SotW (7/30-8/5) Origin Access Premier, Botching Spyro, and Single Player not really dead

So it's been a while since I last posted one of these, but with a couple of vacations in, and a little bit of time off to focus up on projects, I'm ready to get back into it. First off, I just want to say that I held off publishing this til today because of a story that came out late last night that I'll talk about at the end of this. So let's get started?

So first off, we have a BS story, not that it IS BS, but that the fact that it is actually happening is BS. So anyone that has Origins Access, or cares about getting it, recently found that there are some small tweaks that are coming that kind of suck. Origins Premier was shown off, as well as talked pretty heavily about in EA's conference during E3. Now EA doesn't have many "good" practices about it anymore, but every once in a while, they show that they kind of get it, even if it doesn't last. One of those things, was when Origins would open the vault, and give people a free game on the house. A highly consumer friendly practice that gave out roughly 30 games over the last 4 years or so, is just now coming to an end with Premier being brought out. With Premier, you pay $15 a month, you get to play any game EA has in it's library for free, even brand new games the day they are released, but you don't own them. You give up Origins Access, you no longer can play. They still have the basic version, that for $5 a month, you get to play a handful of hours on any title, sort of a "trial" per say. Even if it wasn't consistent, or a lot of the games were older like Jade Empire, it still was one of the most consumer friendly practices that EA was apart of. I'm not sure if it's because of the recent release of Premier, having done it's job to bring in enough people, or if just wasn't popular at all, it's still disheartening to see them just scrap it altogether.

Next we have an even more BS story that hurt me to my core. Activision potentially botching the release of Spyro: Reignited Trilogy. The game is still set to release, but apparently according to new info release this week, the 2nd and 3rd games of the trilogy aren't even in on the disc. Or at least not completely, needing major space downloaded on someone's hard drive. Now with most, Physical copies are still a thing, and the reason for is the limited space on someone's hard drive, seeing as the most space you can find on a PS4 or Xbox One is 2TB's total. Of course it says all of this, right on their website. So go figure. This flies in the face of those who want to take up the least amount of space they can. Now I know I'm not a game dev, but it can't be impossible to put all three games on the disc. Either Activision doesn't want to, or Activision doesn't want to push back the release to give the team working on it the time they need to put it on. Which is without a doubt, disappointing. I'm still excited for Spyro, seeing as I got extra space via external hard drives I picked up a while ago, but I feel this is still a blemish on a game that still hasn't even be released(or re-released) yet. It's a bad precedent, plain and simple.

So of course, with every weekly story, it can't be complete without talking about Fortnite. I usually don't talk too much about Fortnite if I can help it, seeing as it's so overdone as it is right now. However, I had to talk about a couple of things, first off, apparently parents are dropping down cash, to have their 12, 13, and 14 year old kids, tutored in Fortnite. Some have gone on to saying that there is a lot of pressure at school to be good at Fortnite(Jesus) and so some parents have been dropping down anywhere between $10-20 an hour to have their kids not only level up, but win games. So if you're really good at Fortnite, maybe try and get paid for it, huh?

In good news though, Playground Games, a UK developer who is backed by Microsoft, just added a bunch of new people from studios like Bioware, Rocksteady, and EA Motive to help out with their Official/Unofficial RPG Fable game. When it was announced that Playground would work on the new Fable game, they opened a brand new studio up and filled it with about 200 people at the start. Hiring people from all kinds of studio backgrounds, but mostly ones centered in either open world, or in RPG, sometimes both. Even hiring people from Ninja Theory and Guerrilla Games too, the studio is still trying to get the team together for what was announced by a source that hit up Eurogamer earlier in the year as to be a big budget Fable game. This is good news as the UK got 200 more jobs in game development, which is great for so many great UK devs looking for work, or even looking for somewhere pretty central. It's also good news, because it feels like Microsoft might be taking it serious with their "big budget" games as they focused most of this console cycle on just making the consoles, but not the games. Now to make sure it's out there, there is no "official word" that this IS Fable, but the rumor, and the knowledge we have, it seems like it is, as Microsoft kept the rights to Fable, and you don't usually do that if you don't plan on using it, right?

