In this economy, you cannot blame a company for trying to make a buck. We get it. For this profit to happen, two things must take place. First, the plan has to be well received by your customer demographic. Second, they have to be willing to pay for it. EA’s latest idea to charge “$10 to $15″ for bigger demos may not be the best. Why? The gamer has zero incentive to buy into it.
There are some gamers who will pay whatever it takes to get the chance at playing a game early. If Microsoft sent an announcement out that said, “Halo: Reach is coming in late September. If you pay $15 bucks in August, you can play now and it will come off the principle of the remaining balance.” We all will happily do so. Why? Halo: Reach is going to be a home run and we get to play early. Those who don’t, will feel left out, and then buy in. EA plans on doing this for full release games which means titles will maybe be DL only? Goodbye HDD space.
Now here is the problem. The example given is BF 1943. Awesome game. It costs $15 bucks. Who is going to pay for more than half the game and run the risk of hating it? Why not just wait for a review from one of the hundreds of sites out there? If the game is a full priced game, then paying 1/4 of the game’s price means you have to DL the rest of it when released? Xbox 360 HDDs are way too expensive to be download 4-6GB games regularly. If I want to play a game that I am not sure of buying, I will rent it. I don’t need to own the first 30 min of a game I might delete after it sucks.
I understand EA needs to turn a profit and according to the above cited, they need to find new ideas. Here are a few: Stop buying up studios. Stop developing/advertising underwhelming games. An example is Mercenaries 2. It was… okay. I saw commercials for it everywhere. It was underwhelming. God knows how much money was sunk into that. LOTR Conquest? Do I even have to say anything about that abomination? Extending a game’s life by adding more DLC to it is a great idea and really makes the gamer feel like they are getting their money’s worth. Having to shovel out cash to try a game for more than 15 min feels like gouging and will create a backlash towards an industry giant.
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I’ve got to disagree with you slightly here Steven. If PDLC acts as a glorified demo or beta then yeah it will suck to lay out cash unless it will come off the balance later on. The benefit of this is on franchises like Battlefield where titles are released annually. Core players can get an early look and contribute to their favorite titles allowing for a more expanded play test. The developers can tweak the game, add or remove features and make the game more fun. The downside are bugs and any extra expense to the consumer.
If EA offered a subscription deal like $40 for the year and you get access to all the PDLC from EA, at least 3 titles a year. Assuming all of these titles are BF 1943 quality I’m up for it. And if you get something in addition like all future DLC is free or some other benefits to make it worth the outlay of my hard earned currency.
It could be another way of seeing some breakthrough titles and unproven gameplay hit the market given there will be time to tweak it. Maybe more games like Flower or Heavy Rain.
All in all this could be really good, or suck something fierce.