People seem to completely forget how trust works. Once trust is lost in a company, it is very hard to regain it. That given companies, like EA, have done things in the past that seem ... unfortunate or shady is not something the intelligent gaming community quickly forgets.
The PR response to that is not to say 'hey but our latest heavy-handed approach is just fine, yo!' - it's to eat a little humble pie and say 'ok, we screwed up, but we're going to do better because you deserve it, our favoured customers'. That of course implies EA actually cares about its customers, which increasingly seems not to be the case.
Take a page out of CD Projekt's PR manual. Everything they have done around the Witcher 2 has both involved DRM and even legal challenges around piracy and yet because they understand customer service, they come out of it smelling of roses. I had a genuine problem with SecuROM in Witcher 2 crashing my game, logs and all. They gave me a free no-strings-attached download of the game from GOG.com by way of apology, and then after the launch had died down, removed the DRM for
everyone in their first major patch. They've earned my trust. They've shown they care, that they are making games for me, not just to earn a buck.
What has EA done lately to do that? Even if cynically it's a PR stunt, it worked!
The greatest irony for me is that when ME1 finally came out for the PC I didn't buy it because of SecuROM. It took three years and a gift through Steam for me to play it, and I was wowed, I was in awe, I thought 'what an amazing game I could have missed out on'. That right there is why buggy and awkward DRM in all its forms, and whether you like it or not I'm including Origin, is a handicap not a boon to the publisher.
Then ME2 came along, with practically no DRM at all. I thought that EA had seen the light. They'd understood that heavy-handed tactics earn them no favours and reduces trust in the publisher. I bought ME2 on launch day, CE edition, by way of a thank you.
Now ME3 comes, and EA have totally reversed stance again. Well, perhaps it will be another three years and a gift on Steam before I play the conclusion. I can wait.
I want to be able to take a DVD out of the box and play the game I bought, whether now or in five years time, and not worry about whether EA kept the lights on in the mean time. Would we have a relatively bug-free patched copy of Vampire Bloodlines today if Troika had folded
and taken authentication servers with it? People are still buying that game and enjoying it today, a testament to the efforts, if not so much QA, of a talented developer (and the community that patched it). Will we be able to say the same of ME3, or will we find that a few years down the road, nobody can really get it to work, the great talents of Bioware inaccessible, because they & EA have moved onto the next shiny? Time will tell.
Bioware isn't making the next FIFA that lasts a year and is then discarded. They're making a saga, something people will invest, have invested, hundreds of hours of gaming into, quite possibly for the next decade. That they treat that with such little respect is disappointing.
Longer post than I'd planned, but hey ho.
Modifié par Grammarye, 27 janvier 2012 - 09:54 .
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