That's what I'm saying though.. PC's have pretty much ALWAYS outclassed consoles. Go back to, say, the SNES. Compare Doom on the SNES to Doom on the PC released two years earlier: Doom PC rocks the shit out of Doom SNES. PC's have always had the performance advantage over consoles. Consoles advantage has always been in standardization and accessibility.
Yeah, but the point is it didn't mean much back then. Sure your PC was more powerful than your SNES. There were no SNES ports on the PC. The rare one, like Doom you just mentioned, were the rare blue moon. A PC for all intents and purposes was an entirely separate entity.
Today, the default state of games is PS3/360/PC. In fact the situation has reversed, it's rare to see a game on a console that isn't on the PC, and that's usually exclusivity issues. So the specs comparison is a lot more significant now.
"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
0
CuvisTheConquerorThey always say "yee haw" but they never ask "haw yee?" Registered Userregular
That's what I'm saying though.. PC's have pretty much ALWAYS outclassed consoles. Go back to, say, the SNES. Compare Doom on the SNES to Doom on the PC released two years earlier: Doom PC rocks the shit out of Doom SNES. PC's have always had the performance advantage over consoles. Consoles advantage has always been in standardization and accessibility.
But that was way into the SNES's lifespan. We're talking about at launch here. A more apt comparison would be, say, Super Mario World to Commander Keen.
Game publishers need to take a hint from movie studios and how they shuffle their big releases around to dates that are free from competition. Nobody is going to try and open a film the weekend the new Harry Potter opens, and I have no idea why game publishers all basically try to do exactly that.
Everything is crammed in a 6 week window of Nov. 1st -Dec 15th, and another 5 week window of Feb 15th to mid-late March. It's unreal how stupid these fuckers are.
May 21st! Release a big blockbuster game you want to sell gangbusters on that date. 2 weeks before school is out. No competition. Profit. June 11th! July 2nd! All viable and you'd own it. Kids don't play outside anymore and they can't afford your games. Adults who buy shit work year round and don't care what season it is.
Thing is, movies will be in theaters for 2-3 weeks and then you're out of luck and have to wait for the home release, so other movies can release the week after or maybe 2, and they'll be fine. I think videogame windows are much bigger, because of the larger price so people won't usually be buying two $60 games within 2-3 weeks of each other.
Retail space is obviously not as constrained as the number of screens in a multiplex so the competition isn't as direct, but video games are really front loaded in sales. You can see it directly in the Japanese sales charts and in the US, a release at the end of a reporting period doesn't mean that a game is likely to chart the next month. Basically if you aren't in the exact same genre (think Saint's Row going up against GTA) then a week should be enough to avoid problems.
On a totally different subject, we know that publishers use metacritic scores to determine bonuses for outside developers. Do we know for sure that they use them to determine bonuses for their own employees and/or management? I'm wondering how important SimCity's metacritic score is.
I would expect metascore bonuses would play to the managements benefit more than the rank and file. It seems that most employees at game companies get bonuses (and vacations) around launch dates or when a game goes gold. If its when a game goes gold it would be before launch, when solid unit sale numbers are mercurial guesses and prior to most reviews. Those who work in management may well expect an additional bonus dependent on their product's unit sales or review scores.
Non-management types probably get a flat % of their salary as their bonus that varies by seniority and company.
Also the N64 hit about six months before 3D graphic accelerators became mainstream in computing so there was this glorious period where the most advanced home graphics were back on consoles.
The biggest boon for next gen's hardware isn't so much the power but the architecture. Compared to the PS3 the PS4 is much, much more PCesque and therefore far easier to develop for. I can only imagine Microsoft going the same route and using more of an 'off-the-shelf' style setup than a bespoke set of hardware through and through.
We're going to arrive at a point where, outside of optimization and some very specific UI and mechanical alterations, porting a game between consoles will be virtually instantaneous and cost almost nothing.
If you are a PC gamer, these are exciting times because the home consoles are, slowly but surely, becoming HTPCs in a shiny box. Time was, everything on the mainboard of these things was a custom job with a very obscure development process.
Especially now that the PS3 and 360 have proved that power parity between consoles benefits everyone because of cross-pollination, if I was a betting man I'd put money on the final spec of the 720 being almost identical to the announced PS4 spec.
