
EA Sports Locks Out Multiplayer Modes On Used Sales - vaksel
http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/108/1088621p1.html
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jrockway
Nice. So the game is $60, then you have to buy XBox Live for $10/month, then
you have to buy each game company's online service for $10. A great deal for
everyone! Except the end-user...

(Maybe they should add some biological DRM, too. The game controllers should
do a DNA test on your blood, and if it detects your friend playing at your
house, it should charge you a $30 "game sharing fee". It's a good idea because
before, they got $0 from this. Nobody will be upset at all, just like nobody
was upset with Ubisoft's phone-home-for-single-player-game technique.)

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sdm
You only have to pay the $10 if you bought the game used. If you bought the
game used, you are paying a fair bit less than $60.

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henrikschroder
Yes, but the people who buy their games used do not want to pay full price or
near full price for their games. They are extremely price-conscious and
instead of suddenly paying $10 more for their used games for no good reason,
they will just not buy as many used games as before.

It's the same mentality as the whole pirate discussion. If you are a game
publisher, the people who buy the games used are not your customers. They
clearly state that they do not wish to buy your product at your price point.
Same with pirates, they also clearly state their preferences. Neither group is
your customers.

However, people that buy your games new and sell them on are your customers,
but with this move, your product becomes less valuable to them ($10 to be
exact) and this probably makes a few of them not buy your game in the first
place.

What EA dearly wishes to happen though is that Gamestop and similar should
soak this cost to keep the used games market running exactly as before. Maybe
it will, maybe it won't. At least EA is trying stuff so it will be interesting
to see how this plays out.

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seekely
This is not the same mentality as the pirate discussion. A pirate gets a $60
game for $0. That's a huge price discrepancy.

At used game stores like Gamespot, the difference between new and used is
often $5 or less. It also doesn't matter what the retail price point is set
at. The used game price point will always be lower. Since new games are
currently identical to used game, why not pick up the game for $5 less? This
helps Gamespot and hurts EA.

Now, more a burden will placed onto Gamestop. They will have to lower prices
on used games to compensate for the new 'taxes'. If anything, this is a win
for used game buyers at the expense of Gamestop (an undesirable company from
the perspective of EA).

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w1ntermute
I think everyone's looking at this the wrong way. EA already has countless
flaws which people have been whining about for a long time. The further out of
touch with their customers they become, the better chance other game studios
have of taking a piece of their pie. I'm hoping someone capitalizes on this
opportunity to show customers that at least some non-indie game studios are
capable of not screwing their customers over.

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jsz0
This is a really bad move especially for sports games. They don't tend to have
the lasting online community of FPS, RTS or RPGs. People move onto the new
yearly release quickly to get updated rosters. I don't think a $10 fee is
going to improve that situation at all. It will likely make it worse. The
people who do spend $10 are going to be very disappointed to find out few
people are playing a -1 or -2 year old sports game online anymore. Finding
compatible skill/pings/maturity is tough with a big user base. Nearly
impossible with a small one.

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seekely
The hostility against these decisions always frustrates me. The market will
sort this out, and I'm pretty sure despite all the moaning, it will fall in
EA's favor. You can't expect EA or any game publisher to just give their
product away.

EA is a business and needs to make money in order to sustain making AAA
titles. Nowadays, there are hundreds of people working their hearts out to
deliver each title. These people would like to get paid. Gamestop does not pay
their salaries. EA does. Every time somebody gives $55 to Gamestop instead of
$60 to EA, an hour or two of somebody's work is potentially taken at a loss to
EA.

Budgets of games are not going to go down. Gamers wouldn't go for the drop in
quality. The used market is not going to go away. It's perfectly rational for
gamers to try and make a buck. But this puts EA in quite the quandary.

Rewarding gamers for purchasing the game new is rational and fair. Not evil.
EA will make money and the gamer will continue to get well made games. Just
because a feature or part of the game was once 'free' doesn't justify it
always being 'free'. The market is allowed to correct itself.

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henrikschroder
Noone is expecting them to give it away, stop putting up straw-men. This is
the problem:

One person buying the game and playing it for a year: EA revenue: X$ EA cost
for development and infrastructure per game: Y$

One person buying the game, playing for half a year, someone else buying it
used, playing for half a year: EA revenue: X+10$ EA cost: Y$

If X > Y as we suspect, then this is a naked cash grab. Those tend to be very
unpopular. If X < Y, then the move gets more understandable, but they really
should think about changing their business model so they can charge for the
online experience separately.

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hoelle
The tone and popularity of this sort of reply really bothers me. The
grandparent is the best explanation of the actual business decision in the
entire thread. How was any of it "straw man"?

