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[NaturalViolence]

Shonumi Wrote:I'm no PC gamer, but $35 (or whatever the price is in UK monies) is too much for a game? I think someone's been spoiled on sub $20 on Steam

If it were a good game sure. But it's not.

Rant: (Show Spoiler)

This is just another news tidbit to make me think "why are people still buying these things? How are they still in business constantly pulling this stuff?". Which seems to be a recurring monthly thought at this point. But then I remember their massive and clearly successful marketing campaigns. Their annual madden/fifa sequels, which thanks to their licensing rights are guaranteed to be successful even if they're straight up clones from last years game. And other heavily marketed annual franchises that copy other popular franchises (battlefield is now practically a clone of CoD at this point). Thanks to our moronic consumers they can't fail no matter how much they fuck up the games.

Imo they haven't released anything worth buying in years. Which is why I've stopped buying their products. And it seems most of the internet is in agreement with me. So how are they still making a killing in the market? Well the people who are still buying from the them are the type of people who won't read or care about any of the drama that surrounds them. The "casual gamers" as we've apparently taken to calling them on the web. They do exist and they unfortunately make up such a large slice of the market that companies like EA have zero reason to care whether we buy their products or not anymore as long as they can hold on to that market. The casual market only wants three things, simplicity (a.k.a. zero depth), familiar mechanics (a.k.a. rehashes), and references to cultural icons that they know. These happen to unfortunately be the exact opposite of what we want so EA is essentially forced to choose which types of games they want to make. Since the type of games we want also cost more to make on top of selling fewer copies it's obvious which route they will keep taking. And there is nothing we can do about it at this point. Even mass boycotts don't seem to work anymore. Sucks doesn't it?

And for the record I don't have a problem with this sale. I'm just ranting about the poor quality of their games in recent years in general. Bioware and DICE have been completely ruined at this point. And those were the last developers that they control that I had any remaining hope for.

Xtreme2damax Wrote:I haven't really felt a need to use Origin or Uplay and am sticking with Steam.

Unfortunately for anyone who wants to play or even try any of their newer games this is not an option anymore.

Xtreme2damax Wrote:Origin is alright for a client but still not at the level Steam is at and Uplay is just badly designed, both are badly designed in that they don't integrate with other clients well.

I would argue that all of them have their pros and cons but I actually prefer origin the most out of the three. It's just a shame that their are so few games avialible on it (most of which are cheaper on steam anyways) and I have so few friends that use it (so limited multiplayer options). The other thing I don't like about it is it's not very portable. I recently had to move it to a new drive to save space and that was a serious headache. Otherwise I would be using it instead of steam. It seems to be much faster and more responsive, has lots of basic features that steam still doesn't have (like setting specific download rates for games on the go which is critical for someone on a slow connection like me), and has far fewer bugs/problems.

Despite how much I love origin over steam I still think it was a really dumb move on EAs part. Considering how much it must have cost to develop and maintain it and how many sales they must have lost during the transition I still don't understand how it could have improved their profits or why they would do it.

Xtreme2damax Wrote:Too bad digital games didn't drive down prices as once speculated due to cutting out the middleman and the need to worry about a case, manual etc..

Actually they did. At least for PCs. Games are objectively much cheaper now than they used to be. Both on average and for AAA games. Games that were selling in the tens of millions last year can now be had for <$10 during a sale. That shit never used to happen.

Xtreme2damax Wrote:Should have figured greedy corporations wouldn't ever let that come to fruition. From what I've seen sales of any games from the big publishers, namely EA, Activision and Ubisoft tend to be less generous than other publishers especially when it's a flagship AAA title. This is true no matter where the game is being sold digitally. Around here the best bet is a generous seller on Amazon will offer it for a low price. Other than that wait a long while for prices to drop elsewhere, as popularity and sales decrease so will prices leading to greaters discounts during sales. A lot of games are going to suffer from COD syndrome where a while after the game is released no matter if there are sequels the price will remain high and sale prices will be lackluster. Some games on Steam despite being older than a year are still being sold at full price or near full price.

I'm pretty sure steam has to get the publisher to authorize a sale or change in price. Publishers probably base sale prices based on sales data. If sales numbers have dropped off a cliff then they're going to allow a pretty big discount. They calculate the price that is most likely to net them the most revenue. Lower prices mean less profit per sale but more total sales. There is an optimal point somewhere between the two extremes that they attempt to find. So while it may be tempting to blame the greedy publishers the consumers are probably at least partially at fault for continuing to buy the product in droves at its inflated price. I have noticed that on steam activision is pretty much the only publisher that doesn't seem to allow regular significant discounts. Particularly on the CoD franchise. Which only occasionally get sales and never more than 25% off. The games remain at full price for several years after release and even after that the price is never lowered very much. Only once the game is 10+ years old do we begin to see them at typical steam game prices. It makes me wonder though whether consumers are actually still buying these games in significant numbers at these prices years after release. Or is activision somehow doing this for no good reason? It would seem strange to call that "greedy" since if it's true it means they are deliberately making less money by keeping the price too high for people to buy it. So either activision is stupid and shooting themselves in the foot or the consumers are to blame. The data needed to confirm/deny this isn't made public so this is just a guess, but my money is on the latter.