"We have been saying CryEngine 3 is next-gen ready for years now," he told us in an interview published in our latest issue, which goes on sale Friday 15th March. "The reason I'm saying that is - and this is before we knew the specs, because three years ago nobody knew - it's impossible to go too far beyond what we say today is next gen because it would cost too much."
Click to view larger image
"It would be prohibitively expensive to launch a next-gen console beyond what we say is next gen," Yerli asserted. "It would potentially be a death knell for at least one company."
Crytek has constructed its vaunted CryEngine 3 - which is "three years ahead" of Epic's Unreal Engine 4, don't you know - in accordance with these predictions, without much in the way of manufacturer input. "If you take in the cost of making a console, the parts of it, and say, 'okay, that has to be better than the best PC experience at that time plus two years later'," Yerli explained.
"And you want a package - a $200, $300, $400 package. It's just physically and financially impossible to go higher, so you have to bring it down again, and our guestimates have been quite right."
I've posted a video of CryEngine 3 in action below, from April last year. Swank, no? At the time, Yerli opined that "this kind of realism will be playing a big focus in the next generation. And higher resolution texturing, like in the film industry, where you have effectively no limits on texture sizes.
"In the games, you used to have 256 by 256 textures, those limits will go up to...pretty much as much memory as you have in your PC. The new texturing will become a big topic as well."
Also in April last year, Crytek's director of creative development Rasmus Hojengaard told the world that a pre-owned block in next generation consoles would be "absolutely awesome" from a "business perspective". Kaa-ching, etc.
The biggest boon for next gen's hardware isn't so much the power but the architecture. Compared to the PS3 the PS4 is much, much more PCesque and therefore far easier to develop for. I can only imagine Microsoft going the same route and using more of an 'off-the-shelf' style setup than a bespoke set of hardware through and through.
We're going to arrive at a point where, outside of optimization and some very specific UI and mechanical alterations, porting a game between consoles will be virtually instantaneous and cost almost nothing.
If you are a PC gamer, these are exciting times because the home consoles are, slowly but surely, becoming HTPCs in a shiny box. Time was, everything on the mainboard of these things was a custom job with a very obscure development process.
Especially now that the PS3 and 360 have proved that power parity between consoles benefits everyone because of cross-pollination, if I was a betting man I'd put money on the final spec of the 720 being almost identical to the announced PS4 spec.
Well, my PC running Windows and my PC running Linux are exactly the same but it doesn't mean that ports are trivial. I think even more than the off the shelf CPUs/GPUs the very fact that consoles are now powerful enough that devs don't feel the need to program at at a low level and optimize the shit out of everything means that porting will not be so hard.
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
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AchireIsn't life disappointing? Yes, it is.Registered Userregular
I'm not a programmer, but I've been kind of wondering about the graphics API for the PS4. Obviously it can't be Direct X, so is it going to be Open GL? Or some proprietary API? I think the API would be the biggest hurdle for porting between platforms.
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CuvisTheConquerorThey always say "yee haw" but they never ask "haw yee?" Registered Userregular
I'm not a programmer, but I've been kind of wondering about the graphics API for the PS4. Obviously it can't be Direct X, so is it going to be Open GL? Or some proprietary API? I think the API would be the biggest hurdle for porting between platforms.
The PS3 already uses OpenGL, so I'd expect the PS4 to do the same. Even more so now that it's on commodity hardware.
EA's SimCity saga has provided no shortage of comedy. Maxis general manager Lucy Bradshaw just yesterday proudly announced that the company is "hearing from thousands of people who are playing across regions, trading, communicating and loving the Always-Connected functionality." Surely EA must be receiving a mountain of complaints as well, unless it somehow found a way to prevent customers from even contacting the support team. Hmmm...
As EA forum member LeLedg and others have accidentally discovered in a thread about customers trying to make a legitimate SimCity complaints, EA is preventing the customer assistance hotline number from even appearing in the forums. When you type out the number 866-543-5435, it is replaced by an asterisk, a common message board function typically used to block course language. Just to be safe, the forum-goers typed other permutations of the number in addition to completely different phone numbers -- it's only EA's number that's censored.
There is a likelihood that this is a big misunderstanding, that this function was implemented well before the SimCity debacle to prevent people from spamming the number in the forums. Yeah, about as likely as being able to reach EA via any other means, so not very. A handful of customers have already noted that speaking to a rep via live chat session is ineffective, instead insisting on phone calls. Actually tracking down the number on EA's site is a fruitless endeavor, but the fact that EA is blocking said number from visibly appearing in the forums makes it seem like EA wants to pretend that everything is hunky-dory in Sim Land.
