EA strikes out at second hand games.

[=sw=warlord]

quoted from Dailytech (http://www.dailytech.com/EA+Locks+Used+Sports+Games+Out+of+Online+Multiplay er+Asks+for+10+Fee/article18346.htm)
"Electronic Arts is the king of the sports game market with hot upcoming titles including NCAA Football 11, NHL 11, Madden NFL 11, NBA 11, FIFA 11, and EA Sports MMA. Now it has made a controversial decision concerning all of those titles -- it will lock players who buy used copies out of online multiplayer.

Purchasers of a used game get locked out of that goodness. "Online services, features and bonus content" will all be covered by a one time code, that won't work for the new purchaser. EA describes, "You will be unable to play multiplayer online game modes or use your downloaded content in online game modes.""

And people thought EA were starting to get themselves together.
First the sports games next their going to be doing the same for other franchises.

[ICEE]

fucking lunacy. I don't see any explanation of the method by which they tell which games are new and which are used. The only way I can think of is detecting when a disk has been run in multiple Xbox's. I wonder if they've ever heard of RED RINGS. If my guess is right (hopefully it is not) and this is how they do it, you could end up paying a 10 dollar fee for every EA game you own. If something happens to your xbox, and you have to buy a new one.

Way to think outside the box, EA.

[=sw=warlord]

fucking lunacy. I don't see any explanation of the method by which they tell which games are new and which are used. The only way I can think of is detecting when a disk has been run in multiple Xbox's. I wonder if they've ever heard of RED RINGS. If my guess is right (hopefully it is not) and this is how they do it, you could end up paying a 10 dollar fee for every EA game you own. If something happens to your xbox, and you have to buy a new one.

Way to think outside the box, EA.

"Purchasers of a used game get locked out of that goodness. "Online services, features and bonus content" will all be covered by a one time code, "
:eyesroll:
I would guess the code get's linked to your account but if you lose your account for what ever reason you would need to buy a new code.
This could get very interesting for the rental trade.

[ICEE]

"Purchasers of a used game get locked out of that goodness. "Online services, features and bonus content" will all be covered by a one time code, "
:eyesroll:

Hurrrrrrrrrrr. So I gather that this code is "one time" in the sense that it stops working when put on a different xbox? Thats the only way I can think of that would accommodate the possibility of one player selling the game to another.

[=sw=warlord]

Hurrrrrrrrrrr. So I gather that this code is "one time" in the sense that it stops working when put on a different xbox? Thats the only way I can think of that would accommodate the possibility of one player selling the game to another.

Correct.
Same way subscription and Microsoft point codes cannot be used more than once.
Who's expecting activision to pull something similar with their games next?
talk about milking your games...
"hey I know how we can get more cash!
how?
charge second hand users when they want to play our multiplayer!
Genius!"

[Donut]

i think its time we go to dc with picket fences. they wont give a shit but hell, its time

[=sw=warlord]

i think its time we go to dc with picket fences. they wont give a shit but hell, its time
Forget the pickets.
fill some milk bottles with petroleum with a cloth wick and show them what a real Molotov cocktail looks like.

"EA games, Challenge everything"

[ThePlague]

All those games suck so idc.

[ICEE]

All those games suck so idc.

attn: this will happen to the non-sports games too. That means bad company. That means I mad.


Forget the pickets.
fill some milk bottles with petroleum with a cloth wick and show them what a real Molotov cocktail looks like.

"EA games, Challenge everything"



Then my point pretty much stands :eyesroll:

[Donut]

All those games suck so idc.
i know youre just making a lolpost and i dont mean to pick you out of the crowd, but this kind of apathetic attitude is what is allowing these companies to get away with this shit. sure, we dont play sports games, but this is fucked up either way. what happens when developers of your favorite shooter or RTS start doing this? DLC already being made at game launch, DLC that comes with the disk that you have to pay to unlock, no dedicated servers, DRM, and now this?

fuck it all
/me buys rewrittable SNES cartridge.
good shit.

[Disaster]

All those games suck so idc.

"THEY CAME FIRST for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

THEN THEY CAME for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

THEN THEY CAME for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

THEN THEY CAME for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up."