Trying to get paid for your product when someone uses it isn't any more of a
"cash grab" than any other company selling any other product for money. In
other industries when a maker sees no share of the sale of his work, we
usually find a way to call what happened to him what it is: theft.

If EULAs were enforced, the situation would be different since the "non
transferable license" would maybe kill the commercial used games market.

~~~
matwood
The GPP sets up a strawman argument by saying that people are expecting EA to
give their product away for free. No one is expecting that at all.

To address your point, they are getting paid when someone buys and uses their
product. Currently the $60 price tag includes usage of the game servers for a
single person. If that person sells the game why should the new owner have to
pay an additional cost? The old user is no longer using the servers and as far
as EA is concerned their cost didn't change.

In other industries it's theft? I've never bought a new car so all the used
cars I've bought have been theft? What about used cars that still had original
warranties intact? Should I be forced to buy a new warranty since I wasn't the
original person who purchased it, even though it's tied to the car?

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seekely
I don't think it's theft at all. It's perfectly rational for a gamer to buy
and sell used games. But it's also perfectly rational for EA to try to make as
much money as possible from the used game market which completely undermines
its business.

I suspect the used car market is also a thorn in the side of auto
manufactures. They probably carry higher prices at retail to compensate for
the used market as much as possible (assumption). That works for them.

EA could do the same thing and raise the prices of its games to $80-$100.
However, they have options. EA would rather shift the cost from 'good' gamers
buying new games and go after 'bad' gamers buying from the used market who are
only indirectly customers.

Why is this wrong? In the end, somebody has to pay for what EA produces.

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henrikschroder
_In the end, somebody has to pay for what EA produces._

What? Absolutely not! EA are free to offer their products at whatever price
point they see fit in an attempt to recover their costs for producing their
product, as long as they do so within the applicable consumer protection laws.
And people are free to accept their offer and purchase their product.
Sometimes they succeed. Sometimes they don't.

~~~
seekely
Ha, we're on the same page. I meant the line in a 'if EA wishes to stay in
business, they will have to recoup their costs from their customers' way.

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dman
If suckiness of existing players is any indicator of what market is ripe for
innovation, then game publishing seems to be the frontier market. I dont know
of any other industry that works against their customers interests with as
much precision and passion as the game publishing industry. Between Ubisoft,
Activision and EA its hard to decide whom I hate most.

~~~
JMiao
not to dampen your point, but you could say the exact same thing about any
mainstream media space (film studios, record labels, book publishers).

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dman
Ive not seen movie studios, publishers, record labels do the following yet a)
Require constant internet connectivity while you watch a movie. b) Hold onto
the bonus that is due their employees -
<http://www.physorg.com/news191742223.html>

~~~
dagw
If you've heard of movie studios screwing people out of bonuses, then you have
probably never worked in the industry.

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JMiao
oh, and movies could be easily replaced with music, film/tv (writer's guild?),
etc.

"creative accounting" as they say.

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PostOnce
They're going to lose a lawsuit over something like this in the near future.
I'm not sure what law they're breaking, but going out of your way to cripple
products to increase your chance of sales has got to be illegal somehow...

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zweben
I wouldn't be so sure about that. The only bit of law I've ever heard of that
stands in the way of this sort of thing is the first-sale doctrine, which says
that you can sell copyrighted works without permission from the copyright
holder. First-sale doctrine has become pretty toothless with the advent of DRM
and software that is 'licensed' rather than sold.

Companies have a broad ability to cripple their products in pretty much
whatever way they see fit. Consumers have a discouragingly persistent
willingness to put up with restrictions that are not in their best interest.
People will whine about this, but then most of them will go out and buy the
games anyway.

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ehnus
I don't get why people commenting on this article feel that EA is in the wrong
here. EA makes nothing off the sales of used games yet currently incurs the
cost of providing online services.

What would be a better solution?

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sgk284
The original buyer already covered the cost of online services provided.
Reselling doesn't cost EA anything (it is no different than if the original
buyer had just kept playing the game).

It would be different if suddenly two players could play at the same time, but
this is like lending a book to a friend... you both can't be reading it at the
exact same moment.

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ehnus
The two problems I see with your analogy to books is that books don't have an
ongoing cost for infrastructure maintenance which online services do. I
wouldn't put it past EA to figure out the cost of services provided with a
game diminishes over time with one owner, but if someone new were to pick up
the game and start playing then they would be incurring a heavier system load
than originally forecast.

Book publishers also generally aren't trying to recoup $50-100,000,000
development budgets.

