a launched product is cut for Day one DLC, already or not on the "disk", what was unlocked playing the game is sold as a Dlc and i can continue. It was one publisher on one console...
I didn't found any more recent studie... But in 2011, 51% of players are used to buy DLC... Honestly, i think the futur of the VG industry is really realy dark...
EA tried to make this happen on PC with Origin and their numerous changes of policies, they failed. I really hope to see them failing again, because if this "Access" is a success, Ubisoft, Activision and some others (like Crytek: in their last announcement, they changed to be a publisher and, in their User Agreement, games are labelled "services") will make their own "access".
So, people will loose control of the products that should be owned, it'll be ranted without any kind of claim if the "service" is put down (Hey do you really think publisher will keep games running when they launched a sequel or a new sport game, do you think you'll be able to play Fifa 15 when the 17 will launch ?).
Just remember, in 2003, on the Xbox, Microsoft tried a new form of expansion with Mechassault. It was the first DLC... Today what should be included in a launched product is cut for Day one DLC, already or not on the "disk", what was unlocked playing the game is sold as a Dlc and i can continue. It was one publisher on one console...
I didn't found any more recent studie... But in 2011, 51% of players are used to buy DLC... Honestly, i think the futur of the VG industry is really realy dark...
You know another of the real reasons EA wants to get everyone on a subscription service?
You see, AOL was the first to discover a funny thing about people on a subscription service - they don't know they don't need it and they forget to cancel it.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/21/aols-dirty-little-secret-_n_812307.html
If EA can get dumb kids and dumb parents convinced they need it to play EA games (even ones they buy fully!) then they'll never cancel.
You see, AOL was the first to discover a funny thing about people on a subscription service - they don't know they don't need it and they forget to cancel it.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/21/aols-dirty-little-secret-_n_812307.html
If EA can get dumb kids and dumb parents convinced they need it to play EA games (even ones they buy fully!) then they'll never cancel.
while initially things will seem okay, the real reason why games will push towards even more contrived DLC models is that in addition to letting you play all these games where they can push them on you where the pressure is more on the DLC end than it is the initial sale end which they don't have to do anymore to get you in, it becomes much easier to just keep arbitrarily marking up the numbers at the end of them up by one, making the same game without changing much of anything, and then selling you a new set of DLC while making your old set worthless by dropping the support for that game in favor of the new oneWulfram77 said:
it's stupid but it'll work if people just let it happen
B-but... It' doesn't sound like a good deal Jim-chan, n-not at all.
-Early Access
In the best case scenario they delay the release date for every game for X-amount of days, worst case you're getting a beta or even a buggy as fuck alpha build.
-Access to certain games
The only games they'll put on this are Free 2 play games, and maybe the odd "Titan fall 3 day trial". You know, shit that should already be free.
-Discounts
It won't be on their new triple A releases, it will be like a steam sale, you know, the thing that the free service does. And less frequent. Things that make them money will never get on this list, but if their market analysis drones calculate that selling things at a discount will squeeze more money out of an IP.
I've worked sales, and I wouldn't trust a deal I made myself like this.
I'm going to throw this out their
-Early Access
In the best case scenario they delay the release date for every game for X-amount of days, worst case you're getting a beta or even a buggy as fuck alpha build.
-Access to certain games
The only games they'll put on this are Free 2 play games, and maybe the odd "Titan fall 3 day trial". You know, shit that should already be free.
-Discounts
It won't be on their new triple A releases, it will be like a steam sale, you know, the thing that the free service does. And less frequent. Things that make them money will never get on this list, but if their market analysis drones calculate that selling things at a discount will squeeze more money out of an IP.
I've worked sales, and I wouldn't trust a deal I made myself like this.
I'm going to throw this out their
EA points
For every dollar you spend you get an EA point, 1 point translates to 10 cents, you buy 10 AAA games you get one free.
You would gain so much positive press and it's only really costing you 10%. And it's really not hey; you'll get consumers back that you've lost in the past, and encourage people to make more purchases from you. "10 more points and I can have the Sims 4 for free..."
You can also do deals on that too, like you can have a clearance section of items that don't sell anymore, buying from this each point is worth 20 cents. Or you could let us be able to buy DLC with those points.
Just... there, if you marketing assholes feel like you need to make it look like you've earnt your paychecks just use that idea. No one will tell, I swear on me mum.
Or don't, the sooner the triple A industry crumbles the sooner better business practices rush in to fill the void, the sooner I'll actually buy games again instead of playing Shadowrun.
For every dollar you spend you get an EA point, 1 point translates to 10 cents, you buy 10 AAA games you get one free.
You would gain so much positive press and it's only really costing you 10%. And it's really not hey; you'll get consumers back that you've lost in the past, and encourage people to make more purchases from you. "10 more points and I can have the Sims 4 for free..."
You can also do deals on that too, like you can have a clearance section of items that don't sell anymore, buying from this each point is worth 20 cents. Or you could let us be able to buy DLC with those points.
Just... there, if you marketing assholes feel like you need to make it look like you've earnt your paychecks just use that idea. No one will tell, I swear on me mum.
Or don't, the sooner the triple A industry crumbles the sooner better business practices rush in to fill the void, the sooner I'll actually buy games again instead of playing Shadowrun.
I would agree with you here, however, I don't really see how this is helping developers (the ones who matter in this situation) any. EA is the only one making money off of this scheme. And one could argue that it'll trickle down to developers, but when does money ever "really" trickle down? I mean we look at two things:RandV80 said:
1. If developers were making it so good under publishers then why are they seemingly "stuck" with them. Likely because they get paid just enough to make a game but can never pay back enough to EA in order to be free of their grasp without having to crawl back or at least go to another publisher.
2. As evidenced in an above post, we know EA's history. We know what they have and will still do to developers. They'll cannibalize them, tarnish their names, ruin they're games if it makes them a quick buck.
Point being... I don't see how EA fishing for more free money is really "helping developers" anymore than used games are. It's all at EAs discretion and if developers don't lick their boot then they get the boot. Hell even if they do lick the boot they still will probably be screwed. It may not be exactly the point your making but I think it's important be honest in saying this isn't exactly a "good" thing for anyone except EA.
Paid subscription = Fuck off
That's how I view paid subscriptions these days. And I cannot see how anything the AAA games industry will ever do a paid subscription service that doesn't screw over everyone. Like when DLC was becoming pay for content rather than included in a patch or saved up for a full blown expansion pack I said do not pay for it, I say today do not subscribe!
Of course there will be enough subscribing for the to continue like DLC and then turn the bullshit up to 11 soon afterwards.
That's how I view paid subscriptions these days. And I cannot see how anything the AAA games industry will ever do a paid subscription service that doesn't screw over everyone. Like when DLC was becoming pay for content rather than included in a patch or saved up for a full blown expansion pack I said do not pay for it, I say today do not subscribe!
Of course there will be enough subscribing for the to continue like DLC and then turn the bullshit up to 11 soon afterwards.
Uh god, subscribing to a publisher service. Heaven forfend that I ever sink so low. In fact if it does happen just shoot me because it will be a sure sign of alzheimer's setting in.