Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Madden 11

I picked up Madden this morning, and I also figured something out.

When I was inputting the "online pass" code, I saw that "roster updates" were specifically mentioned as a feature only available with online access.

That's a dick move.

Here's why. Since only people who buy the game new have online access (unless they pay an extra fee), people who buy the game used can't get roster updates without the fee. But the game comes out before pre-season even starts, so accurate rosters aren't available for a month.

In other words, if you don't buy the game new, EA isn't going to finish the game unless you pay an additional fee.

It gets so much worse, though. Remember how the NCAA team was touting the "tuning updates" that were going to make it much easier to fix problems without going through the Sony/Microsoft patch certification process?

At first, I thought that was the greatest thing ever. For once, a company actually doing something for us, with no downside.

Well, not exactly.

I realized today that those tuning sets aren't accessible for anyone who bought a used copy of the game, unless they pay for online access (the tuning updates are downloaded from EA's servers). So while this might be a way to be more responsive in terms of fixing bugs, it's also a way to totally lock out the used game market (their primary motivation, I strongly suspect). Again, they're shipping a beta, and you have to pay them to finish the game.

That is a bad, bad precedent.

On to other matters. There's currently a CPU vs. CPU game beavering away on the television in my study. I'm starting with last year's slider settings, on the assumption that quite a few things haven't changed, and this will quickly tell me what has changed.

I'm not sure what the timeframe is for initial slide release, but I expect it will be less than a week.

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