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dman
In that case it would be a simpler mental model for the user to just decouple
the usage cost from the game cost aka the World of Warcraft model. Why let the
original purchaser play as much as they want, cap their usage too (~40-50 hrs
of playtime for free) and charge them for usage beyond that. Also if the cost
of running servers is so high and such a big drag,why dont they let third
parties run game servers and charge a fee. That way competition among game
server hosting companies would bring the price down closer to what it should
be in the real world.

~~~
ehnus
That doesn't address my second point of recouping high development costs.
Anyways, they would have to coordinate this with the platform providers which
tend to keep things bolted down quite tightly when it comes to the provision
of online services. Are there even any console games available for the Xbox
360 or PS3 that charge monthly fees?

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malnourish
Interesting decision. I wonder if this will pay off for them. I'm fine with
buying new games if the content is worth it, but many times, EA downloadable
content is not.

If they require a new purchase for multiplayer and online franchises, those
features better be damn enticing.

Thankfully with Backbreaker coming out, EA will have _some_ competition in the
football market before their NFL lockout is over.

I'm all for innovation and I know they are trying to maximize return, but if
the content isn't up to snuff they're playing some tough odds.

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sliverstorm
"This is an important inflection point in our business because it allows us to
accelerate our commitment to enhance premium online services to the entire
robust EA SPORTS online community"

Read:

"This is an important inflection point in our business because it allows us to
extract more money out of our customers"

~~~
malnourish
However, are they really extracting more money from their customers if they
are charging used gamers for online content?

They don't make money from used game sales, resale stores like Gamestop do.

While this is a very questionable move from a consumer standpoint, it makes
business sense.

MMOs rightfully charge for multiplayer access, however they have servers to
maintain and use the resources acquired to improve their game and keep it
fresh.

One could argue that if EA wants to make this idea appealing to customers,
they should offer new content for free for the paying subscribers of used
games, or those who paid for a new game.

Then again, they may just charge us for cheat codes and "VIP" mode like they
have in the past. Even if one were to buy the game new.

~~~
dman
What I dont understand is that over the 10 years the size of the market has
gone up, sales of blockbuster games have gone up, average selling price of a
game has gone up, revenues via additional digital content has come in, product
placement has trickled into some games, cost of servers has gone down, cost of
bandwidth has gone down, cost of hiring programmers has roughly remained the
same, some games have even gotten money via movie rights. What is it about
publishers cost structure that pushes them to nickel and dime customers
inspite of all the above mentioned factors ?

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jparise
Development costs have gone up.

Even if the cost of hiring individual programmers has remained constant (and I
don't have evidence one way or another there - we'd have to consult something
like Game Developers' annual salary survey and apply the appropriate
adjustments), development teams have definitely grown in size. Bigger teams
mean more developers (from all disciplines), including additional management
and QA staff.

There are also other cost areas to consider, such as licensing fees and devkit
costs, but I'm afraid that I can't share specific numbers there.

~~~
dman
<http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Video_game_costs> \- That suggests that game
dev costs have nearly tripled over the last ten years. I also think the same
timeframe saw the cost of a game go from ~20 to ~60. Admittedly I always
bought games a fair bit of time after they got released, so my recollection on
game costs might be biased / incorrect. Also - cost of devkits has in fact
gone down. Suggested by the page that I linked to, and I know for a fact
otherwise. At least the PS3 devkit and the Nintendo DS devkit are very
reasonably priced.

~~~
ShardPhoenix
New AAA games have never cost as little as $20. The increase is more like 50
-> 60.

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davidmurphy
I don't play console video games, but this makes me kind of angry. I know a
company has to make money ... but the recession isn't the time to spring
things like this on consumers (if ever).

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adi92
i don't know much about how this works, but why cant people just bypass this
by creating a separate account for every game they purchase and then pass on
that account's details to whoever they sell the game to

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mukyu
You have to have a gold subscription to use the account online (in non-guest
mode).

So you would have no friends, no gamerscore, tens of accounts and paying for
gold on them constantly.

No one would do this and that you would even think of it makes me think you've
never even used xbox live.

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aresant
Article mentions that users can "unlock" online modes for $10 - looks like
it's $10.00 for EACH used game - <http://www.easports.com/onlinepass>

Not going to be a popular move for EA but it's a smart business move.

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jgg
>Not going to be a popular move for EA but it's a smart business move.

If I'm misreading your post, I apologize, but how is something that pisses off
current and potential customers a 'smart business move'?

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zweben
Because most of them will continue to buy the games anyway. Whether a consumer
is pissed off is irrelevant to EA; they have to refuse to buy the product for
it to matter, and most don't.