[Dwood]

EA is retarded. Who put them at the top of the food chain anyways? Looks like those guys who jumped ship from Activision should have gone with Microsoft instead.

Good think we have Activision to make good games without nazi protection. owai-

[Con]

Valve are the only good guys at this point.

[Donut]

im predicting an increase in suicide rates if valve starts fucking up

that or an increase in ebay sales of retro consoles :raise:

[n00b1n8R]

I play cross-platform FPS's on consoles
:lol:
Still, this is fucking retarded. I hate how money-hungry this industry is getting. At least for now it's only on horribad games but. :downs:

[paladin]

We all know the last good sports game was NFL Blitz 2000.

[Llama Juice]

i think its time we go to dc with picket fences. they wont give a shit but hell, its time

http://img693.imageshack.us/img693/5312/picketfence.jpg

i got mine, you guys ready?

Also, there's a PSP game that does this already, been out for a while now.

[Limited]

From a business standpoint, this makes perfect sense. EA don't get ANYTHING when people 'trade-in' games, and the retailer sales them on again. Or they hardly get any money for it. Either way they lose out a TON.

This is EA, they are very dominate and they want their money.

It goes for ALL EA games, not just sports games. Which by the way are fantastic 'party games' and socialising games.

[=sw=warlord]

From a business standpoint, this makes perfect sense. EA don't get ANYTHING when people 'trade-in' games, and the retailer sales them on again. Or they hardly get any money for it. Either way they lose out a TON.


Not to mention those who only play games through rental.

[Cojafoji]

Not to mention those who only play games through rental.
oh shit. that's gonna wreck the rental market lol.

[ICEE]

:lol:
Still, this is fucking retarded. I hate how money-hungry this industry is getting. At least for now it's only on horribad games but. :downs:

I don't. I am just sympathetic to my fellow gamer.

unless they're noobinator. Then I am very cold and unfeeling

[paladin]

Free-market capitalism ftw.. Good job EA!

Also, they did something similar to BC2, every time I go to multiplayer it prompts me with the god damn vip code........

[Donut]

From a business standpoint, this makes perfect sense. EA don't get ANYTHING when people 'trade-in' games, and the retailer sales them on again. Or they hardly get any money for it. Either way they lose out a TON.

This is EA, they are very dominate and they want their money.
im hearing this argument alot. it does make sense, you're right, but lets think back here: games for the current generation of any time period have always cost ~50 bucks. i remember buying legend of zelda majoras mask at its midnight release (as a third grader, lol). 50 bucks. my physics teacher tells me that when final fantasy 6 was released in the USA for the SNES (under the name of ff3, but that's a whole other story) it cost close to 80 dollars. the point im making is that while technology improves, the price has stayed somewhat constant. im bringing up older games because back then renting games was a big deal and a very profitable market. people wanted to rent the games that they weren't going to play all the time because they were expensive just like they are now. i don't recall any major gaming companies going under due to rentals.

nowadays we have youtube, so people can check a game out much more extensivly and easily than they could 10 years ago without even having to leave the house. in fact, ask anybody aged 10-18. most of them probably wont even know what renting video games is. the big thing today is returning games after they get old, and then they are sold again. yes, gamestop (or whatever provider you use) makes a large profit here, but whats the difference between returning and reselling vs. rentals? as i said before, the price range has remained fairly constant throughout the years, and back when they were popular, a game would be rented many times in its life time.

i dont have any exact numbers to quote to you guys, but i cant imagine big companies like EA are "losing" any more money today with returns and friend to friend private sales than they were back in the 80's and 90's with rentals. in fact, once they sell their game, thats it. they have made their profit on that game. if its worth playing, the retailers will buy more supply to fulfill the demand. the only thing theyre doing now is squeezing MORE money out of their audience. what they are doing is ABUSING their customers. like i said before with controversial things like unlocking DLC thats included on the disk and assassins creed 2 having to be logged in to play, video game companies today are basically betraying their loyal fans just to make an extra buck. theres no reason for it. its disgusting.

in other news, i just found my next school essay. thanks EA!
E: omghuge post. made it a bit easier to read

[k4is3rxkh40s]

They've already done a form of this with Mass Effect 2, albiet not limiting online gameplay, but the system was still in place(Cerberus Network). I also believe the PC version of Bad Company 2 does this by limiting the online key to a single EA account. For PC games, this has been in place for quite a while. For consoles however, this sucks ass. This defeats the whole purpose of buying used/renting/getting games from friends. I can already imagine people buying a used copy then going home to find out they have to dish out more than what a new game costs.

