Looks like they are just taking everything we already get and charging us/charging less for it.
- Discounts on all DLC for "participating" EA Sports console titles. Considering a vast majority of their current DLC for sports games is just bullshit pay to cheat unlock codes and courses that were in previous games for free, I don't give a fuck about this. Plus they put participating in there... any discounts likely won't apply to the popular sports titles. They can fill this promise by offering you cheaper cheat code DLC in NHL 12 and a new ball skin in FIFA. Fuck EA.
- Downloadable versions of "participating" titles before release. They sure aren't going to be giving us Madden before release date. And even if they did, is it worth it? Fuck EA.
- Exclusive membership recognition badge. Great, who doesn't want a scarlet letter on their profile? "Look at me! I'm EA's bitch!" Didn't they already try this with the hardcore Madden subscription or whatever? Where you had to pay to play ranked All-Madden games but got your name in a cool font? Fuck EA.
- Transfer paid content from past titles into future participating titles. Well this actually is a little shocking. So instead of getting a lot less content out of the box because EA cut a lot of it out to sell as DLC, you can instead buy the DLC, but then never have to buy it again? Tiger Woods comes to mind. IIRC the full game costs over $100 to buy and almost all of the DLC courses were in past games this generation for free. Fuck EA.
- Free extension of EA Sports into web and PC. Uh.. we already have this. We are forced to sign up for your goddamn shitty website accounts for virtually any one of your games. And linking them rarely works so people who play a lot of your games probably have 4-5 EA accounts. What this says to me is that the web features we used to get free like using the PC for Madden/NCAA franchises, will now require a subscription. Fucking stupid. But just as was the case in Madden 10 and Madden 11, someone will come out with something that fucking decimates what Tiburon and their huge staff and budget can do. I believe in Madden 10 someone from here created a franchise stat script. And in Madden 11 we have the league manager site. Fuck EA.
- Free DLC for participating titles. Have they ever released sports DLC that is worth a shit anyway? And you're paying a subscription so it's not "free" anyway. Fuck EA.
And people gripe about Activision. The dumbest part about all of this is they claim to want to create a unified, persistent social profile. WE HAVE THIS ALREADY. They are called our Live tags and our PSN usernames.