Is EA drunk or just insane ? "EA's 'Project $10'

No.

DA:O and Mass Effect 2 comes with DLC that is free-to-download, but only if you bought the game. This to further discourage pirates, but mostly for this: second-hand users don't get said DLC for free, they have to pay for it.

I don't see any direct way in which this is applied beyond that. But it does suck a bit, the DA:O Golem DLC is a good chunk of the game, honestly.

And you guys are talking as if it's not already in place. Newsflash: it is. EA is already doing this.

As for why? If only it was pure greed. It's more a consequence of the wasteful, horrible badly way the gaming industry is run. The core of the gaming industry is bankrupt, and it needs schemes like DLC or this 10-bucks-from-2nd-hand to keep it propped up. If game companies weren't ripping off gamers like that, the industry would collapse. Which I still really hope happens, it needs to collapse to get rid of this current, untenable industrial model.

 

If only. The gaming industry is booming in growth numbers, and arrogant in its "recession proof!" nonsense. But all this does is hide the fact that piracy blocked PC as a growth platform (and DD is currently still too marginal for most companies), while the production cost and manufacturer take skews the sales margin for consoles so badly that a game needs to sell at least a million to be profitable.

Don't get me wrong, some companies are thriving, like Rockstar, or Bethesda, or Blizzard. But if you followed gaming news closely the last year or two, you'll see game cancellation upon game cancellation, mass layoffs and studios closing. I'm impressed they managed to dodge total collapse and this is mostly due to expanding digital sales, especially DLCs, which with much lower production costs have much higher profit margins. They might have dodged the bullet and be able to ride out the crisis, which would suck for us as consumers because their skewed profit margin means they'd have to continue ripping us off.

 

It's funny how little awareness the constant stream of bad news seems to get. Just glancing at the last few weeks we have CodeMasters downsizing and SouthPeak in serious trouble. There's a storyline like this every week, really, for the past year if not past couple of years. Are we honestly supposed to pretend everything's fine?

Reminds me of the story in La Haine; Heard about the guy who fell off a skyscraper? On his way down past each floor, he kept saying to reassure himself: So far so good... so far so good... so far so good. How you fall doesn't matter. It's how you land!

That's what usually happens, but it depends on the capabilties. Thing is, if a really big company like EA or Take Two collapses fast, there's no way anyone can fill the void, and the entire industry goes, no one profits there, including said doing-well companies. I don't think the big 'uns are close to collapse.

The indie industry has never been as big as it is now. It's thriving.

 

The blog I used to use died, sadly. And I only really follow indie RPGs, so that sticks me with GameBanshee (I'm doing a preview of two indie titles once I round up my BioShock 2 review), RPGWatch, RPGCodex and - top of the game - Tales of the Rampant Coyote.

One excellent place for PC indies - though not for the console Live/handheld indie scene - is Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

If nothing else, it has a newsbit on upcoming official-free-to-play-MMO-of-NMA-after-FOnline World of Tanks.

 

It seems half the people in this thread are assuming EA will demand $10 for every used copy. That's not how it works, they're doing this through release-day DLCs tied to an account.