EA Sports have locked the multiplayer portions of their titles to new purchases only. If you've bought the game used, assuming the person who pre-owned the game played multiplayer, you'll need to spend US$10.00 to buy a new code to play multiplayer.EA previously provided free release day DLC to new owners as a type of incentive to purchase the game, such as with Bioware's latest releases Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age: Origins. Now, they're punishing everyone who purchases their game second hand by stripping away features. They really, really don't like the second hand games market.I wonder how long it is before this type of lock-out is placed on the single player portion as well. Steam-like one time activation, locking the game to your Account, requiring everyone with a console be connected to the internet?
EA is just a big evil corporation (thou so is gamestop). Such things will feel entitled to as much money as possible, and will go the best way they can about it. Yes EA is trying to steal money from Gamestop. But worse yet, they are trying to steal OUR rights of first sale. If EA could they would make you pay $5 every time you heard the name of one of their games spoken to you.
i literally have over 200 legitimate games (probably around 250) but i refuse to buy games with these terrible DRM measures. some of the games i would have bought are wings of prey, silent hunter 5, settlers 7, silent hunter 5 and the list will keep expanding....
You buying a used book from Bob doesn't put load on my multiplayer servers and cost me money to support you. Buying a used game and playing multiplayer does.
No, no it doesn't. You buy a Copy of Game A, it doesn't matter how many times that game switches hands, it's just one copy with access to the server at any given time. If it goes through a hundred hands, there is still only one copy that has access to that server, and EA will know that that copy has been sold and should plan to have it on that server.
For shame! You need to buy more games.
I think this is a trend in general i.e. rather than a game being sold with full support now people seem to be inching towards the MMO model (always on, RMT, constant update schedual).
Your hated star pony, sparkly horse, sex with the stars, MyLittleNOTGAY!Pony is a good example, its something that isn't created with the subs from the game (because its sold seperate - like batteries). Its something extra. (actually it was probably going to be a TCG rare loot card where people would have paid many hundreds of dollars for such a thing in game. TO SOME NUMPTY who got the card out of the TCG. Im not sure how much profit the TCG game made but the horse was bought by a lot more people than the card game customers).
The point is Blizzard has been OKAY with people paying their sub (or multiple) any race, name or server change fees (although it must be in pure profit stage by now, over the inital development costs) AND TCG rare loot cards (which are ebay sales) AND pets and mounts as 'micro (lol) transactions'.
I think theres more than just profiteering. Instead there seems to be a shift in perspective to what the basic game is 'worth' on its own.
Although it is strange that potentially (I think) that say a game is traded around 10 times (a bit high... but) if each person wants multiplayer thats $100 they made above the initial cost (and its all profit since your paying to lower a barrier, theres still only one copy and one player).
One person buying the game will play for a while, then finish with it. At that point, it's no longer on the server. If they go through the pawnshop market, they will get some money back, Gamestop will make a boatload of profit, and EA gets extra load that wouldn't have existed otherwise now that user 2 has just started playing.
How about I buy the gmae, install it play it multi-player, then uninstall it (for whatever reason0 then re-install it later to multi-play..what now? Do I have to cough up 10$?
Logically no - you'd simply have a nontransferrable license - the same way a digital purchase is linked directly to your account and is generally non transferrable.
Yeah, this system stinks, especially for console games that typically require you to own the disk in order to play. The appropriate response: just don't buy games from publishers who resort to this kind of foolishness. As EA has demonstrated by cutting back DRM in games like Dragon Age, companies get the message very clearly when customers do not buy their products.
They would if they could. It's not so much that I'm supporting EA's practices here, but rather Gamestop had the chance to stop this train-wreck before it reached this point. The writing was on the wall that publishers were annoyed with the used game industry, and more importantly that technology had advanced to the point where they could take action. Had publishers been getting kickbacks from used game sales this entire time, they're be no reason to rock the boat now. But they always want more money, and they have the tools to get to that money now, so they're going ahead with it. It's a fight between EA and Gamestop, while the customer is merely a casualty caught in the wreckage here. And Gamestop cannot win if EA can turn the used copies of games into useless coasters.
It's certainly not a good thing for us, but again I have trouble caring too much seeing as PC games have been like this for years. Yet ironically publishers blame PC gamers for causing them the biggest losses of revenue. It seems they're finally realizing there's a lot of money leaking on the console end too.
I got no problem with this. I think it's right.
Steam & Impulse are the same way.
Buying it used = screeewed
Actually you can resell or give your copy to a friend with impulse. You just have to call customer support to get the activation put onto their account instead of yours. Don't think steam has that option but, hey I already don't buy games from steam ,gamestop or EA since all three have major drm ,compatability issues(steam)or other bad business practices. Don't see why people even buy used games from gamestop when you can usually buy any game new for like 30 bucks off amazon a few months after release.
EA is like a big warning sticker for me. "dont buy this title, its to expansive and has an ugly copyprotection!"
I play single player games once, with few exceptions. To a developer, there's really no difference if I pirated the game to all my friends or if everyone in my LAN circle kept "selling" it to the next person once they were done playing it. The end result is I get only one sale. Even the ability to pass on CD-key's for multiplayer games is kind of similar and I don't feel mad at publishers restricting the sale at all.
Movies, books and games (console or PC), really shouldn't be sold second hand because of how much of the value of the product is just in the initial experience (especially with the trend towards purely digital sales).
