[branon]

EA perpetuates practices that hurt customers, too.

I used to unapologetically pirate video games and only within the past two years have I finally come full circle and begun purchasing games, both new titles and older ones I had played in the past but never paid for until now. Steam has been the tool of choice for this reconciliation process.

As a result, some of the hardships that paying customers encounter have become apparent to me only recently. I was aware, in a peripheral sense, that some singleplayer games required an Internet connection to run. But this never mattered to me because the pirates patch that stuff out.

Lo and behold, I'm sitting in a hotel last night trying to play Mass Effect Legendary Edition, and the thing refuses to function because I'm not connected to the Internet. I was astounded. This has never happened to me before. Why am I subject to this as a customer? If I steal the game, I receive a product without this glaring defect (I believe the defect has a name: "Origin").

Missteps and antipatterns like this are rife within the games publishing industry so it's no surprise that employees are treated even worse than customers.

I must admit I do not understand the industry, but I don't see why competent studios like Blizzard/BioWare/Id could not simply self-publish their games. What exactly does EA add to the equation? Seems like it would not be a particularly monumental task to cut them out.

[snet0]

This reminds me of something Gabe Newell famously said about Steam.

> "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable."

I'd almost never pirate a game that was available on Steam. There are games I want to play that I don't see myself playing (unless I can be bothered to pirate), just because they're on some ugly, useless, slow, cumbersome and frankly worse-than-literally-nothing "launcher". I'd rather play a game through Steam than just through an executable, but I can't say the same for literally any other launcher/game service.

[mouzogu]

Afaik only GOG sells games without DRM. I have bought EA/Ubishit games on Steam which when you open the game, it installs Origin/UbiWhatever and then run through them only.

[dleslie]

A few years ago Steam began showing labeling on store pages for games that use third party DRM; and if you buy a game that has it and you did so unwittingly, then you can return it without issue provided you played less than two hours and you bought it within the last two weeks.

[karpierz]

This return policy is true regardless of whether it has DRM or whether you knew.

You can return any Steam game, for any reason, provided you've played it fewer than two hours and purchased it within the last two weeks.

[sorry_outta_gas]

the refund policy is one of the reasons I buy games on steam first over other stores, I tend to buy a lot of games for whatever reason and end up refunding 5-6 a year for various reasons after playing under two hours

Microsoft only allots you one or two a year or something which isn't enough considering how misleading game marketing is mixed with the prices

[nu11ptr]

+1 for GOG. I don't play games much anymore, but I still collect some of the older ones I enjoy on GOG knowing that there is no DRM. I tried steam and purchased a few games, but honestly I prefer to just have the game flat out without needing a "client" to get them, so while many people praise Steam... I'll pass.

[cruano]

Steam doesn't force you to be DRM-free like GOG, but they definitely do have DRM-free games. You can launch them from the .exe without internet or Steam installed, but it's up to the publisher

[goosedragons]

TBF Valve and Steam were IIRC the first or very close to first to have a game that required online activation (not including like MMOs) with Half-Life 2. Steam was incredibly frustrating for me as a kid stuck with dial up as the offline mode was tremendously broken and the install DVDs always fetched large portions (for dial-up anyways) of the game from some server. Plus you had to update games upon install even if you didn't want to which meant longer downloads.

[georgeecollins]

Steam has DRM, the Apple Store has DRM and other services like GoG don't. Where do game developers put their games? The places with DRM.

Unpopular opinion, down votes incoming: Just because you don't like the way a company chooses to distribute software doesn't make piracy right or justified.

[cupofpython]

>I don't see why competent studios like Blizzard/BioWare/Id could not simply self-publish their games

related to this is how the games are managed once installed as well. Each studio is moving towards each having their own "Hub" for their games. Usually it is referred to as a "Launcher", but I dont think it is going to end there.

For example, Blizzard has "Battle.net". You open battlenet, log in to battle net, and then select a game to play from your battlenet library.

Games I used to be able to just launch from Steam, now open up a separate UI where I have to login and launch the game from there (Larion Studios).

I imagine a future where I come home from work, login to my housing account, login to my computer, login to the 1 of 5+ games marketplaces to access my purchased library, select the game i want to play, login to the publishers account, login to my game studio account, login to my game-specific user account, login to the 3rd party server running the game instance backend for my session, then download a 32gb update and not be able to play until tomorrow

[dleslie]

That's not the future, that's basically now for any Ubisoft games.

[xmprt]

That's the "future" that we already have except things like OAuth and single sign on make that transparent to the user.

[Thaxll]

> I must admit I do not understand the industry, but I don't see why competent studios like Blizzard/BioWare/Id could not simply self-publish their games. What exactly does EA add to the equation? Seems like it would not be a particularly monumental task to cut them out.

Indeed you don't understand it because BioWare etc ... are just studio name it's all EA right. People at Bioware are EA employees they're not Bioware employees. btw EA purchased BW before ME2 even released so it has been 15years+.

As for the rest EA is one of the best place to work for in the video game industry, they're pretty good with their employees ( working hour, perks etc ... ).

