That time EA tried (and failed) to surprise everyone by adding fullscreen adverts to a $60 game 2 weeks after it launched

[IAmAndre]

5 minutes ago, imreloadin said:

I've owned a couple of MMA/Boxing games over the years but that is irrelevant honestly. It might be hard to believe, but people who aren't "into sports games" can still complain about this type of practice because it affects the industry as a whole. You don't think that other devs seeing EA pull this type of shit further emboldens them to do the same? They're getting additional money from it so obviously there is a financial incentive for other developers to do the same if they can see that EA gets away with it with little push-back from their consumer base. The same thing happened with micro-transactions, once a major publisher did it the rest followed suit because it's seen as additional profits that they are missing out on if they don't and they then have the shield of whataboutism with the other publishers who are actively doing it.

 

So yes, people who don't like sports games can still complain about this because it affects the industry as a whole.

Of course you're entitled to have an opinion about anything, but what if the target audience doesn't mind it and has been used to it for years? Should they stop everything to please the people who aren't buying their game in the first place? That's my point here because basically what you're saying is "you shouldn't like that because I don't want it to happen in other games."

[Jet_ski]

17 hours ago, jaslion said:

Eventually this will become such an issue a law will be made against it. These are adding non advertised features to a game after launch and this can easily be seen as false advertising of the product in a way. I wouldn't be too surprised when in a couple years it bites them in the butt again just like with lootboxes getting banned around the globe.

 

EA does not care in the slightest. Their reputation is so far down the drain they might as well keep going. Anything that makes them money is worth it for them.

People pay for TV and get blasted with 30 mins of ads for 30 mins of content. What law?!

[suits]

Why do poeple buy EA games anymore? Bankrupt this company and the industry will think twice. You'll probably also get better games for all the sports lineup of games at least. 

[jagdtigger]

3 hours ago, suits said:

Why do poeple buy EA games anymore?

To put it bluntly most of the mass populous is hopelessly stupid.....

[SolarNova]

This is why I vote with my wallet.

EA are scumbags, hands down the worst publisher in gaming. There are others dont get me wrong, but EA have been at it longer.

 

I havnt bought a game that is under the EA logo in over a decade, nay almost 2 decades now. .. fk'em !

[GoodBytes]

Meh.

EA has won. They'll  remove it now, and then on the next game, it will be more baked in, and call it day. The audience who buys such games, will still buy it.

We have seen over the years, time and time again, that gamers just gives in, as a whole. And those who don't, are just a minority... a dying one at best, as the younger generation doesn't know better and goes with it. We have seen this with day 1 DLC, microtransaction, gambling mechanics. People say "I am banning xyz game/publisher", but these companies are ranking up billions of dollars from this. Only to have the competitor studios just copy, and now it is standard thing, and gamers continues to buy the game, continues to play them, and find justifications for their actions.

 

Funny thing is, is that these full screen ads, are jokes I used to do ages ago on games, when they starting to put ads in game world.

 

I expect the next level is in the story script ads, and placeholder like on TV shows.

"Oh man I have a headache" says side-character #5. Main character replies "Here, take Tylenol! You can always trust extra strength Tylenol^®. Extra Strength TYLENOL^® products are tough on pain, but gentle on your stomach, providing fast, effective relief.". And then to progress, you actually have to go in your inventory and give the pills to the side character.

 

 

[Master Disaster]

1 minute ago, GoodBytes said:

Meh.

EA has won. They'll  remove it now, and then on the next game, it will be more baked in, and call it day. The audience who buys such games, will still buy it.

We have seen over the years, time and time again, that gamers just gives in, as a whole. And those who don't, are just a minority... a dying one at best, as the younger generation doesn't know better and goes with it. We have seen this with day 1 DLC, microtransaction, gambling mechanics. People say "I am banning xyz game/publsiher", but these companies are ranking up billions of dollars from this. Only to have the competitor studios just copy, and now it is standard thing, and gamers continues to buy the game, continues to play them, and find justifications for their actions.

Social conditioning.

[NewbieOne]

On 9/7/2020 at 10:24 AM, jaslion said:

Eventually this will become such an issue a law will be made against it. These are adding non advertised features to a game after launch and this can easily be seen as false advertising of the product in a way. I wouldn't be too surprised when in a couple years it bites them in the butt again just like with lootboxes getting banned around the globe.

 

EA does not care in the slightest. Their reputation is so far down the drain they might as well keep going. Anything that makes them money is worth it for them.

