2 responses so far ↓

• 1 Herr_Alien // May 19, 2010 at 3:06 am

  Aaaah, heal stations!
  In Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher’s Bay, the healing stations would have 2 or 3 long needles come out and jab into your neck to administer the treatment. The most cool heal stations ever!

  Riiight, and if you own the game you have the right to make a no-cd patch, right?

  @EA attempting to get a piece of the used game sales:
  Well, I see two ways to control the used games market: either try to enforce some regulations, or use some sort of DLC to get the people to buy the new game.
  It kinda make sense to go for the DLC approach, it’s much easier to implement.

  @One of the worst Video game decline in history:
  What if people just re-alligned their priorities?
  Greece is much more complex … lets stay out of politics …

  @Farmville to break away from Facebook?:
  Obviously for more profits :))

  The portal I visit is geared towards both hardware and software news (tomshardware.com would imply just hardware, but they do SW as well) and their subjects are quite cool. That and the RSS feed do wonders 🙂

  @recreating farms: people worked hard on it? Didn’t they hear of tractors and mechanized agriculture? 😛
  People will re-create their farms. Because they love the game mechanics.

  Facebook became the de-facto publisher for a successfull game, that’s why they ask for money. All publishers take much more than 30%, so I see the 30% fee as reasonable.

  @Nintendo has a new enemy:
  The no increase in market for the iPad? Yeah, that was me. Funny, I also posted up the news link.
  I guess that shows how different a game developer vs. a game consumer sees the market …

  @Question of the week
  … nope. Sorry. Closest thing I did was to print the Quake 3 logo on a t-shirt. Looks very nice, by the way.

• 2 Jonah Falcon // May 20, 2010 at 11:25 am

  I discussed EA’s $10 online fee on my own podcast, and I think EA is doing this because they see sliding Madden sales and think it’s due to rentals and used game sales. They’re seeing a trend and getting the WRONG conclusion.

  For one, the PS2 is dying, and Madden no longer sells on that platform, which has taken away a massive chunk of sales. For another, they’re RELEASING THE SAME GAME OVER AND OVER EVERY YEAR, and people are fatigued by it. Sad, but true. There’s no excitement over a new Madden, just as there’s no excitement over a new Guitar Hero.

  In Derrick’s other podcast, he talked about how people bought a used copy of Assassin’s Creed and that transformed into sales of new copies of Assassin’s Creed II. People got a taste of the IP for less, and decided they wanted the new one day one.

  Look at Valve and Portal. They’re giving it away FOR FREE. FREE. They’re claiming it’s to celebrate Steam arriving on Mac, but if you notice the videos posted, they’re basically advertising Portal 2. The BEST ad they’re doing is giving away a game that’s a few years ago for free. They’re not making money on sales of Portal anymore, so why not give it away free for 2 weeks and give it to people who didn’t buy Portal – a good chunk of whom will now buy the upcoming $49.99 Portal 2. It’s SMART BUSINESS.

  Valve isn’t alone – MechWarrior 4 was given away free after the announcement of MechWarrior 5. EA doesn’t seem to realize that low sales usually aren’t piracy, aren’t used game sales, and aren’t rentals. They simply have no interest in the game because they’re either bleeding the product with needless sequels every few months, or just making it less attractive to the consumer. EA has to understand that used games and rentals are ADVERTISEMENTS. It took film producers a few years to realize that, and now THEY know that movie rentals are gold, and all they had to do was form a relationship with rental houses. See Netflix for Example A.

Leave a Comment