The difference from now to then is, that games offer endless online service and these also needs neverending development, bug fixing and people even demand new content. These costs are not simply covered by retail price.
It's not that I disagree with you, but some payment models are justified and comprehensible. On the other site, its pretty obvious that especially companies like EA make use of that and try to gate it's users behind those walls on purpose to get big buck for small bang.
For me, personally, I will never buy a game if it has some connection to EA ever. These guys are toxic and just hurt the industry. But people buy and EA delivers. And obviously people don't learn, EA got so much shit from the internet community and people still don't stop buying there games, which, for me, is incomprehensible.
> The difference from now to then is, that games offer endless online service and these also needs neverending development, bug fixing and people even demand new content. These costs are not simply covered by retail price.
It's a problem they created on purpose, so they shouldn't get to use it as a justification for their practices. It's not that players need "endless online service"[0] that needs "neverending development, bug fixing"[1]. It's that the companies figured out doing it this way gives them access to much more money, so they created the problem and used their marketing budgets to make it a new normal.
> but some payment models are justified and comprehensible
Yeah, but some feel like they're justified by self-serving arguments, in a case of creating a problem to justify getting paid for solving it.
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[0] - Which actually isn't endless, but works just for couple years until the next game in the franchise is made, or the studio gets bored, or bought out, or...
[1] - Tangential, but I still don't buy the whole "bit rot" thing as a natural phenomenon. I'm starting to believe that our industry has accidentally become good at making everything so fragile that it justifies endless work just to keep things running.
It's not that I disagree with you, but some payment models are justified and comprehensible. On the other site, its pretty obvious that especially companies like EA make use of that and try to gate it's users behind those walls on purpose to get big buck for small bang.
For me, personally, I will never buy a game if it has some connection to EA ever. These guys are toxic and just hurt the industry. But people buy and EA delivers. And obviously people don't learn, EA got so much shit from the internet community and people still don't stop buying there games, which, for me, is incomprehensible.