StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Your Mileage May Vary. Get it, it's a pun. I'm so clever, right? Maybe EA should hire me for marketing. Let's face facts, another mobile title from EA that's full of gimmicky bullshit to get you to put down the game isn't news and hasn't been since forever. But coming off my worthless ranting in the Dungeon Keeper thread, I'd like to remind myself about EA's hilarious "Don't worry guys: we'll stop doing this" bullshit.

"For people who'd grown up playing Dungeon Keeper there was a disconnect there. In that aspect we didn't walk that line as well as we could have. And that's a shame." He would go on to say that the publisher had learned some valuable lessons regarding both its treatment of classic IPs and, perhaps more importantly, the way it handles the free-to-play business model. "When you're thinking about any business model, premium, subscription, free-to-play, value has to exist," said Wilson. "Whether it's a dollar, $10, $100 or $1000, you have to delivering value, and always err on the side of delivering more value, not less."

Yea, not like NfS has a dedicated group of fans or anything. Seriously, just call it Speed Needed.

Really though, I'm just yelling at clouds yet again. For all the nerd rage and yelling, Kungeon Deeper did quite well for a cash-grab mobile app. And since it cost about 5 bucks to make, any kid running up gems on their mom's credit card is just sweet gravy for EA.

After the numbers above? No. No they do not. Dear friends, I think we are finally witnessing our own marginalisation. Games were originally for geeks and nerds. No cool person would be caught dead playing a computer game when there was football to be played or watched, or girls to be whistled at. Then came the influx of the dudebro games, the Maddens, the CODs. Now, finally, the people who don't care about games are turning the tide with F2P. Now, companies who don't care about games can make games for people who don't care about games and make money off them.

He thinks this is new information. How cute. My issue is that everytime someone says "it's just a mobile app, let it go," they ignore games like these pad shitty publisher coffers because they can afford to front the cost of the IPs and development. Had Dungeon Keeper failed, it would have been a drop in the bucket for EA. So they can continually throw shit at a wall until something sticks and they make a few hundred million. That and this type of microtransaction bullshit has been bleeding into the mainstream games for years, just not with as much success as EA would like.

Anyways, I'm quoting the original article at the end because my pathetic ranting is far more important:

It's been a few years since a Need for Speed game popped up on Android, but EA announced last year that NFS: No Limits would arrive this spring. The game has already launched on iOS in a few regions, and the early reports indicate EA is up to its same old in-app purchase tricks. Actually, it's maybe even a little worse. No Limits will charge you to fill up the tank, which is funny because that sounds like a limit. Can't be, though. The game is called "no limits."

EA will basically be employing the always fantastic wait or pay mechanic in the new Need for Speed. You can either wait for a certain amount of time, or pay to fill up your tank immediately and keep racing. Each race uses up a certain amount of your fuel. It's like the ambiguous energy level used by some games, but employing the gasoline metaphor we're all accustomed to from real life.

The IAPs won't stop there. EA will have multiple currencies in the game too. The more rare will be gold, which is used for "premium" transactions. You will be able to buy it for cash money, then use it to fill your tank, upgrade you car, and so on. None of this should come as a surprise. It's EA, and EA loves in-app purchases to the point it will happily break a game to insert them.

Well, the good news is I've always been more a fan of Burnout, so I can just play that, right? Who publishes those games? Oh well, not important.

Free to play and similar bullshit is just the gaming industries approach to planned obsolescence. The games rely on the money players pay for maintenance just like any good car manufacturer who makes you pay 150$ for replacing your entire fuse box when a single 19ct fuse is damaged.

The gaming industries approach is a bit more direct as they only shroud the fact that the game isn´t really free pretty weakly whereas car manufacturers will lie and tell you that it is straight out impossible to manufacture fuse boxes whith accessible fuses for easy fuse replacement.

I recently had to take appart a lap top computer into every single component it had in order clean the cooling fan from dust. Monitor, speaker, main board, even the processor had to come off the main board, ram, hard disk, keyboard and pretty much any other component you can think of just to reach the god damn fan. Of course they used several kinds of differnet screws, among them differnt sizes of Torx which normal people don´t have at home. It took me a whole day for a task that should have taken 10 minutes. Most people would have shelled out 80 bucks for "servicing" the computer or just bought a new one.
The only worse offender in the case of screws is MS who use fucking Securty Torx on their XBox controllers and Apple who glue their batteries to MacBook Pro cases with so much glue that the adheasion is larger than the cases cohesion so that it is physically impossible to replace a MacBook Pro battery without damaging the case.

The good thing about games is that it is relatively easy to find out which games are "free to play" and just ignore them whereas with physical products that employ similar money grabbing techniques it can be very difficult and time consuming what to avoid the bad ones.

But now I´m the one who is ranting...

salm wrote:The gaming industries approach is a bit more direct as they only shroud the fact that the game isn´t really free pretty weakly whereas car manufacturers will lie and tell you that it is straight out impossible to manufacture fuse boxes whith accessible fuses for easy fuse replacement.

Though it is funny to see EA critcised by British regulators because EA is so good they can even make "Free to Play" a bald-face lie.

The thing is, this isn't as pervasive across the industry as EA would like you to believe. There's a reason Angry Birds is stupidly popular: well done F2P games exist that are still capable of gouging the shit out of you if you let them. EA just can't wrap it's head around "well done."

salm wrote:Apple who glue their batteries to MacBook Pro cases with so much glue that the adheasion is larger than the cases cohesion so that it is physically impossible to replace a MacBook Pro battery without damaging the case.

They went even further - invented iScrews that can't be unscrewed by any available tool:

http://www.ifixit.com/blog/2011/01/20/a ... ur-iphone/

Security Torx doesn't seem so bad now, eh?

As for the game, what you want? It's quite appropriate name: No Limits [to gouging]