PeteZahutt

The problem with them giving out a high priced game are people like me. I admit I haven't played any PC games in like 10+ years except for FFXI. Everything I play anymore is on consoles because I dont keep my PC up to gamer specs.

However I have downloaded steam finally when TF2 went free. I downloaded it but haven't played it yet. I also grabbed Portal last week because it was free. Some day I might play it. I will likely sign up for GOG simply to download this free game.

I admit to being a freeloader when it comes to PC games simply because I have more than enough games on my console to satisfy all my gaming needs. I dont pirate games but I do take advantage of free ones. And I am sure there are a lot more people like me too. So who knows how much GOg would spend on bandwidth and other related costs for people like me. Better they give away a smaller game that is older and perhaps less desirable than a more recent game that would use a lot more bandwidth and overhead.

I just played the demo that has just been released on Xbox live. I was pretty impressed. Not so much with the fighter jet portion of it since I don't think it is as good as my favorite AC4. But I was pleasantly surprised by the helicopter portion of the demo. I thought it would be the less interesting of the two modes but I enjoyed that more than the fighter jet mission. It was just different in a good way.

Definitely check out the demo if you're interested in the game. Probably not a $60 pickup for me, especially with all the other games coming out this fall. But it gets to the $40 mark.

@PatientJ

The customer is getting screwed because the developer has already been paid for the use of that game online. In the ideal situation, the publisher would like for someone to buy a game, play for a couple of days at most, then put it on the shelf and let it collect dust so that they don't have to pay anything else for bandwidth and server maintenance. I am sure they loathe people who buy a game and continue to play it several months after launch (just like credit card companies hate people who pay off their statements each month).

There is absolutely no difference in what the company pays out for someone like me who buys something new and continues to play it for a year after release than someone else who plays for 3 months, sells it to someone else, who then plays for 9 months after that.

I always buy everything new as long as I can because of other reasons than the online pass. But I rarely buy any game at full price because I think that $60 is too much. I still feel that the online pass program is a bunch of b.s. to the gaming community.

I know that the big game publishers have always been primarily out for money. But at least in the past they put on a somewhat believeable facade that they also cared about the gamers. Now, with online pass and the piss-poor support most games get after release (EA and DICE being the worst of them all), there is no denying that they care nothing for their consumers except for the money in their wallets.

@Slomoshun

BF is vastly superior to CoD - out of the box.

But when it comes down to it, both Infinity Ward and Treyarch are miles above DICE for game support. With Black Ops, Treyarch has put out 3 map packs for their game and like 11 title updates to fix issues (and add the new packs). The 4th pack is really even more of a money grab than their previous overpriced map packs. There really isn't anything new added except for 1 zombie level. The rest was done back when the game launched. But they have continually supported their game until MW3 comes out.

DICE's post-launch support is horrible. DICE pushes out a game and immediately moves on to the next one. They have a skeleton crew which rearranges some maps and then calls it a "map pack" when they push out old maps for new modes. And then they finally release unseen maps for the game 9 months later (which also aren't really new either since they are remakes of BC1 maps and single-player game levels). Not to mention their overloaded servers which constantly lag and they take no action to fix.

With CoD you get a crap game with bad netcode but pretty decent post-launch support up to about a year when the next iteration comes out. With BF you get a really good game with bad netcode and bad server structure as well as minuscule support starting directly after launch.

So either way we as gamers are on the losing end of that stick.

@Dcmac

Back when the game first came out starting in April until a fix in early June 2010 there was horrible rubberbanding lag on the PS3 in North America. They fixed that, but even after the rubberbanding was gone the game still showed major signs of lag. Everytime I have tried to play the game in the past few months it just hasn't been a fun experience for me. And that's with a 30 Mb/2.5 Mb internet connection. From the looks of the EA forums as well, many people experience the same problems and sounds like it has gotten worse, not better:

http://forums.electronicarts.co.uk/battlefield-bad-company-2-ng/1131612-console-lag.html

The last page (page 55 as of now) has a great youtube video which shows similar lag that I experience when playing the game on our consoles.

I really haven't noticed a lot of lag in BF1943, but there has been absolutely no post-launch support for it. Mics on the PS3 still suck and there hasn't been one patch or addition to it at all. BC1 has some noticeable lag, but they didn't fully support that game either with arty glitching still in the game today.

And not only does BC2 have lag problems but DICE put out 2 measly patches for the game since its release and they only did that because they added new for-sale content and then tacked on some new maps in the process. The first patch was June 7th which added Onslaught Mode plus some old maps for different modes. The first actual new maps we got were with the November 23rd update (nearly 9 months after release) which also had the Vietnam update with it. So DICE wasn't doing us any favors by releasing either of these patches, it was another cash grab.

DICE puts out great games. But their post-launch support for all of their console games is horrid. I don't have high expectations for BF3 on consoles other than the fact that it will look awesome and would play spectacularly great on a lan environment. I won't be preordering BF3, but I will be picking it up the first time it goes on sale for $40 or less because that's where I feel I will get my money's worth from it due to the frustration DICE will put me through. DICE just simply doesn't deserve a full $60 for this game based on their past track record.

This game is going to be awesome... offline. If only we didn't have to deal with EAs over-worked, under powered servers on both the PS3 and Xbox which leads to horrible lag online. It happened on All the other BF console games, it will likely happen again.

If you look at the new 15th anniversary RE collection that they announced earlier today it has the two games in a single package on the far left of the picture. So there's probably a chance they will release it as a stand alone collection on disc outside of the xbl/psn store too.

That's a pretty good selection for that cheap. But with all the free iphone games that I have in backlog ad the fact that theres a rarely a time that playing on my phone is a top priority, I'll pass on these. Offer them free for a day and I'll grab it.

But I have never and don't expect to ever spend any money on iPhone games simply because even at 99 cents I don't think I'll ever get my money out of it.

Hell my Wii doesn't even play Wii games as I haven't turned it on in probably two years since House of the Dead Overkill came out. Not like I'm going to miss the GC backwards compatibility. If I want to play GC games I'll do the same thing I do with all my old consoles, plug in my original console and play it with the hardware that was meant to run it.

There are so many different reasons someone would want to have a game installed on a fat32 drive regardless of the age of it. It is still a useful drive format even today.

And no matter how "cheap" you guys think drives are out there, even if it were only $10 there are some people that still couldn't afford to buy it just to play a game. Yes then the argument could be made that they shouldn't even be buying the game in the first place. But why would a company purposefully cut out a group of people who would be interested in buying their game, even if it is a small amount of people, when all they would have had to do was split up one file. Seems like a dumb decision to me.