That's one of the things about the game industry that are calling for more regulation, especially in the context of fraud avoidance, or at least deceit avoidance, or at least transparency & fairness. The era of allowing distributors to get away with EULAs stipulating the 'as-is' principle with no guarantees or refunds, stipulating arbitration of the developer/distributor's choice and exempting liability for just about anything — must finally stop. Given the role of reviews and difficulty getting refunds, more regulatory emphasis should be placed on honesty, especially on reaction to dishonest moves, so that their cost begins to exceed the gain, thus dissuading devs/distributors.

 

Review circumvention could already be regarded as false advertisement, it's just that software sellers and especially game sellers have historically been given so much leeway and almost totally escaped the purview of consumer laws and pretty much all other regulation.

 

My other gripe is companies getting away with digging up their games post-release to mix things up again after they were briefly tidied up for release. This is especially true for Paradox — guys who can change the concepts of a game months or years after release, introducing enough bugs to make the current version unplayable for weeks at a time and forcing you to roll back to an earlier patch while the DLC you've just bought is useless to you. Effectively, this means game companies get away with disguised public betas and early access, which means they soak the funds from the market without giving the buyers (sometimes ever at all) a fully finished, fully workable product. And this too is done after release, so reviewers can't react, and is done while the games already have high Metacritic scores. Plus, a reviewer only gets to spend so much time in the game anyway.

 

Companies also tend to drown out negative feedback in their own forums by inventing and abusing rules about 'constructive' posting or outright saying that you have to be very respectful when talking to company employees, which is supposed to be more about the form than the content, but when the content is negative, they claim you aren't constructive or you aren't respectful. So you have to very carefully tone your negative feedback down and dilute it or else you'll get banned. Or even bullied. This has happened to me (like literally marketing employees sending me intimidating private messages in Paradox forums). Heck, they will often even label criticism as spam just because they've heard it before, so they claim it's repetitive. This culture of almighty moderators and admins — something we left behind like 10 years ago but started readopting like 3 years ago — is toxic is and is a problem from the perspective of honest advertising. Not just in devs' or distributors' own forums but also Steam, where the moderators are employed by the gaming companies themselves.

 

Next thing, the law needs to deal with is publishers and reviewers making chums with each other or trying to, or exerting pressure. Not just outright bribes in money or free equipment but also special deals for the site's members and obviously ad income, like only placing ads on those sites that give the best review scores, and then giving them exclusive access or other special opportunities. As a minimum people unearthing such stories should be immune to lawsuits and other forms of retaliation (including bans from communities, although arbitrary bans should be altogether disposed of anyway).

 

At least I'm happy there's backlash and those people aren't getting intimidated and the gaming press aren't trying to ignore the issue.

 

On 9/8/2020 at 3:30 PM, GoodBytes said:

Meh.

EA has won. They'll  remove it now, and then on the next game, it will be more baked in, and call it day. The audience who buys such games, will still buy it.

We have seen over the years, time and time again, that gamers just gives in, as a whole. And those who don't, are just a minority... a dying one at best, as the younger generation doesn't know better and goes with it. We have seen this with day 1 DLC, microtransaction, gambling mechanics. People say "I am banning xyz game/publisher", but these companies are ranking up billions of dollars from this. Only to have the competitor studios just copy, and now it is standard thing, and gamers continues to buy the game, continues to play them, and find justifications for their actions.

 

Funny thing is, is that these full screen ads, are jokes I used to do ages ago on games, when they starting to put ads in game world.

 

I expect the next level is in the story script ads, and placeholder like on TV shows.

"Oh man I have a headache" says side-character #5. Main character replies "Here, take Tylenol! You can always trust extra strength Tylenol^®. Extra Strength TYLENOL^® products are tough on pain, but gentle on your stomach, providing fast, effective relief.". And then to progress, you actually have to go in your inventory and give the pills to the side character.

 

 

Yeah, as long as the anti-social business exec culture doesn't die out, that's what's going to happen. And right now the gaming industry is firmly controlled by anti-social business execs, even former game designers turning into those, precisely for the reason the other poster nailed down — a lot of money is not enough, the goal is all the money that could possibly be squeezed out, no matter the emotional or moral cost. Because they gotta maximize (game theory applied in business — now everybody seems to be anti-socially optimizing profits to the max rather than just simply doing things efficiently the way it used to be).

