I have recently become VERY fed up with the way the industry has been going in the past few years and there is nothing I can do about it. And I see the future: you want to fire that gun? Extra $1.00 to unlock. You want to play team death match? Extra $5.00 to unlock. Want that map pack that is already on the disc? Extra $10.00 to unlock. This last one, is already true.
It’s getting ludicrous the amount of money we have to pay for a game these days. Case in point would be Gears of War 3. One of the most polished, well designed and feature rich games on the Xbox 360. It’s a beautiful game, and considering that it’s only on a DVD-9 disc (Right?) you would think that they couldn’t fit in everything that they wanted. They have Horde Mode, which is competitive co-op with up-to 5 players. Beast Mode, a five player co-op strategy game. A multitude of Versus game types. A feature rich campaign mode that includes an Arcade version of the campaign, where up to four friends can compete for the most amount of points, not to mention four different difficulty levels, which can be applied to all the game types in versus, Beast, Horde and campaign. All of that for $60 (Could be $150 if you bought the Epic Edition with the statue). It is really great bang for your buck.
But now, there’s DLC. And a LOT of it. For $24 more, you can purchase the Season Pass to get the (at least) first four DLC packs. Okay… $45 more for all 22 weapon skin unlocks. In terms of rip-offs, it’s getting a little warmer. But the Season Pass is a good deal. Normally those four packs would be around $50 total (two packs at $10, and two packs at $50). So, to extend the life of the game, I need to pay at least $84 (that’s not including the Epic Edition that I purchased at $150). But here is where the REAL gouging occurs: Epic is making you pay $24 for a season pass for content that is ALREADY ON THE DISC! That’s right, they pre-loaded the disc with extra content that you have to pay to access. In other words, you already paid for it once, and now you are paying for it again. I’ve already seen this with EA and their Battlefield Bad Company games, but I thought Epic was better than this. Of course, I could be wrong, and Epic could have really gotten good about compression and compressed three new maps, three new character skins, and a bunch of new features in Horde into a 1.04 MB download.
Is it me or is this a PRIME example of how greedy the gaming industry is getting? But wait, it gets worse. EA is requiring people either buy their game new or pay $10 for an online pass in order to play their games online. This was started by Activision, but the industry as a whole took it up in a heartbeat and it seems to be very successful. So, even with this very successful model, they still seem intent on doing things that REALLY piss off their customer base. For instance, yesterday, they announced that Battlefield 4 would be coming out in the future. Battlefield 3 hasn’t been out in the hands of gamers for a month, and they already announced a successor? Another thing that really stings home right now, is the fact that Battlefield 3 has had some of the worst server issues in recorded history, including being down for three days the week it was released. But the biggest issue that I have with Battlefield 3 is the lobby. It has to be the worst one I have every used. Why they couldn’t have, at a minimum, used the lobby from Bad Company 2 is beyond reasoning. For that reason alone, I will not be purchasing Battlefield 4. I refuse to spend the limited gaming time that I have, waiting to get into room that my friends are in.
I would say that Activision announcing that there would be 20 DLC packs for Modern Warfare 3 (MW3) is ground-breaking news, but I was still a little shocked to see that amount. I personally see MW3 as a $60 expansion pack to Modern Warfare 2, but that’s my own personal option. But 20 DLC packs? Are they going to charge $5 per pack? That is $100 extra all packs. How about $10 a pack? That’s $200 extra all packs. Grand total for the game = $260 for the life of that game.
I would be a little less offended by all this, but there is something else that is bothering me. The publishers/developers/gaming companies just don’t want to listen to customer feedback anymore. And for this, I blame Apple. That’s right Apple Computers. That company, beyond all else, is famous for setting a standard and if you don’t agree, you could go fuck yourself. They don’t care about bad press and making a customer unhappy. They do their own thing, and if you don’t like it, tough, buy somewhere/something else. These game companies that are churning out these hit games that are selling millions and raking in 100’s of millions of dollars just don’t give a crap because they know we’ll buy it.
Activision knows that Modern Warefare will sell 10 million copies so they can charge what they want for whatever price they want and people will still buy it. Epic knows that people will still buy Gears of War 3, so they did the very shitty thing of putting the content on the disc and then having you pay to unlock it. EA knows that it can break the lobby of Battlefield 3, and let the servers go to shit the first week because they know that people will buy the game, even though we know it has problems. What I find funny about this is that @MajorNelson himself asked the publisher about a feature to quit the game before having to go into the next room, which wasn’t included on Battlefield 3, and the developer responded “Why would you want to leave the game?” and completely ignore the question otherwise.
Of course there will be bug fixes, and so fourth, but the real bug is they don’t care about the features we want. They only care about the features we’ll spend our money on. We need to send the gaming companies a message that we want a good user experience for a fair price. But what can really be done to get this message across? Nothing, because no matter how many of these blog posts that I write, someone out there is willing to spend $200 on map packs for Modern Warfare 3. And that, right there, is why developers and publishers shouldn’t give a shit about what we think and charge extra for add-ons.