Another thing that can arise, too; employees of stores like Gamestop opening the games pre-release, taking them home and playing them, then using the codes. When you get home to find out it's already been used, how can you prove that you didn't use it? It's probably just me thinking the worse will happen(too many horror stories read), but I just have this funny feeling about it.

[Donut]

^ thats not a far fetched idea at all. your concern is well placed. im probably going to get bc2 for my xbox sometime soon, and if i do im going to talk to the guy working at the gamestop and see what he (or she, since there seems to be a majority of female employees at the gamestops where i live) thinks about this.

[Pooky]

Personally, I don't see that big of a deal. This is almost exactly the same as CD keys for PC games, they just need to get rid of the one time use bullshit.

[Dwood]

I can't rent games any more if I don't want to buy them or use them illegally.

[SiriusTexra]

Fuck sake.

Why do you think all the DRM and all the massive clamping on security is so rampant at the moment? Piracy, yeah ok. Bring out the fucking violins. Same tired story and I'm sick of seeing the fucking thing.

The big guys are trying to literally destroy the industry to be rebuilt again.

They don't like the way the current system works for them, and it's leaning more and more out of their control. Same goes with the music industry and the film industry. All butthurt, and now they're trying to change it to put them back in the game again.

They're going to do whatever it takes to make us do the destruction for them, so it was "never really a choice". Just how it has to happen now, guys. Sorry. You did it, not us.

I foresee 1 console coming out of all of this. 1 console, with monthly fees, and ridiculous prices. Sort of a PC, but much more mobile than everything else. It'll also be smash packed full of ads galore and you will have no rights whatsoever over it. All the code will be done server side and the rendering will be computed in the cloud via renderfarms or some shit. Supposedly what your fees go towards maintaining, uh huh.

It's inevitable. The hungry giants can't survive making shit games any longer. While they're still pushing the buttons and making the calls, they're going to set fire to the hive, so they know which way it's going to fall and who's going to be burnt. They WILL NOT allow the system to break in a way where they don't know what's going to happen to themselves.


Same reason many of the recording artists themselves are in support of the sort of "pay what you want" market musics heading to. Don't confuse this. The studios themselves are the good guys. What I'm talking about is the head honchos. The guys gambling their cash on these industries. They don't like the idea of a market that makes them literally fucking obsolete.

[ICEE]

danepost.

The accumulated filth of all their shitgames and drms will foam up about their waists and all the console developers and totalitarian publishers will look up and shout "Save us!"... and I'll look down and whisper "No."

[jcap]

I foresee 1 console coming out of all of this. 1 console, with monthly fees, and ridiculous prices. Sort of a PC, but much more mobile than everything else. It'll also be smash packed full of ads galore and you will have no rights whatsoever over it. All the code will be done server side and the rendering will be computed in the cloud via renderfarms or some shit. Supposedly what your fees go towards maintaining, uh huh.
Oh, you mean OnLive (http://www.onlive.com/)?

:smith:

[Phopojijo]

I'll somewhat adapt a post I said in another forum to a bunch of media guys. It was in reply to a few posts about Flash's benefits over HTML5 because it produces closed-source content "that people can't rip off".

People are often stuck on locking their content down as much as possible because they think that leaving it open will mean lost revenue for them. The MPAA is famous for that. Fortunately, time and time again -- proponents of openness show that open source, DRM free, etc. are all substantially more profitable than closed -- if the author is able to leverage the market. People are willing to give you time and money if you stand yourself as their best use of that time and money.

Now that's not to say that everything everyone does needs to be open-sourced... you may not want to figure out how to leverage the open market for your product but:
==If you provide a wholly locked down service -- you better hope that service is worth your asking price or you're screwed.
==If you provide a closed core with APIs to use your product in assorted intended-or-otherwise ways -- then you will have the default user, as well as users from any mashup or whatever looking at your content. If you can monetize those eyes (ads, donations, profit-sharing, brand recognition for the core, whatever), extra profits for you.
==If you provide a wholly open service -- you likely have the maximum number of users your service will get. You can monetize it by dual-licensing, ads, donations, profit sharing, brand recognition for other products, whatever. If you can leverage this -- *very* extra profits for you.