Another good story was the news about God of War, and it's success it had. Back in 2008, we were told Single Player games were on the way out. 10 fucking years, and think of all the games that were amazing Single Player games. They still make money, and a lot of it, it just isn't "all of it". God of War, a Single Player game that was released in April, that I still have yet to finish, but now that I have time I will right away, has made $131 million in digital sales, alone. The game in it's first month sold 5 million copies in stores, so it's safe to say that between this, and the critics all screaming it's successes, that it itself, is a success. GoW is now the fastest selling PS game of all time. One of the most successful games in PS history, so say that Sony is "pleased" is a bit underrated, seeing as it "exceeded expectations" according to Sony itself. It's funny hearing these things, because so many publishers have been spewing for, well nearly 10 years now, from Ubisoft to EA that the "standard" Single Player game is dead, and trying everything and anything to make US, the customers believe that. Going onto other websites to talk about how the SP experience is "dying out" yet this shows that when you don't stuff a game full of MT, "Online experiences", and other BS, people will still buy quite a bit of your product. Yeah, you might not make a billion in sales like Fifa, but you should be able to sleep at night, and make something truly memorable in the process.

Back to the bad, earlier this week a Fifa player, who was simply named "Michael" as he didn't want others to know his real identity, sat down with Eurogamer and had a talk with them about how he had spent $10,000 in card packs over 2 years in Fifa's UT. Using the GDPR, something that the EU is to thank as they had a sweeping vote to get it implemented after the whole Facebook debacle, asked EA to give him his data on how much he had spent in UT, or Ultimate Team for those that don't play. The idea was put into practice with back with Fifa 09, and the idea was to take players from all around the leagues, as well as rookies, and retired players, and allow you to play with them using cards from card packs to unlock. A way for you to have the "Ultimate Team". Like if you played Football, and you wanted Ray Lewis with Mean Joe Greene, you could do that if you pulled both players from packs. Or with Basketball you could have Jordan playing with Lebron James. So, Michael asked EA to give his info, and within 30 days, EA did so, by dumping him with 2 PDF's with over a 100 pages of stuff to go through, even so much as to give him his calls he has had over the years with EA customer service. Now, Michael admits he was in his words "gobsmacked" to see that he had spent so much over 2 years, it turned out, that when you add in what he spent in Fifa 17, the number raises to $16k. Now Michael admits that lucky for him, him and his fiancée are in a good enough financial position that it didn't hurt them, which was probably why it went unnoticed. However, he did go on the record for saying he felt bad for the people that are less fortunate that become addicted to these card packs. Also, he called out EA for their ability to tell him how much he spent on each pack, but not what he got, as well as the fact that they actually kept the audio files of calls he had made for nearly 2 years.

Of course EA gave a robot answer saying they "had to withhold certain data" as it "could impact that security and integrity of their EA products and services". What a load of shit. Which Michael agrees, saying that "To me, this is EA using loopholes to avoid providing full disclosure to their customers..." to me, this is the biggest reason why we need to continue to talk about lootboxes, and what they really do, exploit the consumer.

The well done story was done by Wesley here -> https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-07-23-fifa-player-uses-gdpr-to-find-out-everything-ea-has-on-him-realises-hes-spent-over-usd10-000-in-two-years-on-ultimate-team

Finally on a very last note, Gamespot had an article come out late last night right before I published this that I found...odd. EA made a comment on Fortnite being "good for brand". CEO Andrew Wilson had said that Fortnite was good, because it would "Expand the audience" while CFO Blake Jorgensen said that it was bad "because there are only so many hours to play games". Now, this worries me for a lot of reasons, but also intrigues me too. The stories right above is always why it will worry me, and it should worry you, but the fact that they talked about a free to play game that they have no hand in, and saying it's "good for business" is...odd.

"Without a doubt, [Fortnite has] been a phenomenon in the industry, and I'm sure it's taken up people's time. We have a hard time pointing to exactly where that's impacted our business, but I am sure it is taking up people's time across the industry," Jorgensen said. "But we also know that, that means more and more people are brought in to play games and will enjoy games in the future, in particular, first-person shooter games down the road." They also talked about maybe doing their own "Free to play BR game" to which I say, of course you will. One thing everyone should know by now is, it's hard to find originality in the gaming world, when too many CEO's are looking at dollar signs and board meetings.

Link to the Gamespot story here -> https://www.gamespot.com/articles/fortnite-is-good-for-gaming-ea-says/1100-6460954/ So that will do it for me, what did you think of the stories from this week, is there anything that caught your eye, you want to discuss, or that maybe I missed? Let me know, and as always, have fun and stay safe people.