Just in case EA decides to delete these posts, LeLedg decided to share screen grabs of the hilarity in action. Check those in the gallery below.
Every new day it's like a comedy of errors.
+7
HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
We have a guy on the forum who does (used to?) work for EA in customer support.
I wonder what the next step for EA is. Maybe their customer support webpage will just get taken down.
They're getting too many calls, they're trying to stop traffic coming in to their customer support website from getting redirected to phone support for no reason.
Just look at that opportunity cost, what they saved getting out of getting out of selling NVIDA chips to Microsoft/sony for 10 years. Really dodged a bullet with that one. . . :rotate:
Maybe they did. We don't really know what terms Sony was offering.
I suspect one core part of whatever financial calculations they made would have been simply that they'd be selling (relatively) low end chips to the console manufacturers, and those are only going to devalue as the generation goes on. Profit margins are much slimmer on low end chips than high end ones, and you've got to be certain that devoting manpower / resources to the manufacture of them is worthwhile compared to where else it might be spent. For all we know it could simply be that they don't feel the PS4 isn't as profitable an avenue as say, the mobile market (especially since hardware on the mobile market is updated at a far greater pace).
This is reaching, what are the profits of the mobile market when you need to R&D and retool your fabrication almost every refresh.
Being a supplier for 10 years is guaranteed income, that's on your balance sheet for 10 years. By there very nature a console box's components are stable meaning a captive market.
NVIDIA is fine selling mid and low range GPU's to Dell, HP, Apple, ACER, Asus and Sony PC laptops. But a ten year commitment to providing midrange GPU is just too much hassle. Yeah right.
Bastable on
Philippe about the tactical deployment of german Kradschützen during the battle of Kursk:
"I think I can comment on this because I used to live above the Baby Doll Lounge, a topless bar that was once frequented by bikers in lower Manhattan."
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MichaelLCIn what furnace was thy brain?ChicagoRegistered Userregular
We have a guy on the forum who does (used to?) work for EA in customer support.
I wonder what the next step for EA is. Maybe their customer support webpage will just get taken down.
Fly to the Vatican, ask NewPope to help. They're good at covering up scandals.
Topical Humour!
Nah, it's rated E10+. They wouldn't be interested.
That phone thing, if true, is pretty ridiculous. I mean hiding Electronic Arts (EA) Technical Support number - 866-543-5435 - in their forum shows a particular level of desperation. Maybe they need to do a Rock Band staring Barbra Streisand.
They're getting too many calls, they're trying to stop traffic coming in to their customer support website from getting redirected to phone support for no reason.
No gamer will ever understand the absolute truth of every single part of your post, which is a shame.
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
They're getting too many calls, they're trying to stop traffic coming in to their customer support website from getting redirected to phone support for no reason.
No gamer will ever understand the absolute truth of every single part of your post, which is a shame.
You're suggesting a business has the right to deny customers a means of contacting said company? Because the BBB and other federal agencies will have something to say about that.
+2
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
They're getting too many calls, they're trying to stop traffic coming in to their customer support website from getting redirected to phone support for no reason.
No gamer will ever understand the absolute truth of every single part of your post, which is a shame.
You're suggesting a business has the right to deny customers a means of contacting said company? Because the BBB and other federal agencies will have something to say about that.
The overall worst mistake EA could make is to let this situation become so ridiculous in terms of complaints and not answering them is to let this whole mess come to the attention of federal agencies. If the complaints from the Simcity debacle are so bad that EA can't even handle the load and has to basically hide its support from people having problems, that's getting into territory where it's millions of pissed-off citizens instead of just a bunch of overreacting gamers. EA could very well have stepped over the line here and caused themselves a lot more trouble than just unhappy customers who can't really do squat.
For EA, getting clear of this situation is basically a matter of cutting corners and treating customers like shit to make as much profit as possible while still keeping the mess low-key enough to not be considered as breaking the law. Granted, it's small-time stuff in the grand scale of things, but EA's general scumminess here is with something that's making hundreds of millions of dollars, which is something the government would definitely be interested in.
AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
edited March 2013
EA are also rescinding keys from Amazon for those who complained, accusing them of making a charge back. Amazon will give a new key and refund if this happens to you.
