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[Friday]

EA begins the systematic slaughter of children in the streets of New York

Nerds continue to claim this isn't something to be upset over, "They'd have died eventually, anyway."

[Thad]

UPDATE: Electronic Arts has announced that CEO John Riccitiello is stepping down.

Well, THAT'S good.

I mean, it would be silly to blame this single debacle for his stepping down.  He was probably well on his way to stepping down after all those OTHER debacles.

EA is reportedly replacing its own support number with asterisks in the SimCity forum

...oh my.

CEO stepping down is a good start but I'm afraid EA's still turning way too big a profit on this thing to learn anything.  I don't think it's going to get better.

[Brentai]

Well, the reported reason for the CEO's ouster is unacceptably poor Q4 results, which most analysts are simply pinning down to the fact that "fucking everybody hated EA by the end of 2012".

So yeah, there's a financial blowback here, even if they don't see it in the offending product's numbers (which is the usual case).  If nothing else, they're probably agitating more than just the consumer now, unless Amazon happens to be okay with EA trying to gag their customer support.  (Hint: Amazon really, really values its customer support reputation.)

[Bal]

Maybe pulling all their games off of Steam was a bad idea after all.

[TA]

Well, Origin being a giant security hole in and of itself can't be helping.

[Thad]

EA does something right for a change and kills Online Pass.

It's probably a coincidence that it's happening right after the Xbox One backlash; the amount of time it takes for a major corporate about-face to be approved and then implemented is generally more than a week.  But EA can probably benefit from the timing.

[Bal]

I think they're removing online pass because Microsoft at least is confirmed to be doing that service for them with the Xbox One. You're right that it's nothing to do with the backlash, but they've had devkits for the XBone for months now, they've known what it does.

[Brentai]

If that's true it implies they're not worried about PS4 piracy legitimate resale either.

[Defenestration]

I never understood the huff about Online Passes. If there is an online pass to begin with, it means there are servers that the developer or publisher have to pay for. Requesting a 10 dollar one time fee when I'm going to do something that will cause company X to spend money when I have only given money to company Y is more than reasonable.

[Brentai]

If there is an online pass to begin with, it means there are servers that the developer or publisher have to pay for.

Well, yes.  The servers exist to manage the online pass system.  My understanding is in most cases the servers do fuck all to actually facilitate multiplayer, they're just there to collect a toll before you can connect to other players.

[Thad]

I never understood the huff about Online Passes. If there is an online pass to begin with, it means there are servers that the developer or publisher have to pay for. Requesting a 10 dollar one time fee when I'm going to do something that will cause company X to spend money when I have only given money to company Y is more than reasonable.

Which would be a perfectly reasonable argument if they weren't already overcharging for games, nickel-and-diming you on DLC, and generally doing absolutely everything possible to charge more than necessary at every turn.

Do you really believe that ten bucks per user is even in the same ballpark as their maintenance and bandwidth costs?

Hell, I pay $55 a month for cable and THAT'S a gross overcharge.

Course, customers might be willing to overlook all that if they felt they were getting a bare minimum level of service from EA in exchange for their hard-earned dollars.  But that kinda requires the competence to actually keep your servers operational.

[Bal]

If that's true it implies they're not worried about PS4 piracy legitimate resale either.

Turns out yes and no. It will have the function built in for publishers to use, but it won't be universal as on the XBone. So yeah, real magnanimous, EA.

[Defenestration]

I never understood the huff about Online Passes. If there is an online pass to begin with, it means there are servers that the developer or publisher have to pay for. Requesting a 10 dollar one time fee when I'm going to do something that will cause company X to spend money when I have only given money to company Y is more than reasonable.

Which would be a perfectly reasonable argument if they weren't already overcharging for games, nickel-and-diming you on DLC, and generally doing absolutely everything possible to charge more than necessary at every turn.

Do you really believe that ten bucks per user is even in the same ballpark as their maintenance and bandwidth costs?

Hell, I pay $55 a month for cable and THAT'S a gross overcharge.

Course, customers might be willing to overlook all that if they felt they were getting a bare minimum level of service from EA in exchange for their hard-earned dollars.  But that kinda requires the competence to actually keep your servers operational.

It's not JUST maintenance and bandwidth. $10 dollars per every user after the first is perfectly reasonable when you only see revenue for for one out of every five people that paid for your game. Johnny will buy the game, play it online for 3 months, then sell it to Gamestop who sells it to Timmy who plays it online for 3 months, who then sells it to Gamestop who sells it to Judy who plays it online for 3 months...

