UGotta Check It said:I will never understand the mindless banter that goes on with these posts and shut downs. Read the press release. The games online features are under 1% of their players. For example. 100 people are playing madden 11 online and one guy is sitting in a lobby in madden 10. So waste money for the one guy and maybe 10 on a Saturday. Or how about cut it, use that "saved" money to improve next years title or even keep alive the servers now. It's funny because so many people say fuck ea and they are just money grabbers. But gamers are the culprits. If you would play the games that you don't play. They wouldn't shut them down. If achievements weren't apart of a game. Why would most of you be angry? Hell with there closures you are actually finishing games because there's a time limit now. So you should be thanking them for getting these old games off your shelves.
And yet, games like Rumble Roses XX and Halo Wars can still be matchmade just fine using Microsoft's servers. Funny how games with populations that are miniscule, yet aren't EA-based, can continue to operate just fine. And that is exactly what our XBL Gold fees are going towards...servers for matchmaking.
The problem with using a "bottom 1%" metric is that it's always a moving target. There will ALWAYS be a bottom 1%, no matter how many servers and games are shutdown.
Game companies can have it one of two ways...either cheap but they lose control of the servers or expensive but have complete control on shutdowns. You can't have it both ways. EA has apparently chosen the latter method. When you chose to go the control route, you lose the right to bitch about how much it's costing you when there is a perfectly valid and acceptable way of minimizing your outlay for costs, but you lose the ability to force obsolesence on the people who have purchased your product.
It's the same thing as current production models for any number of products. If manufacturers can sell you a product that'll last for 20 years, their profits drop. So instead they sell you crap that'll break within a year just to force you to buy another to artificially inflate their profit margins. The trick is to make the items in question just difficult enough to repair that it costs as much, if not more, to fix the busted item than to buy a new one. For example, take rechargable drill batteries. We can get about a year (or less) out of them. But guess what? Buying a new battery is more expensive than buying a whole new drill set. But the catch? That "new" battery is incompatible with the old drill. Meaning that old drill, which could be perfectly usable, is now rendered useless.