EA are also rescinding keys from Anazon for those who complained, accusing them of making a charge back. Amazon will give a new key and refund if this happens to you.
Holy shit what.
What's a word for when something goes beyond being farcical?
The only way you have a shot of getting out of this insanity is to drop to your knees, put your head down, and beg for your life. Big doe eyes, quivering lips, and you play that sympathy card long and hard and hope people eventually stop picking on you due to how pathetic it is and pray enough people eventually just forget about it with time.
You do not triple down on the stupid with the lying and the deceit.
First rule of getting out of a hole. Stop digging!
"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
EA are also rescinding keys from Anazon for those who complained, accusing them of making a charge back. Amazon will give a new key and refund if this happens to you.
Holy shit what.
What's a word for when something goes beyond being farcical?
I first noticed this when @jdarksun posted about his game disappearing from Origin in the Sim City thread, where he was able to get a refund and a new code out of it. I wondered if anyone else was having the same experience and then I found this thread on reddit: Warning: Origin disabled my legitimate sim city key.
I will say I was inaccurate the first time, it doesn't appear you had to have made any complaint about the game to EA, it seems to just be some random problem occurring to Amazon customers. The result is always a happy one though: New game key and a full refund. So nobody gets screwed here, it's just another example of how utterly bizzare and stupid this situation has become.
At this point though, depending on how widespread this is, you could view EA as being some kind of Scooby Doo level villain. Unmasked and caught out by the inquisitive gaming public, they are shaking their fists declaring "I would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for you damned meddling servers and your little modders too!"
I am not even sure if this being just any random potential amazon customer rather than those who specifically complained makes the situation better or worse.
EA are also rescinding keys from Anazon for those who complained, accusing them of making a charge back. Amazon will give a new key and refund if this happens to you.
Holy shit what.
What's a word for when something goes beyond being farcical?
Haha EA is so bad I bet EA stands for Electronic Arts considering how awful they're turning out.
EA are also rescinding keys from Amazon for those who complained, accusing them of making a charge back. Amazon will give a new key and refund if this happens to you.
Do we have an actual source for this?
EDIT: @Bastable: Like I said, we don't know what terms Sony was offering. And given that Nvidia was supplying them for the last seven years, at the very least they're going to have a good idea of what they want for the next gen, and what did and did not work out for them last time as a result. Steady profits doesn't mean much if you're either getting a pittance or aren't making as much as you could be, and Nvidia are the only ones that can really make that call. Calling it a bad move can't really be done without further information.
subedii on
+3
AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
EA are also rescinding keys from Amazon for those who complained, accusing them of making a charge back. Amazon will give a new key and refund if this happens to you.
The only way you have a shot of getting out of this insanity is to drop to your knees, put your head down, and beg for your life. Big doe eyes, quivering lips, and you play that sympathy card long and hard and hope people eventually stop picking on you due to how pathetic it is and pray enough people eventually just forget about it with time.
You do not triple down on the stupid with the lying and the deceit.
First rule of getting out of a hole. Stop digging!
Oh posh, they should just get down on their hind claws and do the apology dance.
I don't think there will be, at least not yet. EA is a company that is big enough that they can piss off all sorts of different people and still have people throw money at them.
AthenorBattle Hardened OptimistThe Skies of HiigaraRegistered Userregular
Yeah. While the crown of worst AAA gaming company seems to rotate between Ubisoft, Activision, and EA depending on the latest outrage, EA is pretty much bulletproof. Their bread and butter game, Madden, will never slow down in popularity thanks to the almost trust-like exclusive licensing deal (Seriously, the government should take a look at THAT more than anything). Despite how much people complain, games like Dead Space 3 continue to sell despite all the complaints. SimCity sold well enough on PC-only that it basically crippled EA's ability to support the product. EA's shareholders are not gamers, are not internet savvy, and are the type to listen to Pacther and trust his judgement rather than looking into matters themselves.
The only way EA will improve is if the stockholders feel that there is more worth in enforcing the company core values company-wide. While I'm willing to bet the majority of the development studios follow the creed, I don't believe the management, support, and marketing infrastructures do. That's why we see disconnects like Vsolve having pretty awesome things to say about his chunk of the company, followed by actions that look like EA are mustache-twirling villains. (I'm placing the unfinished-feeling gameplay issues of SimCity on Maxis, and the fact that things were allowed to ship in that state/the response since the news got out on EA. Maxis set out with an amazingly ambitious, awesome idea for a Simcity game, found they couldn't do it, and likely re-engineered things in the middle of development while still keeping in line with their original goals.
HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
Well we're talking about them scooting close to a line that's doing consumers wrong, and we've got protections (well, they're not the best but they exist) for consumers in America. It's really uncomfortable to see.
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AthenorBattle Hardened OptimistThe Skies of HiigaraRegistered Userregular
Well we're talking about them scooting close to a line that's doing consumers wrong, and we've got protections (well, they're not the best but they exist) for consumers in America. It's really uncomfortable to see.
Do government protections extend to a private forum, though? I mean, they are providing methods of support, such as live online chat. I know someone said finding the support number on the website is hard, but isn't the support number published in every "manual" for every game, ever? I though that was part of the 2 pages that people print as an insert anymore, because you need that number for warranty purposes and all games have at least a basic warranty on them. All EA would have to do is point to that, claim that the forum moderation is to prevent spamming of the call centers by malcontent and harassing people who don't own the game, and voila - BBB avoided.
Yeah. While the crown of worst AAA gaming company seems to rotate between Ubisoft, Activision, and EA depending on the latest outrage, EA is pretty much bulletproof. Their bread and butter game, Madden, will never slow down in popularity thanks to the almost trust-like exclusive licensing deal (Seriously, the government should take a look at THAT more than anything). Despite how much people complain, games like Dead Space 3 continue to sell despite all the complaints. SimCity sold well enough on PC-only that it basically crippled EA's ability to support the product. EA's shareholders are not gamers, are not internet savvy, and are the type to listen to Pacther and trust his judgement rather than looking into matters themselves.
The only way EA will improve is if the stockholders feel that there is more worth in enforcing the company core values company-wide. While I'm willing to bet the majority of the development studios follow the creed, I don't believe the management, support, and marketing infrastructures do. That's why we see disconnects like Vsolve having pretty awesome things to say about his chunk of the company, followed by actions that look like EA are mustache-twirling villains. (I'm placing the unfinished-feeling gameplay issues of SimCity on Maxis, and the fact that things were allowed to ship in that state/the response since the news got out on EA. Maxis set out with an amazingly ambitious, awesome idea for a Simcity game, found they couldn't do it, and likely re-engineered things in the middle of development while still keeping in line with their original goals.
Ubisoft were never anywhere near the shittiness of Activision or EA. And at their lowest point did a complete about-face and abandoned their DRM, listened to their customers and put out quality games we all enjoyed.
They've definitely had their troubles, and flirtations with terribleness, but I think they've turned it around and are fairly decent. I mean, they're no Valve or Bethesda, but they're so much bigger with a completely different corporate mentality that I'm surprised they're not far, far worse as a company.
Also, just to note for Americans who don't play real football: say what you will about EAs churning of their annual franchises, but FIFA has been consistently good for years now. Naturally, unofficial titles have improved gameplay in many areas, but as a complete package it's hard to beat. And a sales juggernaut.
I wonder how much worse EA, or one of the other companies, has to become to upset people enough that they put some real effort into organizing some kind of boycott.
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AthenorBattle Hardened OptimistThe Skies of HiigaraRegistered Userregular
Soccer games have competition, from a lot of sources. Competition breeds better product. So it makes sense that FIFA would maintain high standards, where Madden just gets to skate by.
And yeah... Ubisoft isn't nearly as bad as Activision or EA, as they haven't done anything to directly screw over people and make games unplayabl--- Oh, wait, that's right, I was fully planning on buying Rayman: Legends the second it came out (before I knew about Need for Speed: Most Wanted). But now I can't, which is a fair bit worse than anything that is going on with SimCity. Even the developers were in protest over that one.
Well we're talking about them scooting close to a line that's doing consumers wrong, and we've got protections (well, they're not the best but they exist) for consumers in America. It's really uncomfortable to see.
Do government protections extend to a private forum, though? I mean, they are providing methods of support, such as live online chat. I know someone said finding the support number on the website is hard, but isn't the support number published in every "manual" for every game, ever? I though that was part of the 2 pages that people print as an insert anymore, because you need that number for warranty purposes and all games have at least a basic warranty on them. All EA would have to do is point to that, claim that the forum moderation is to prevent spamming of the call centers by malcontent and harassing people who don't own the game, and voila - BBB avoided.