This book and library argument is pretty much invalid. Just because we've been able to get something for free doesn't mean we should. IMO if a library wants to have a book they should pay a different price than the end user, similar to a site license for certain software. If a writer/publisher wants to get more publicity he can always lower or waive this fee so that's not an argument either.
This would also get rid of the problem with passing on the costs unfairly. If you ever look at the price of reference books you'll notice they are sky high. That's because libraries are usually the only ones to buy them so they have to charge such a high fee to make up for low sales.
Er, the price for reference books are high because they take a long time to write, require extensive research, and have a tiny market. If only a hundred people in the world need (not want) your book on an exotic ARM microprocessor design, then it has nothing to do with "reselling."
I have friends who work (as in owners) in construction and upon hearing that EA decided you're not allowed to resell your multiplayer CD key, they said maybe it's time people weren't able to buy used homes. After all, it cut into their profit margin, and so much of it was in the initial experience. Then we started talking about how much Ford would like it if people weren't allowed to buy used trucks.
I wasn't about to argue that programmers were some special breed of Higher Man that deserved special protections for their product that my friends in the construction industry weren't "allowed" to get.
If EA doesn't want a million people on their servers for the lifetime of the game, don't sell a million copies. It's just bs to think you can sell a product and sit back and hope, really wish upon a star, that they never actually use features that you claim make your game worth 60 bucks for more than a few weeks so you can sit in and rake in the money and not actually support what you sold.
It's very unlikely that something like this would affect me, so it's not as if we are talking about my ten dollars here in this specific case. This is about the mentality, the greed machine that is the software industry. Oh no worries, they're already trying to get more out of those who buy new al the time anyway. The used PC game market was destroyed pretty early on compared to how well it works for the consoles, and I really don't buy and trade my games. I don't tire of games easily, so I keep and play them for years. I can't think of the last used game I purchased and certainly long before that was a game i actually turned in.
All I hear from the gaming industry is more schemes to get more money. They don't want to pay for customer support so we get idiots that tell you to wipe your OS two weeks before they release a patch for the known issue you are contacting them about (no i don't ever listen to these idiots when they tell me that... 2K). They want everyone to use their servers so they can try and control piracy, but they don't actually want for pay for those servers so they yank them at leisure. Of course people will go to their defence saying that they shouldn't have to pay the upkeep of servers forever despite the fact we have technology available that clearly makes publisher supported servers an option not a necessity. It is possible, and doesn't work too bad either, for consumer machines to connect to each other. Now they want people to pay for servers they yank at will? Let's not forget we're talking about a sports title here, sometimes they pull servers within two years because the greed machine is at its best by releasing yearly updates disguised as new games. They release broken, buggy, and sometimes games that just don't work, and then want to know patches aren't really considered extra goodies but a necessary part of the game.
The innovation of the software industry is to figure out more ways to get customers to pay more and more while offering less and less. I just can't imagine why piracy is so high right? There must be some corporate shill sitting as his desk just wondering why oh why they can't get these pirates to get in line to get screwed like everyone else.
As companies like EA try and change what it is we buy, how it is we use what we buy and how much that thing we buy is actually worth, more and more people will climb on board the pirate ship. 20 hour games with customer support to ensure that the game works used to be worth AU$100.00 and I happily paid. Now a 5 hour game with broken multiplayer that'll be switched off in a years time and no customer support is worth AU$120.00. Unfortunately, once the ACTA is successfully negotiated we'll be quite literally screwed - we either play their way, or we don't game - and we won't have a legally supported leg to stand on to challenge them.Between companies like EA and Activision, I think there must be some kind of competition to be the most hated companies in the world. Activision is currently winning, but I'll be damned if EA isn't giving them a real run for their money!
I think Spore is the only EA game I'm really interested right now. It's unique enough and fun enough (looking) I might be willing to put up with the root-kit-like DRM. Everything else? Meh.
Do. Not. Buy. Spore. Ever. I seriously cannot stress this enough. The game is a technical achievement on a massive scale that's simply mind blowing in its scope, but as a game it fails in every possible way, and it even invented a few new ways to fail as well.
I tend to agree... I had fun with it for 10 hours or so... then quickly lost interest... game play, imo, = meh.
Sins has been the only newer game to hold any interest for me. All the rest are the same old crap with a little eye candy. I bought left 4 dead, played 1 month or so. BORING. EA pissed me off long ago with Battlefield 2 (internet for single player). Never ever will I buy EA again no matter what the game.
Except that it happens all the time. A lot of games have metrics in them now to monitor how they're used, and most users don't stick with a given game for very long or use most of what it can do.
No game made ever has enough capacity for every single box to be put on the servers at the same time. Even MMOs don't work like that.
Besides, they have the legal right to limit access to their multiplayer servers by any criteria they want.
Side note- I hate it when the loading videos with all the companies name CAN'T BE SKIPPED until the EA logo passes on the screen....nothign to do with that, just..pisses me off looking at the 10-15 seconds of dumb ass intro
I have removed the videos intros on ALL my games. Most just need to me moved or renamed. Google "remove intro video [whatsyurgame]". They do get old fast.
With EA, I use a command line switch in the shortcut properties.
"E:\Games\Battlefield 1942\BF1942.exe" +restart 1 +joinServer 64.34.180.19:14567
The +restart 1 skips the intros. This shortcut takes me directly to my favorite room in 1 click. Valve has a different one but its not hard to find.
Internet doesn't work like that either (which is kind of funny)
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