Show EA The Money.

Posted on October 24, 2006
Filed Under Games, Rants |

Thankfully I read up about the new Battlefield 2142 game online before I went out and paid £35 for it. EA have some cheek, apparently theres a little peice of software that gets installed along with the game which allows them to serve localised ads to you while you’re playing online. This seemingly innocuous program sends your IP (and EA assures us that this is all it sends) to their ad servers so that players in europe don’t get american ads, and vice versa. Those of you who know a little about this sort of thing will recognise a description of spyware when you read one.

Now I have no problem with this peice of software, I trust EA to be telling the truth. It would do their reputation (such as it is) no good whatsoever to lie to their customer base. What I do have a problem with is the way they have decided to tell you about it. The information regarding this peice of code is contained in the box. Not on the cover, not on a poster next to where the game is displayed, but inside the cellophane wrapped, sealed box. Now as any PC gamer knows, and any decent retailer will tell you, once that seal is broken and the game opened the game is then non-returnable. In other words if you open it and don’t like what you find inside, tough.
This has long been an issue with EULAs, the ream of text that you have to agree to before you install the game. If anyone actually reads these things apart from the lawyers who write them I’ll be very surprised. The thing is, if you don’t agree to it you can’t use the software (which if you’re in the process of installing it, is already out of its box and hence non-returnable). The same goes for this ad serving app which comes along with BF2142. If you don’t want it on your machine you can’t take the game back, because you’ve opened the box. EA couldn’t be happier, they’ve got your money.
The other gripe I have with the game (I played it on a mates LAN) is the total lack of single player or LAN compatible content included with the game. You want to play the big maps or get decent kit for your soldier? You have to play online. There is currently no way of unlocking all the goodies (including any grenades) for playing in a single player game or on a LAN. They are not even giving offline players a quarter of a game. There are people working on getting around these limitations (see here and more interstingly here.) but I find myself wondering how long it will be before EA turns its legal bloodhounds loose on these projects. It looks like EA are trying to entice people online, so that they can serve more ads possibly? I wonder how EA are getting paid for putting ads in the game, if its per ad shown then they’ve engineered a game which will make them loads of cash over and above the £35 ($50) they charge for it. They’ll be laughing all the way to the bank.
So if you were planning on buying BF2142 (or any other future EA release, this will only be the beginning) don’t pay for it if you’re not going online, it really isn’t worth the money, and have good hard think about what EA is doing with this game. If they gave it away free and you paid to get rid of the ads then it wouldn’t be so bad, but they are milking a devoted gaming community for every penny they can and not actually giving anything back to that community. They don’t care what gamers think as long as they fork over the cash.

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