sublimit
Banned
There's only so much you can do with a customer who buys a game.
And I mean buying a game in the traditional sense, where you go to a store, pick up a physical product, and can play that product on your hardware forever and ever, amen. Sony has found success with "giving away" games every month for subscription of PlayStation Plus, and Microsoft is now catching up and starting to up the quality of the games being offered. But EA is taking things a step forward and launching a subscription-based service for the Xbox One.
But let's be clear, this is a shift of power from the buyer to EA. You'll lose access to content if your subscription lapses, just like the free-game initiatives from Sony and Microsoft that are designed to keep you paying month after month, year after year. EA has an easy way of tracking your spending habits and buying habits, and could begin to offer you tailored content to match your playing patterns.
The importance of having this sort of service within Xbox Live can't be understated, and it locks you into EA's platforms and products in a way the company couldn't before. It could be a good deal for customers, but it's definitely a good deal for EA. It's also another step away from true game ownership.
What EA is offering in this case is ephemeral, just like the games we buy digitally through Sony and Microsoft and install directly on our hard drives. One day the servers will go down, and the games will be gone. The hardware will die. The companies will stop supporting these services and they'll cease to host games. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. The digital coupons for content and games are a great deal for this generation, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking we're buying anything lasting.
We may complain about this in the comments, but the reality of the situation is that this is the future we've built.We support this new age of limited ownership, of products that exist at the pleasure of the publishers and developers. We spend money on games and services, we prop up the minimum viable products that we like and support their ongoing development.
The stacks of NES games that I can still put in my system to play, the PlayStation One games that still work on my first-generation PlayStation 2, these are all relics for a time that has passed. We're not buying anymore, and EA is showing us the next step towards our rented future. This future comes with benefits, and we may save some money, but let's also understand what we're giving up, and why.
This is the way forward; the way of the future. Your kids won't mind that they don't own their games, they won't know any other reality. The rest of us will worry about what it all means, as we pay for the next piece of content that will blow away like sand the moment the Xbox Two is released, or will fade from memory as we hook up our PlayStation Fives.
http://www.polygon.com/2014/7/29/5948829/ea-access-owning-games
Pretty good opinion piece (IMO) and i agree with all the points he makes.Also another thing that he didn't mentioned is that if EA's experiment becomes successful and more companies follow their example,it will be much easier for MS or Sony in the future to lock you in a new DRM console.