Paid Roster Updates
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
There was always going to be a time when roster updates where going to cost the gamer.
The revenue stream from non-sports games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero is alluring to EA Sports and they have been trying to find ways of introducing this into their sports line.
EA March Madness charges you for the real bracket. In Tiger 09, you can spend MS points to get clubs and items otherwise earned as you progress through the game. Now in order to get weekly roster updates in FIFA 09, called Adidas Live Season, you will need to shell out MS Points to update two or more leagues. You get one free.
I understand that weekly roster updates are more time consuming than monthly or in the case of FIFA, twice, but this is the beginning of true microtransactions in sports games.
There are a ton of pitfalls to the actual implementation of Live Season. One is the ability for EA Sports not to over compensate for player’s performance. If Robinho scores 3 against Hull FC on a weekday game and then scores 1 with an assist on the weekend, does that mean his stats will jump dramtically making him an uber-Robinho.
The EA servers have to be reliable. There cannot be a week where the servers are down or you can’t update your live season.
The cost has to be reasonable. EA Sports states that you get one league for free but if you want any of the other leagues, there will be a cost. EA Sports has not released the pricing structue but I would bet it would be around $2.50 per additional league. The leagues (counties and top divisions) that will be update are England, Spain, Italy, France, Germany and Mexico. So you get one league and pay for the rest. It could be $10.00 for 5 leagues.
What bothers me is not that they are charging for this feature, though if you think about it, you are paying $59.99 for the game and let’s say another $10 for the roster updates. That’s around $69.99 for a feature entitled, ADIDAS Live Season, that is only for exibition and online matches. You have coporate sponsorship and EA Sports is passing the cost onto the consumer.
I don’t expect a company to give away a labor intensive feature but I would hope that Adidas’ sponsorship is subsidizing the cost and we get the feature for a reasonable price.