Basically my point is that -- as the MPAA, RIAA, etc. show time and time again -- profits do not usually scale with control... they often are actually tradeoffs... increase one and the other gets perpetually harder to maintain.

---

As for OnLive... I just hope people don't get caught in the whole "wow it works" and get locked in to the subscription. It'll work... but it's just about the most anticonsumer service you can have. Clap at their accomplishment -- but let it die. Want a single platform? GPL'd Operating System. Simple. No-one can monopolize it.

[SiriusTexra]

Oh, you mean OnLive (http://www.onlive.com/)?

:smith:


LOL


When the fuck did this happen?



The more I read about this thing the more deja vu I experience.

A one size fits all console killer with no competition? If this thing becomes the "it" were literally fucked.This thing is designed to take the industry over. I wouldn't be surprised by looking more into this that MS, Sony and Nintendo all have a part to play in this fucking things creation.



Also, I keep seeing the words "instant" "blazing fast" "lightning speed" "fast" "amazingly fast" associated with this things features. You know what this means?



Slow as fuck.

[Phopojijo]

The guy was an ex-Apple engineer -- he developed Quicktime -- ended up perpetually inventing stuff... WebTV and such...

It's the Cable business model for "disposable entertainment" -- big 2-weeks, moderate couple months, a bit of long tail, in with the next new thing... and it'll gain a lot of traction just because people will be shocked that it works and it'll be a shiny thing. Then they'll be locked in because they already have a few hundred dollars worth of games on the service... which may or may not be taken off the catalog for being too old -- but by then they'd have another few hundred dollars of software... etc.

They got a fair amount of money and business connections though -- which is scary... you know -- for a company that can control what's on its platform, from whom, for exactly how long, and who will be allowed to play it... with basically no legal action possible from the clients.

[SiriusTexra]

Good info as always Phopy.

Seems like a very Apple rooted way of doing things.

Man, I did not expect something like this THIS FUCKING SOON. When I was bantering on with conspiracy I had the "in the next 10 years" thought in my head, but JUNE? THIS JUNE?
Jesus fuck at this rate I'll be shooting news presenters on TV virtually with my fucking eyelids by 2012.

Btw, that's always been my dream. Videogame technology, where all TV and movies are replaced with CG actors and it's all scripted and animated/ real time, completely photo realistic etc, and you can at any point just shoot people in the movie/ on the news or blow the brains out of a dickhead band you don't like.

[Phopojijo]

And then have the Duck Hunt dog come out?

[Dwood]

I highly doubt they will use OnLive for 1 reason: It's been too long. They have taken too long to take OnLive and make it a viable platform. This should have happened about 2 years ago. At this point with Valve and Impulse, among the other online distribution platforms, without having to pay monthly OnLive shouldn't hold any water as none of the quality developers will subscribe to such a method of drm... Once they find out that people are not willing to pay that monthly fee + the fees the games cost (the monthly fee to play and rent the games has been there for ages already) it will be there, but I don't think it will gain a large enough following to usurp power from Valve and Stardock's drm solutions.

And I don't subscribe to your theories yet dane, even though they do fill the void of why what happens is happening.

[Phopojijo]

Well there's a reason why they've been going all super-crazy with the buzzwords. "Limits of the Speed of Light"... "Instant Gratification"... "Cloud Gaming"... etc. They're trying to bring over the Apple "magical" appeal. You know, distract people from realizing they're paying subscription prices + likely higher game prices than their PC counterpart for a system that locks them in to have reduced graphical settings from their PC counterpart. (They admitted at GDC2010 they're cranking down Red Faction Guerrilla a bit to meet their hardware profile -- and Burnout Paradise from some leaked screenshots show not all graphical settings are at max -- so all these people who claim that OnLive will be gaming on supercomputers and have the highest possible settings -- you're fooling yourself -- and I've had to say that a LOT because a damn lot of people honestly believe it.)