Zeel said:
Ranorak said:
Zeel said:
Ranorak said:
Zeel said:
We deserve better, indeed. I am tired of reading these little kiddies defend their favourite cult EA games. Let EA games get away with this, they will not stop.
Why do we 'deserve' better?
Better what?
Besides buying their stuff, what do we do that makes us entitled to anything?
Also, calling people who disagree with your view little kiddies, is not without it's irony.
Thats right. We are only entitled to their product.
When they try to slice and dice it for extra money then i'm not getting the full product, am I? I think you guys are little kiddies not because you disagree with me, but because your arguments are always FUNDAMENTALLY FLAWED. I've yet to see a good freaking argument in support of the dayonedlc nonsense.
You've been given good arguments, but you just cover your ear and go; "I don't care what you say, I'm still going to keep saying DLC is taken from the main game, and not added as an extra."
Which basicly makes your own argument invalid, because you still have access to the full product, it just costs 10 euro more.
If you say that day-1 DLC should be part of the main game, buy them both.
Problem solved.
Oh? What's that? You don't want to pay 10 euro more for the "complete" product?
Well... THEN DON'T!
oh yes this "there are good arguments you just don't understand them"
Please man, don't insult my intelligence with this nonsense. If there were good arguments why is it that everytime I engage EVERYONE they always fall to this postion: Oh there are good arguments you just don't get them
imagine that! Good arguments please. they are sucky arguments that why i debunk them. Again, here are my two points into why dayonedlc's are usually subtractive and not additional:
1.One of my most poignant points is the fact that all of this is during the inital development cycle. As in, the same budget. Let's say I grant you the point that these are additions, these are 'additions' that use the original budget. They aren't adding extra money to develop these 'additions'. yet they are charging you more for it. Does that make sense to you? An additional product that is costing the company nothing. If there is time to develop something during the first cycle then the budget had enough room for it. Ergo, there is no 'additional cost'
2. What seems more likely to you? That a company whos number one priority is to profit, would develop extra content for the consumer that would generate no extra profit. OR that they'd mince up some of the product and charge you extra for it.
Now while you're thinking about this. Do know EA games has done the latter many of times before. Example: DA2: Prince Sebastian. All the content was inside the game, you were just paying for the code.
put up or shut up.
your last post completely sidelines the issue: is it right for EA to hold content hostage inorder to squeeze more money out of its customer.
All of your posts display a fundamental lack of how business, software development in general, and games development in specific work.
1. A budget does not (except inasmuch as it informs a floor for price) inform costing decisions. A budget only exists internally and is used to determine the assignment of production assets and costs. No consumers do not set budgets, or prices. The business interests of a company set budgets based on a number of factors, and the market sets prices (and yes the market is different from consumers).
Similarly, you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a budget actually represents. Conceptually a budget is not a finite amount of money that is used up during production. Rather a budget is more representative of business costs v. time required for given teams and tasks, as a method of gauging bottlenecks and development problems, hence the frequent inaccuracy of most budgets. As you can see, none of this really has any bearing on the final price of a product at all.
Granted you are entirely right that the DLC for a project is "on the same budget", but that's a wildly different statement than saying it "doesn't cost anything extra". Salaries, office space, hardware, all of these things that are very much used in the production of DLC ARE costs that did not need to be incurred, and as such in taking on the task of creating DLC are in fact "extra". Although once again, none of that has any bearing on what the final product should cost or how it should be delivered.
On to the software development side. "Shrink Wrap" or boxed software is almost always "Finished" months before it hits store shelves. There are exceptions, that's certainly true, and ME3 may even be one of them, we have no way of knowing. But by far the standard is to reach feature/code complete up to a half a year before actual release. At this point you are no longer adding anything new wherever possible, this period is for polishing, and rooting out weird edge cases that break things. At this point you're requirements for the size of your development team drops drastically, only needing to keep on a core team of people to fix the problems that are found. Then you reach the gold master, at this point no changes at all CAN be made to the product, as it's the version decided upon to be widely released. It's possible that some distributors will in fact allow changes to be made during this time, but by and large once they receive a gold master they will not consider new changes because their own process is now in motion. While for Digital Distribution this is not a necessary step, if you're planning on releasing physical media in tandem, the decision will almost always be to leave both at the same state on release, it's not worth the trouble of having two different versions in the wild at the same time on day one, both from the support standpoint as well as appearing to cater to one group of customers over another.
In the creation of games, as soon as you reach the feature complete stage your development team could very well shrink by more than half. A great number of people who were vital when creating new content and features just aren't required in finding and fixing the problems that will come up. Now, these people are free to work on other projects, but a better choice is to have them continue working on DLC now that it's a viable option. First, you end up with more things that you can sell without adding significant investment (you're entirely right in this, it's a good use of resources because they can charge more without having to spend a large amount), and they remain "in the loop" so to speak in the case that they are required for fixes or minor additions.
As for 2. I'm a cynic so I can't honestly say that I believe EA wouldn't do that, in fact I might even call it highly likely. More to the point though, considering that there is also a very highly possible alternative, and you or anyone else that isn't directly involved with development simply cannot say for certain which route they took, we can't say that they're screwing us with any degree of certainty.
Is it possible that EA is being a huge bastard and screwing us over? Possibly.
Is it likely? Maybe depending on where you fall on the scale of cynicism to idealism.
In the end though none of that is really relevant. The end result is the offering of a product, and it's your choice to purchase it or not, based on your own judgement of its worth. What you include in that judgement is up to you, if you are that offended by the development practices then you are well within your rights to do your part in changing them by not purchasing the product.
To get at the point you were actually trying to make though:
I come down with people who think it's way too expensive, so I won't be picking it up. Perhaps later on when the price drops, but certainly not for the release price.
