Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Lol no ty kthxbai

Apparently The Old Republic is going to only be available through EA's equivalent of Steam:

"We still don’t know exactly when SWTOR will launch or what the payment model will be, but we do now know that it will be exclusive to EA’s newly-revealed Steam/GoG rival Origin."

Steam is practically a part of my operating system. It is always on. It's earnt its place by being

a) Timely
b) Offering (mostly) much cheaper prices than retail
c) Coming from a popular, do-no evil company

GoG is not the same, but there is zero DRM on the games I buy. So I don't have to run an extra program. That's fine.

EA's new Steam clone is the opposite of these things to me. It is several years late, offers prices equivalent to what you'd pay in the store even though they didn't have to pay for any boxing/shipping etc, and EA are evil. On top of that, if I start pandering to this, I'm going to end up needing a clone client from every single publisher that wants to get in on the action.

Fair enough if they want to try and promote their new client, but to not make it available through the competition? Lol. There is no way I'm going to install that shite on my hard drive. I was on the fence about The Old Republic. I mean on the one hand it's a new Star Wars game, and therefore I consider it my nerd duty to play it. But on the other hand, everything I've seen and read about the game (CG trailers aside) looks awful. I was going to suck it up and try it out anyway, but now I won't need to put myself through the pain - thanks EA!

Oh and as a bonus, Keen has the opposite opinion, which means that I must be right.

1 comment:

Sente said...

Steam unfortunately often use 1 USD = 1 Euro in conversion rate for the ir games, which means that some games are not particularly cheap, especially when some stores use a more accurate conversion when setting their prices.

Other than that I really like Steam also and completely agree with your last sentence :)