SP2219 wrote...
Bioware, I hate to break this to you, but your business model, as it stands, is just plain wrong.
Let me start with a quote from an article you and your friends at IGN recently put together, then I can explain to you WHY you are wrong.
"While Electronic Arts and BioWare were a little slow in taking up the free-to-play model in Star Wars: The Old Republic, BioWare has been experimenting with distribution models for its single-player role-playing games for a while. BioWare has used online passes, day one DLC and significant story additions to build revenue outside of the traditional one-time purchase price. According to Fernando Melo, director of online development at BioWare, having a post-ship plan is “absolutely fundamental to what your team needs to be doing.”
He directly answers questions about why BioWare offers day one DLC at a talk at GDC Europe, showing how despite the displeasure for such an offering, the sales numbers justify the business practice."
What worries me the most is the final paragraph, where the words "displeasure" and "justify" appear in the same sentence. Though this is somewhat an inferal on Charles Onyett's part, it doesn't matter. The two words are there in the same sentence. This is not good.
Bioware, in business, there is no justification for causing your customers any degree of displeasure. In business, you should be pursuing the opposite. Displeasing your customers is something you should avoid at all costs. When 90% of your customers are practically screaming at you NOT to engage in the day 1 DLC practice, it's a good idea to do exactly that. Why? Because they are your customers. They are your sole source of income. It doesn't matter what YOU think. If your customers are not happy, you lose. It really is that simple.
You seem to think this is justified because your sales numbers are low in relation to your production cost. That's because your games are not of sufficient quality to boost sales numbers to where you want them to be. The solution is to make your games better, and not release them when they are full of programming bugs, writing inconsistencies and lack of depth. It is definitely NOT the solution to charge the customers more money for an already below par product.
It really is so simple. If your game is good, people will buy it. If your game is bad, people won't buy it. The game is a single product. Not a product that's purposefully broken into lots of little bits you have to buy seperately. Just a single game, on a single disc. That is all you should be concerned about.
Take a look at games like Zelda, the Metroid Prime series, the Half Life series. Did they rely on this business practice? The answer is a resounding no. This is because the development teams took the time to ensure their games were of the highest quality. Thus more people bought the game, these games produced greater profits, the money they made on sales eclipsed their production costs.
Take a look at your previous games. Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, Mass Effect 1. These games did not have day 1 DLC. The first two had no DLC at all, and they were better games for it.
There is writing on the wall here. Your customers don't care about sales numbers, profit margins, or any other reason you might have for participating in the day 1 DLC practice. Your customers simply do not want it. Threfore you should not give it to them.
For the millionth time, it is that simple.
Epic fail.
Know your market, not do what the customer says. The customer is seldom right. And most of them don't have a clue what they actually want, they just know they want something (insert desire or need to be fullfilled here) Hence overblown marketing budget EA is currenty trying to reign in.
EA has relied on impulse buying and trading on reputation of IPs that have been built up over a number of years. So it has got away with it. Day 1 DLC is a business model which combines with lower production costs at the base product level to provide extra revenue, thus the ratio of cost : income increases over the life period of the game, suplimented by additional DLC. It's a clever model, but a short sighted one. At the moment the ME IP seems spent, DA I'm not sure it depends on their future showing.
However, it's apparant that EA has attempted to shift market segment. Not sure that doing so in the middle of the IP was a good idea, but still. The casual gaming segment is proportionally larger than that of the "RPG" gaming segment, for want of a better word. The view that both segments are mutually exclusive is rubbish as there will always be significant peripheral overlap betweeen the two segments, based on customer desires. Hence it was a calculated risk to make the move to open a potential larger revenue base and risk loosing a portion of the original base. Which they have, but you'd have to see if the numbers justify the shift to a casual base, which in terms of units sold I think they have in this instance, but I don't think they can rely on the boost from the previous segment before.
Thank you and good bye
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[platform elitism removed]
