Noita, Hades, Factorio. Three insanely good games without ads or ingame purchases with very high replayability. Just don’t give EA more money, please.
Electronic Arts started out so differently. The best, highest quality games, sold in album cases like vinyl records. They wanted to make their devs into rock stars. M.U.L.E., Seven Cities of Gold, Archon. Every game was innovative in every way.
Much later they’d changed, shifted toward the dark side, slipping way. But they still managed to bring us two of my favorite MMOs of all time: Motor City Online and Earth and Beyond.
MCO was online multiplayer Need For Speed with real classic American cars with real hot rod parts, the real engines, everything. I’ve not seen anything like it since. Hardly no one wants to pay to license real world cars any more. And you certainly don’t get the real engines with the real hot rod parts.
EAB was a crappy FPS but somehow 2D space game, but it had the best crafting and leveling system. You take things apart eventually learning how to build things. Player built stuff could possibly go was high as 200% quality so other players would want to buy your wares. The leveling system had three distinct lines: exploration, combat, and trade. Play the game how you wanted to having fun your way not how they think you should.
Anyway, EA killed them both, turned off the servers, refused to release the server code so player servers or single player modes were impossible. They sent me a coupon for their new Sims game, though.
So fuck EA. Haven’t bought a single one of their games since.
BG3
Honestly, I can’t even remember the last time I bought an EA game. What do they even make these days besides sports games?
Yes, but also the star wars and sims franchise
Only ea games I can think of that I’ve bought are jedi: fallen order and jedi: survivor. And I only bought them because they’re actually good games that aren’t monetized like a casino.
Fuck this.
There will be literally ads everywhere soon.
Ads in the street, on TV, on the radio, in magazines, on the internet, in games (including in VR)…
It’s a nightmare it will be completely impossible to go through one minute of your life without being sold something.
It’s not really something new but it saddens me because gaming was one of the few space that was mostly spared by advertisers. One of the last place you could get out of your reality for a little while.
Now this is over. Just like Netflix people will go up in arms against ads and then still get Free2Play games showing ads and normalize that practice.
I have removed alot of advertising on tv by self hosting my dvd/br content. Best decision i had in a while, its like netflix but content is there forever and always accessible from anywhere in the world (if my upload can keep up). Fair amount of work but no subscription chargers
I don’t know, I have removed close to 80% of ads in my life. None on my pc, none on my phone, none when I listen to music, none when I play games. Adblocking, Linux and a dash of the old yarr matey worked like a charm
Then this one should give you nightmares: https://youtu.be/YJg02ivYzSs
They been doing that since forever ago
They needed to sell that turd of a movie somehow. 🤣
They’re also using YOUR bandwidth to download these ads.
Yeah seriously; I’ve been seeing ads like this in games since at least the 6th generation of consoles (PS2/GameCube/XBOX). I distinctly remember seeing Napster and Cingular Wireless ads in Tony Hawk’s Underground 2, for example.
Hell, in the 90s we had entire games that were basically ads, like Chex Quest, Cool Spot (7-Up), and M.C. Kids (McDonald’s).
fuck that, if it has ads and/or microtransactions it better be free
its almost like the rate of profit is falling, forcing capitalists to find new ways to exploit everything and everyone around them…
Indie games, FromSoft, and larian ftw.
Great games are cheaper than ever. If you buy into those only trying to extract as much money from you as possible, that’s on you
hear hear. best games i play are significantly cheaper than 60 bucks, and are compete packages.
I’m so glad I haven’t bought an EA game since Battlefield 1942.
Billboard ads? Shitty but ehh not that bad overall. In game ads over radio or video? Nah miss me on that.
Their games should be free at this point
I’m not at all defending advertisements because, like every single person on earth, I hate them. However, the constant complaint that ~games are expensive~ is more and more becoming absolutely out of touch. Considering how complex modern games are from a software standpoint, they are fucking cheap as hell. $60 for (generally speaking) 40+ hours of entertainment is a goddamn bargain, not to mention they’ve mostly been priced the same for the better part of two decades. Y’all realize actual people make these things right? People who need to be paid for the work they do? Of all the absolute shit that happens behind the scenes and in plain daylight in the gaming industry, I think we can find better things to bitch about than the price of games.
You realize that it’s much easier now to make a game than it was two decades ago (see other comment)? That digital platforms make it more accessible for buyers to get your game? That the overall trend in the industry has been to get a game out as fast as possible then try to patch it after the fact, when that wasn’t even an option two decades ago (internet existed, sure, but not everyone had good internet)? Sure, the quality of graphics may have gone up, but everything else has been left behind.
Also, saying that people complaining about price is out-of-touch, is itself out-of-touch. Most people have even less purchasing power now than they did two decades ago and you want us to pay even more for a product inferior to what we would’ve gotten years ago?
Considering that most titles are cross platform I’d say it’s actually much more difficult to produce games these days than it was in the past (see Cyberpunk’s shaky release due to it trying to run on everything under the sun at launch—and being forced out too early due to investor demand). It’s not like game engines and other development tools make it so people press a button that says “make game” and the game pops into existence.
My main point is that games have not actually gone up in price for over two decades. And, as you have pointed out as well, there are an awful lot of actual things to complain about with the gaming industry. The out of pocket cost we pay to play the games is really not one of them.
I guess some thing about it, like a game costs less than a big budget Hollywood movie to make, and Hollywood movie tickets don’t cost $80
but audience for movies like 100x times bigger, yk
Sounds like they’re screwing the loyal fans to make up the cash. Imagine if an independent movie or snap budget film charged $80 a ticket because they have a smaller audience?
that would be fair if these companies weren’t incredibly profitable, only increasing that profit, and only using that profit to pay the executive and shareholders.
it’s just greed. they don’t need the money.