$60 is too much to pay per game, absolutely. But with the current system, the developer/publisher needs to compensate to run in spite of the used game market. I'm curious to know what you're referring to by "nickel and diming." There are *absolutely* games that do nickel and dime horrendously, but as a whole I'm sympathetic to creators trying to make alternative revenue streams for games that exist for pretty much any other form of media. For example, after the movie leaves box offices you have DVD sales. And then after DVD sales you have television syndication.

[Ocksi]

One example of horrendous and common behavior would probably be any day-1 DLC.

Where'd you get the 4/5 of games are bought used stat?

[Brentai]

The big problem with major studios is simply that their economics are crazy.  Nobody would mind if the core game was somewhat cheap and could be extended through DLC - a lot of smaller games work very well on this model.  Nobody would mind paying for online access if it was a bonus and the product wasn't essentially built around it.  The way AAA titles work today though - it feels like they're selling BMWs without air conditioning as a standard option.  The values are all skewed up because of a wave of newcomers who don't know what video games are supposed to cost.  Damn kids.

[Classic]

Yes. They're supposed to cost $80 in 1995 money.

EDIT:
What I mean to say is that the price point for console software in the US has always been pretty high.
It skews down for portable titles (sometimes), and skewed down slightly when the reduced costs of disks as media was a selling point of the PSX, but people have kind of internalized the $60+ AAA price tag, and it seems to be here to stay. It's similar to what I understand as the reason for the ridiculous Australian prices.

[Thad]

It's not JUST maintenance and bandwidth. $10 dollars per every user after the first is perfectly reasonable when you only see revenue for for one out of every five people that paid for your game.

This is an utterly nonsensical way of looking at the secondary market.

Resale value is part of the value of a game.  Reduce that value and you reduce the likelihood of someone buying it in the first place.

A used sale isn't a lost sale.  A used sale is something that's baked into the cost you charge for the item in the first damn place.  Resalability is a feature, not a bug.

If I have a yard sale, the companies that made my old TV, paperbacks, shelves, toys, etc. don't get a cut.  The bottom hasn't fallen out of Sony's TV business because Sony didn't get a cut when I sold my old TV; the bottom's fallen out of Sony's TV business because Sony ceased to provide a quality product at a reasonable price.

For example, after the movie leaves box offices you have DVD sales. And then after DVD sales you have television syndication.

Yeah, and Nintendo wants ten bucks for Super Mario 64, Valve wants ten bucks for Half-Life, and EA itself wants $20 for SimCity 4.  The idea that video games don't have the same kind of perpetual rerelease cycle as movies is so 2005.

EA makes a sizable chunk of its money from sports franchises that it rereleases annually with minor changes.  It makes another sizable chunk from free-to-play phone games with microtransactions.  That's before we even get into whether or not zero-day DLC is legitimate (short answer: sometimes) and the myriad other ways EA's online double-dipping is bullshit (such as adding to games that don't actually need to be played online).

[Joxam]

Yeah, I gotta say, I am willing to pay sixty bucks for a new game because of gamestop. I know that not everyone buys a game retail, so I'm willing to eat a bit now for that system in the future. And online passes fly in the face of this structure. I am NOT willing to pay sixty bucks for a game that can't be traded, that's why I don't pay more than 40 for PC games.

[Brentai]

Most people don't think of depreciation cost in games, but it's there (for physical games anyway), and the OP system probably hurts the initial buyer more in forced depreciation than it does the potential resale customer.

Whole fucking thing isn't even that smart from a bottom line standpoint, considering DLC.  You end up selling less DLC because you end up with less total customers exposed to the core game.  Considering how heavily EA's model banks on aftermarket revenue, you've got this weird scenario where Gillette is going around telling people with razors that they're not allowed to buy any blades.

[Thad]

Most people don't think of depreciation cost in games, but it's there (for physical games anyway), and the OP system probably hurts the initial buyer more in forced depreciation than it does the potential resale customer.

Could be, but it's certainly both.

I don't think that's the only reason that GameStop at this point is only selling used games for about $5 less than new ones, but that's certainly got an impact on whether I'll buy a game used.

Whole fucking thing isn't even that smart from a bottom line standpoint, considering DLC.  You end up selling less DLC because you end up with less total customers exposed to the core game.  Considering how heavily EA's model banks on aftermarket revenue, you've got this weird scenario where Gillette is going around telling people with razors that they're not allowed to buy any blades.

Yeah -- maybe somebody finally figured that out.