That's why I said they're scooting toward that. The private forum thing is... I mean it's true, but if EA started to curbstomp community members helping each other where the company was failing to do so, a case could be made (but that would be the problem; making the case).
Posts
Yeah, but the point is it didn't mean much back then. Sure your PC was more powerful than your SNES. There were no SNES ports on the PC. The rare one, like Doom you just mentioned, were the rare blue moon. A PC for all intents and purposes was an entirely separate entity.
Today, the default state of games is PS3/360/PC. In fact the situation has reversed, it's rare to see a game on a console that isn't on the PC, and that's usually exclusivity issues. So the specs comparison is a lot more significant now.
But that was way into the SNES's lifespan. We're talking about at launch here. A more apt comparison would be, say, Super Mario World to Commander Keen.
I would expect metascore bonuses would play to the managements benefit more than the rank and file. It seems that most employees at game companies get bonuses (and vacations) around launch dates or when a game goes gold. If its when a game goes gold it would be before launch, when solid unit sale numbers are mercurial guesses and prior to most reviews. Those who work in management may well expect an additional bonus dependent on their product's unit sales or review scores.
Non-management types probably get a flat % of their salary as their bonus that varies by seniority and company.
We're going to arrive at a point where, outside of optimization and some very specific UI and mechanical alterations, porting a game between consoles will be virtually instantaneous and cost almost nothing.
If you are a PC gamer, these are exciting times because the home consoles are, slowly but surely, becoming HTPCs in a shiny box. Time was, everything on the mainboard of these things was a custom job with a very obscure development process.
Especially now that the PS3 and 360 have proved that power parity between consoles benefits everyone because of cross-pollination, if I was a betting man I'd put money on the final spec of the 720 being almost identical to the announced PS4 spec.
Pimp that engine edition.
Well, my PC running Windows and my PC running Linux are exactly the same but it doesn't mean that ports are trivial. I think even more than the off the shelf CPUs/GPUs the very fact that consoles are now powerful enough that devs don't feel the need to program at at a low level and optimize the shit out of everything means that porting will not be so hard.
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
The PS3 already uses OpenGL, so I'd expect the PS4 to do the same. Even more so now that it's on commodity hardware.
Every new day it's like a comedy of errors.
I wonder what the next step for EA is. Maybe their customer support webpage will just get taken down.
Fly to the Vatican, ask NewPope to help. They're good at covering up scandals.
Topical Humour!
This is reaching, what are the profits of the mobile market when you need to R&D and retool your fabrication almost every refresh.
Being a supplier for 10 years is guaranteed income, that's on your balance sheet for 10 years. By there very nature a console box's components are stable meaning a captive market.
NVIDIA is fine selling mid and low range GPU's to Dell, HP, Apple, ACER, Asus and Sony PC laptops. But a ten year commitment to providing midrange GPU is just too much hassle. Yeah right.
"I think I can comment on this because I used to live above the Baby Doll Lounge, a topless bar that was once frequented by bikers in lower Manhattan."
Nah, it's rated E10+. They wouldn't be interested.
That phone thing, if true, is pretty ridiculous. I mean hiding Electronic Arts (EA) Technical Support number - 866-543-5435 - in their forum shows a particular level of desperation. Maybe they need to do a Rock Band staring Barbra Streisand.
No gamer will ever understand the absolute truth of every single part of your post, which is a shame.
You're suggesting a business has the right to deny customers a means of contacting said company? Because the BBB and other federal agencies will have something to say about that.
The overall worst mistake EA could make is to let this situation become so ridiculous in terms of complaints and not answering them is to let this whole mess come to the attention of federal agencies. If the complaints from the Simcity debacle are so bad that EA can't even handle the load and has to basically hide its support from people having problems, that's getting into territory where it's millions of pissed-off citizens instead of just a bunch of overreacting gamers. EA could very well have stepped over the line here and caused themselves a lot more trouble than just unhappy customers who can't really do squat.
For EA, getting clear of this situation is basically a matter of cutting corners and treating customers like shit to make as much profit as possible while still keeping the mess low-key enough to not be considered as breaking the law. Granted, it's small-time stuff in the grand scale of things, but EA's general scumminess here is with something that's making hundreds of millions of dollars, which is something the government would definitely be interested in.