One probably can't get rid of the anti-social exec culture without plunging into full-blow socialism, with the scale and depth of invasive state intervention that this sort of regulation would require. But at least if psychological gimmicks were to be banned from marketing (which is not going to happen because hey, you aren't just going to ban salespeople from using advanced psychology worldwide), if dishonest communication were to be banned and criminalized (the most important part would be not just criminal records for execs and marketers but also large enough fines for the companies to make sure they understand they're gonna lose more money than gain and take a net loss, which should then be prohibited from being passed on to customers or employees or subcontractors, so that it has to eat directly into shareholder and executive perks)… maybe then things would move. Or something like disqualification from the industry for several years by court order, so you can't work as an executive, manager, supervisor, advisor or team leader if you get caught manipulating reviews or ads.

 

And stripping away the companies' immunities (from EULA and otherwise) to class action and other forms of litigation could probably help. A class action for false advertising, forcing the company to e.g. give a $20 refund on a $60 game would certainly teach them something, though I'm not a fan of unleashing private plaintiff's lawyers like vultures on people and companies as a form of punishment. Direct fines are more moral.

 

On 9/8/2020 at 3:43 AM, IAmAndre said:

Of course you're entitled to have an opinion about anything, but what if the target audience doesn't mind it and has been used to it for years? Should they stop everything to please the people who aren't buying their game in the first place? That's my point here because basically what you're saying is "you shouldn't like that because I don't want it to happen in other games."

If the target audience really doesn't mind, that's one thing. Especially if to not mind is a decision, an informed decision. Then sure. But the problem with gamers is that they've been intimidated by publishers into acquiescing in just about anything, just so that the inbound stream of games doesn't stop. In other words, people are afraid games would stop coming out if they tried to defend their rights. Also developers themselves — the gamers who create games but have their salaries paid by the anti-social business execs — play their own part in this intimidation-deceiption operation.

 

Next, people who act like an activist or tribune of the gaming plebs shouldn't be exposed to backlash from publishers' lawyers and from abusive moderators and administrators in gaming forums, who are often regular employees of the publisher's marketing department. (Again, this is what happened to me in Paradox Forums, after I pointed out they were falling below the professional level of skill and care when turning the DLC fest into a permanent public beta test of Crusader Kings 2, an early access to a game that would never be finalized before 3 came out — as truly happened.)

 

Ooops, sorry, guys. Looks like I've caught a bout of textwallyitis. I can bit a bit verbose at times.

 

Edit: As for buying from EA, I guess Red Alert is going to be relatively safe, or at least I didn't mind 3. But RPGs, sports and action titles… not so much. I feel for you guys. I'm totally not into sports games just like sport in real life (I respect it and have positive feelings for it, warm fuzzies and all, but I fail to get engaged), but look what's happening to RPGs, which is my favourite genre and in which EA controls BioWare, and then there is or was Atari. Business decisions and politics everywhere, no longer just simple normal storytelling-focused design that's simply meant for entertainment and good fun. (Everybody's either promoting a social cause, his own obviously, or trying to squeeze out a questionable buck.)

[IAmAndre]

48 minutes ago, NewbieOne said:

Then sure. But the problem with gamers is that they've been intimidated by publishers into acquiescing in just about anything, just so that the inbound stream of games doesn't stop. In other words, people are afraid games would stop coming out if they tried to defend their rights. Also developers themselves — the gamers who create games but have their salaries paid by the anti-social business execs — play their own part in this intimidation-deceiption operation.

I think that's very far from happening here. I'm part of the target audience and I don't mind it, just like most people since it's been present for years and was actually seen as a cool "feature" 15 years ago. I think the problem here is that EA is paying for their bad reputation among gamers, so they don't get any "tolerance" and everything they do is seen as an attempt to grab more money. Product placements are way more present in other games like the 2K series and I'm pretty sure nobody would have noticed that if it wasn't an EA game. For instance, people were rather happy/amused with the Monster reference in Death Stranding because Kojima is seen as the cool guy.

[drazurd]

Everyone is mad at EA when no one realizes that 2K also puts a minute fucking gatorade add in every GODDAMN NBA 2K GAME

[Yoinkerman]

They only have to succeed once and every shitty thing they do like this further normalizes unethical practices

[PocketNerd]

On 9/7/2020 at 6:56 PM, Jet_ski said:

People pay for TV and get blasted with 30 mins of ads for 30 mins of content. What law?!

Don't you mean 38 mins of ads for 22 mins of content?

[Jet_ski]

44 minutes ago, PocketNerd said:

Don't you mean 38 mins of ads for 22 mins of content?

It’s been a while since I last had cable TV. I’m not surprised that it’s gotten worse.