I don’t think it should come as any surprise that I’d only break “radio silence” on the site to bitch…

But yeah, that’s what’s about to happen. Call it Fanboi rage or something.

Last night, my long wait for Mass Effect 3 finally came to an end. I’ve spent the last month or so playing and re-playing the ME3 demo and wrangled three friends into getting online and playing the multiplayer portion of the demo with me. I went back and played ME and ME2 just to try to get in a fix while I waited.

I’m not against waiting. I actually like when the anticipation builds to a fever pitch and most of the best things in life are worth waiting for. Maybe not all of them but most of them.

What does set my Rage Level to 11, however, is arriving to pick up my game, which, I might note, has been paid for in full since the first day the game was available for pre-order, and discovering there is already DLC being sold the night of the launch.

I have no idea what Electronic Arts was thinking. We’re not talking about some Day One patch that has to be downloaded before I can play but a DLC package that requires me to pay extra to have all of the content on the night of its launch. PAID DLC ON DAY ONE. Let that sink in for a second.

This is like going to the movies and shelling out the cash for your tickets, sitting through a movie you’ve been waiting to see, only to have the lights come on before the climatic ending, and being told that to see the end of the movie, it will be an extra five bucks.

Dirty pool, EA.

It gets better. A little research and Crutchboy discovers that the DLC we’re shelling out an extra $10 for is actually the extra content available with the Collector’s Edition. So now you’ve not just slapped the general gaming populace in the face by providing paid DLC on launch but you’ve also pretty much invalidated the extra content the Collector’s Edition folks were looking forward to enjoying while the rest of us waited for the day when the DLC was made available.

Sure, those who shelled out the extra cash for the CE probably get some physical goodies. Though based on my own lackluster experience with the CE of SWTOR, I can’t say the extra 20 bucks was worth an ME coffee mug or whatever EA packaged into the game since you’ve gone and made the extra content, the actual meat of what you were pitching to those interested in the Collector’s Edition, available to any poor schmuck who feels obligated to give you an extra ten bucks on launch day to make sure they’re not missing out on anything.

This is the end of “us”, EA. I’ve shelled out money for your titles and I’ve been a loyal fan of some of your games for years. You disappointed me when I found my last purchase of Madden to be the version I got the year before with an updated roster and a new coat of paint. You disappointed me when you started tying all of your in-game content to pre-orders of titles I had no interest in or on playing demos of games I really didn’t care to play.

You’ve made some good decisions in the past few years, namely the purchase of BioWare and all of the intellectual property that entailed, but you’ve made some glaring mistakes that I’m finding harder and harder to ignore. Offering me paid DLC on the night of the launch of one of the most anticipated titles on my very short list is the final straw.

You’re not getting any more money from me. Oh, I’ll continue to play the titles I’ve already purchased but I won’t be purchasing any new games or any further DLC from you. I won’t be pre-ordering any more games, giving you the excuse to artificially inflate your sales numbers by counting pre-orders as full sales in the present fiscal quarter.

More importantly to me, though I doubt you’ll notice, will be my silence in regards to any of your new titles. I won’t talk about them, write about them, or recommend them to friends.

And sadly, that means I won’t be purchasing anything else your genius step-child, BioWare, produces in the future because you’ve taken a brilliant product line and applied your ever shadier business model to it.

Gritskrieg – End of Line

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 6th, 2012 at 1:35 pm and is filed under Gamer News, Gritskrieg, THIS WEEKS WTF!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.