You do realize that’s the case for every form of IP, right?
“Man, I want to read the new Brandon Sanderson book, and eat food this month. But the publisher is asking $4,000 for a copy!! What theft!! I’m going to have to subsist on chewing dirt for the next few months!”
Or, sane response:
“Well, that price is ludicrous. I guess I’ll read other books” (and in this case, play other football games)
While on a side I agree with you, on the other I see everytime people complaining about subscription fatigue and they never, ever would pay a recurring amount for a game.
I figured savvy sports fans would find a good simulation game without the license and just mod in the updated rosters, but that never seemed to happen.
If you're paying for a new version every year, is all that different than paying for a service? At the very least, with the yearly release model, you can simply decide not to pay for a year and keep playing the old one.
A lot of people are only passingly interested in video games. For people that just want to sit down and play something having to learn about the game and how it's played is work, not entertainment. I can see how someone who only games maybe once a week could have some real fun playing a sports game. It's very easy to pick up because they already know the rules. I don't agree personally, for me games are the most fun when I'm interacting with a new mechanic, but I am also willing to grind for hours optimizing and learning to push the game to its limits. If you don't have the time for all that, but you still want to game, sports games are a perfect entry point.
Not even I can come up with a justification for the pricing though.
You, and everyone else, should be making enough money right now that a $70 price tag isn't a problem.
Wage stagnation makes price increases seem worse than than they should be. Truth is we should all be making enough that a few bucks increase in the price of Netflix or YouTube shouldn't be something we struggle with.
So by all means, pile it on at EA, but save some of it for your employer too
I get your point. It’s absolutely crazy that people don’t srike en masse for better conditions but then you got people thinking fuck you I got mine.
But I also think that while this is true: EA still is pretty much the worst and needs to be disbanded for controlling large parts of the market and extortionist marketing techniques.