lol
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How does that make EA a quote 'evil nazi empire'?
How does that make EA any different to other for-profit companies?
The 'evil EA' people are bandwagoners, plain and simple.
Did I ever call them an evil Nazi empire? No. Stop trying to drag an argument out of thin air.
You invited a comment, so I made one, pointing out that finally EA was doing something right with DLC after many years of going about it in entirely the wrong way.
The other thing I did was to point out that your example of them being
ever so generous was anything but.
How are they different from other companies? EA is one of the longest running games software/distribution companies on the planet and I've owned shares in them since the very early '90s. Yet rather than learning the lessons that Valve and others have shown work well, they have for much of their existence followed a policy of seeking short term cash gains rather than looking at the much bigger benefits that come with going for long term gains and keeping your customers happy and loyal to you.
The Valve lesson:
DLC can often be much more valuable to a company when much of it is given away, if necessary tie it to having a valid and original game key, as that alone will encourage more sales of the game). With charging for DLC far too early, ie: before the major bugs have been ironed out and whilst the player base is still unsure of whether they'll even stick with game due to the aforementioned problems, you tend to see the same thing happening over and over, which is that the player base quickly becomes split. This is never a good thing when a MP game is trying to get itself properly established. Players have a tendency to watch the dwindling numbers on servers and decide the game is dead or dieing and when they see that happening many will stop playing it all together and never return.
If there is going to be an early DLC release then make sure it is available to all, that way nobody gets alienated and players tend to feel that the company is still sticking with the development and not just squeezing them for extra cash in the first few days/months of a game being released.
Why wait till later to get that bit more cash? Once the game is properly established and has a good community playing it regularly, occasional bits of paid for DLC can become an excellent way of extending the lifespan of a game and will keep on bringing fresh people to the game. Take a look at TF2, free updates and DLC for all has meant that not only does the game still have a massive existing player base, but it is still growing as more people keep buying it.
Extending the lifespan of a game is normally cheaper by several orders of magnitude than moving on and having to generate a brand new IP all together. Sales later on in a games lifespan, once the massive costs of the original development are over and paid for, are much more profitable for a company.
The bandwaggoning that they've been engaging in is actually more along the lines of one EA account manager realising that he could gouge a fistful of extra dollars from some players and give his project a quick boost on the balance sheet by releasing a few extra maps that were already developed (but not chosen for inclusion with the initial release). Of course this is the sort of thing that shortsighted shareholders tend to love at first, until they realise that their golden goose stopped laying golden eggs a long time ago. On getting away with it once, others jumped onto that bandwagon and very quickly it became company policy. Meanwhile, EA have ripped the hearts out of a bunch of their franchises and then end up getting stuck in a cycle of ever increasing development costs and shorter lifespans for their games.
Coincidentally* large numbers of their customers (many of us used to be fans, but this is a much rarer breed nowadays) now feel very little love or loyalty to EA anymore and every mistake of theirs just highlights this, as so many of us have seen this happening over and over again.
Now that I've got that out of the way I'll go back to looking forward to this next patch and it hopefully fixing some of the game breaking issues for me as well as giving me access to features that we were told we would have from the beginning. Until I see this happening though they will not be getting any further money from myself towards DLC.
In the meantime, please take your apologist/shill type behaviour elsewhere. The customers were perfectly within their rights to complain and the shareholders should be doing so too, no amount of straw man type arguments will stop that. If you really want to argue the toss over business practices though, why not pop over to this thread: http://www.gamesas.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=28480
*I think not.
» Thu Dec 31, 2009 5:00 pm 
We're working on getting some official media for the DX11 update so please remain patient until that becomes available.
