Do you really think any corporation, especially EA, deserves brand loyalty? Isn't this the same company that has been caught not paying employees for overtime and been listed as one of the worst places to work in America year after year? Yeah, it makes total sense to blindly purchase their games without question especially when a broken entry in the Battlefield franchise was recently released. These corporations don't care about you, just your wallet, so I find it odd that people are willing to lay down and take whatever they throw at their feet. EA doesn't deserve my trust and neither does Activision with all the shenanigans they both pull.
Again, I don't think EA deserves my trust, which is why I'm not preordering...but I can understand that the value proposition here is good enough for customers to put down money.
EA has a lot of shitty business practices but they have added more consumer-friendly practices recently, as well. Customers know this. The "you must have this much goodwill for me to trust you" line is arbitrary, by its nature, and for some customers, its lower because they have hundreds, if not thousands, of hours dumped into these games, and all their friends play them.
For you, the line was drawn a while ago. For me, the line was drawn last year. For others, they still have enough fun with the games to look past the rest. I don't feel it's right for me to condemn them for that. I sold Destiny because Bungie/Activision was instituting some straight up shitty DLC practices that, at times, made the game worse for non-DLC players by actively taking things away. That is offensive to me.
And, for the record, I do have companies (or corporations, if you will) that I am more loyal to because of past experiences with their products or services. There is nothing wrong with that. It doesn't make me blind to quality issues, nor make me less critical.
Every retailer you go to tries to force pre-order crap on you so don't give me the 'every consumer has done their research' argument because for every neogaf member that reads up on games, there's 10 soccer moms being exploited by what I personally see as shady business practices. DLC in itself isn't bad, however, I have a HUGE problem with announcing content before the game launches which essentially tells the consumer they need to pay $100+ for the full experience. I also wouldn't be surprised if most, if not all, of this planned DLC could be fit on the disc and shipped out at launch but is instead being held back to increase sales due to rising development costs. You can call me paranoid/delusional, I don't really care.
I still fundamentally disagree on this "full experience/game" narrative. With the exception of the Day 1 DLC packs, I don't see how anyone can argue that Premium is content that should have been in the full game, especially when it more than doubles the amount of certain content pieces. Announcing it ahead of time is no different, for me, than announcing it closer to the actual release IF no content was held back and repurposed as DLC.
