You know what, I wrote that post on a mobile phone and my message came out wrong lol.
Let me rephrase, I hate it when the game won't let me play with a gamepad as MW2 and WaW on the PC are designed for M+K only. I believe BO1 is where gamepad compatibility started but the fucking game is still worth $40, it is like 10 years old now and there is a new Cold War spinoff coming out.
Activision are more greedy whores than EA despite making more monies. EA once in a while at least made the expansion packs free for the old Battlefield games like BF4 and BF1.
fair enough.
in defense of those old titles, not that many ports had gamepad support back then, if alone proper one. there's xpadder, but that's a bit of PITA.
agree on the price tho, at least on pc you can get the base games pretty cheap for the campaign on keysites. season pass never goes lower than 50%, and only rarely, and since it's only mp stuff completely pointless cause that's dead pretty fast. as for ea, the only reason they gave away stuff was either shilling origin (the week they gave a away bf3) or to get back good will (bf4 dlc after that abysmal launch). couldn't say why they did it with bf1, maybe to boost numbers for shareholders, but I'm sure there was some strategy involved too.
I think Activision wants the older games to die, as a way to force players into the new ones. Whereas EA takes the opposite approach, where they want you to play every game for cheap. Both companies have different views on company loyalty.
they're not much different, EA dropped BF3 hard to push BF4, which was in abysmal state at launch. they're pretty much equally shit, activision wants you to buy a new cod every year + season pass, EA
wants (wanted, after BF vagina bombed, lel) you to buy battlefield every 2 years + premium and it's alternate title like battlefront in-between. speaking of bf5, watch the recent ps5 showcase and notice which battlefield sony advertised. hint: not the ww2 one.
the only reason EA looks better because they dumped a lot of money into post-launch support for bf4 after the game was such a fucking shitshow for months and close to crash the whole franchise with no survivors - and it worked. the only problem was it completely fucked with their release schedule for years as well (plenty of people stayed with bf4 since it had more content and was more complete/polished than bf1, outside of not being a modern battlefield).
cod doesn't have that problem, good or bad doesn't matter - there's another one coming next year anyway (and even ghosts or IW were never that bad that they had to care about PR, if they even care at all).
I guess the yearly tradition of a new COD title every fall was more important, even when, for once, it wasn't at all necessary for the publisher to make money.
a new
$60 $70 game with it's own season pass + microtransactions is more money, codtards are like sportball-simps in that regard.
a smart move would be have a free base game and each game you own adds content - the more content you have the more options you have. would keep the mp alive since it draws all from the same pool (and thus would be easy to steer, imagine having a weekly rotation per game etc with increased rewards) which means games would keep it's value and more importantly the season pass.
I can already see someone doing it and making bank (like ubisoft with asscreed mp for example), and then suddenly everyone else scrambles to replicate it while they had the chance to grow it organically for years...