3DS Friend Code: 2165-6448-8348 www.Twitch.TV/cooljammer00
Battle.Net: JohnDarc#1203 Origin/UPlay: CoolJammer00
Holy shit what.
What's a word for when something goes beyond being farcical?
You do not triple down on the stupid with the lying and the deceit.
First rule of getting out of a hole. Stop digging!
3DS Friend Code: 2165-6448-8348 www.Twitch.TV/cooljammer00
Battle.Net: JohnDarc#1203 Origin/UPlay: CoolJammer00
I first noticed this when @jdarksun posted about his game disappearing from Origin in the Sim City thread, where he was able to get a refund and a new code out of it. I wondered if anyone else was having the same experience and then I found this thread on reddit: Warning: Origin disabled my legitimate sim city key.
I will say I was inaccurate the first time, it doesn't appear you had to have made any complaint about the game to EA, it seems to just be some random problem occurring to Amazon customers. The result is always a happy one though: New game key and a full refund. So nobody gets screwed here, it's just another example of how utterly bizzare and stupid this situation has become.
At this point though, depending on how widespread this is, you could view EA as being some kind of Scooby Doo level villain. Unmasked and caught out by the inquisitive gaming public, they are shaking their fists declaring "I would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for you damned meddling servers and your little modders too!"
I am not even sure if this being just any random potential amazon customer rather than those who specifically complained makes the situation better or worse.
Haha EA is so bad I bet EA stands for Electronic Arts considering how awful they're turning out.
wait what
Do we have an actual source for this?
EDIT: @Bastable: Like I said, we don't know what terms Sony was offering. And given that Nvidia was supplying them for the last seven years, at the very least they're going to have a good idea of what they want for the next gen, and what did and did not work out for them last time as a result. Steady profits doesn't mean much if you're either getting a pittance or aren't making as much as you could be, and Nvidia are the only ones that can really make that call. Calling it a bad move can't really be done without further information.
Read like, five posts down :P
Even if it's in small numbers, that genuinely is new levels of stupid.
Oh posh, they should just get down on their hind claws and do the apology dance.
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The only way EA will improve is if the stockholders feel that there is more worth in enforcing the company core values company-wide. While I'm willing to bet the majority of the development studios follow the creed, I don't believe the management, support, and marketing infrastructures do. That's why we see disconnects like Vsolve having pretty awesome things to say about his chunk of the company, followed by actions that look like EA are mustache-twirling villains. (I'm placing the unfinished-feeling gameplay issues of SimCity on Maxis, and the fact that things were allowed to ship in that state/the response since the news got out on EA. Maxis set out with an amazingly ambitious, awesome idea for a Simcity game, found they couldn't do it, and likely re-engineered things in the middle of development while still keeping in line with their original goals.
Do government protections extend to a private forum, though? I mean, they are providing methods of support, such as live online chat. I know someone said finding the support number on the website is hard, but isn't the support number published in every "manual" for every game, ever? I though that was part of the 2 pages that people print as an insert anymore, because you need that number for warranty purposes and all games have at least a basic warranty on them. All EA would have to do is point to that, claim that the forum moderation is to prevent spamming of the call centers by malcontent and harassing people who don't own the game, and voila - BBB avoided.
Ubisoft were never anywhere near the shittiness of Activision or EA. And at their lowest point did a complete about-face and abandoned their DRM, listened to their customers and put out quality games we all enjoyed.
They've definitely had their troubles, and flirtations with terribleness, but I think they've turned it around and are fairly decent. I mean, they're no Valve or Bethesda, but they're so much bigger with a completely different corporate mentality that I'm surprised they're not far, far worse as a company.
Also, just to note for Americans who don't play real football: say what you will about EAs churning of their annual franchises, but FIFA has been consistently good for years now. Naturally, unofficial titles have improved gameplay in many areas, but as a complete package it's hard to beat. And a sales juggernaut.
And yeah... Ubisoft isn't nearly as bad as Activision or EA, as they haven't done anything to directly screw over people and make games unplayabl--- Oh, wait, that's right, I was fully planning on buying Rayman: Legends the second it came out (before I knew about Need for Speed: Most Wanted). But now I can't, which is a fair bit worse than anything that is going on with SimCity. Even the developers were in protest over that one.
That's why I said they're scooting toward that. The private forum thing is... I mean it's true, but if EA started to curbstomp community members helping each other where the company was failing to do so, a case could be made (but that would be the problem; making the case).