Regarding the legendary edition it's playable offline so I not sure what you're talking about.

[mattnewton]

> I must admit I do not understand the industry, but I don't see why competent studios like Blizzard/BioWare/Id could not simply self-publish their games. What exactly does EA add to the equation? Seems like it would not be a particularly monumental task to cut them out.

I don’t know what it’s like at all for those larger studios, but for smaller studios EA will basically give all this infrastructure to you for free or even pay you to use it if you become a timed exclusive on their platform. I believe they are effectively in the market for buying origin installs to compete with steam.

[eli_gottlieb]

>Lo and behold, I'm sitting in a hotel last night trying to play Mass Effect Legendary Edition, and the thing refuses to function because I'm not connected to the Internet. I was astounded. This has never happened to me before. Why am I subject to this as a customer? If I steal the game, I receive a product without this glaring defect (I believe the defect has a name: "Origin").

And that's why I still haven't bought "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2" two years later.

[GekkePrutser]

Buy on gog instead :) They don't DRM.

[babypuncher]

Mass Effect Legendary Edition should only require an internet connection the first time you run it on a new PC. After that it works offline.

[LocalH]

This is just a side effect of hypercapitalism at play. Aspects of capitalism aren't bad, but when capitalism is the single biggest driving force of your society, things like this are bound to happen, because the endgame that gets rammed down everyone's throat is "making money is your life's purpose".

These types of things have happened across how many industries at this point, historically? Practically all of them.

[markdestouches]

Such issues are solved with proper regulation and effective antitrust laws. Unfortunately, if you lose the moment and allow the companies to gain enough power, it becomes incredibly difficult to push back against that. That's basically the state of things in the US

[whatshisface]

What's the alternative to capitalism, PBS but for video games?

[thatguy0900]

would gamepass be the closest to that? The other alternative would be games being small indie projects or huge community things. The mods people release for free are sometimes pretty insane in scope, even if Noone ever paid for a game again we'd still get some decent games at least

[GekkePrutser]

Game pass is more like the Netflix of gaming. Not all the content you want but at a reasonable price. Stuff gets removed a lot and there's lots of fragmentation with competing services.

[whatshisface]

Gamepass would be cable for videogames, PBS for videogames would be a government agency that made them.

[dleslie]

The government of Canada funds the development of a fair amount of video games through the Canadian media fund.

[whatshisface]

Are the results of that fund designed for compulsion to a lesser degree than most games made with similar sized budgets?

[thewebcount]

PBS is not a government agency. According to [0] they get about 13% of their budget from the federal government and 5% from state governments. So less than 20% of their funding is from the government.

[0] https://www.quora.com/How-much-support-does-the-U-S-governme...

[dylan604]

>I used to unapologetically pirate video games and only within the past two years have I finally come full circle and begun purchasing games, both new titles and older ones I had played in the past but never paid for until now.

If you are buying games/software as used, do the original creators see a dime of that purchase or is it just as if you never did pay for it?

[Jenk]

They didn't say used.

Also that is such reductive argument. When I sell my furniture to someone else am I supposed to pity the carpenters and whatnot?

How about when I sell my house, should the developers who built it get a cut?

[chucksmash]

> How about when I sell my house, should the developers who built it get a cut?

Only a matter of time?

Some NFTs used this as (an additional) money grab - every time the NFT is resold, N% of the purchase price goes to devs - so the idea is definitely out there in other forms today.

[dylan604]

Book publishers were hot on this too some time back expecting used book stores to kick back up the chain. It came around again with eBooks. It's definitely not a new thought to be sure.

[dylan604]

Yeah, I guess it reads like that's what I was implying.

I was just asking if original creators get a cut of the used price. I had seen discussions around that before, but didn't know if it ever became a thing or not. Just a simple question. Wasn't trying to be reductive and did not mean to piss in your cheerios this mornign

[mos_basik]

Op didn't say "new and used"; they said "new and older".

Since the context is that of piracy, I think it's most likely that op wasn't saying he used to buy bootleg physical DVDs for a console, but rather that they used to download executables for a personal computer.

If so, I've also come around to buying games in about the same manner as OP describes. Your question sounds odd to me, because I've never purchased a "used" game; since about 2011 when i gained access to stable internet every game I've purchased has been a digital purchase from an official distributor or directly from the creators.

There are other discussions to be had about whether digital purchases with online drm are truly purchases or rather subscriptions, and whether the cost of a AAA title should still be as high as it is given that you can't resell it the way you could when they were physical (and how inflation plays into things), etc, but those are out of scope here.

And then there's unauthorized resellers like g2a. I'll admit I've bought from there in the past, but I stopped after reading a great breakdown of how these hurt game developers more than piracy. These are a little like the used market for digital (certainly the creators don't get any of the money changing hands). But there are differences - since usually, once a key is consumed to play a game, it can no longer be resold. I assume this affects the market to look quite different from, say, gamestop.

[dylan604]

>Your question sounds odd to me,

Really? GameStop and other extinct companies made an entire business model of selling your used games to them and then selling those at cheaper prices to new customers. That sounds odd to you?