EA FTL

I didn’t think it was possible, but Electronic Arts (EA) has managed to find a new way to swindle their customers out of money. I honestly thought they had exhausted all available business tactics other than creeping into your house under the cover of night, slitting your throat in your sleep and then proceeding to steal all of your valuables. However, with the November 3rd release of Dragon Age: Origins, EA has demonstrated their willingness to do just that. The heinous act I’ve been alluding to for this entire paragraph is the jarring integration of paid Downloadable Content (DLC) into Dragon Age and what it potentially means to consumers.

Throughout Dragon Age you are able to visit the party camp, where you can recover from injuries as well as buy and sell items from a merchant. This is completely normal. There is also a character with a giant exclamation mark over his head waiting to give you a quest. Seeing as this is an RPG and questing is sort of the entire point of the game, this seems perfectly legitimate—until the character asks you to pay for the quest. I’m not saying that he wants some of your in-game gold; I’m saying he wants some of your real fucking money. It is at this point that the immersive digital environment the developer has tried so hard to create begins to crumble. Moments ago, you were decapitating darkspawn with a Chasind Flatblade and trying to get your freak on with a shape shifting mage, now you’re contemplating grabbing your MasterCard and suckling the corporate teat to the tune of seven dollars. EA has traded the potential impact of a game for the opportunity to wring every ounce of monetary gain out of a product. Admittedly, seven dollars is a paltry sum; however, at its core, this isn’t really an issue of money.

It’s an issue of how far EA will go to foist DLC on its customers. In that sense, Dragon Age represents the middle ground in EA’s vampiric approach to DLC. It was easy to decline when, in 2006, EA brazenly attempted to charge for codes that unlocked content already on the game disc, but it is more subtle than that now. Instead of a faceless corporate entity with its greedy palms open, it is a man who looks down on his luck asking you to honor a promise your mentor made to him (for the low, low price of seven dollars). By tying it into the story of the game, it becomes exponentially more difficult to resist. I fear that soon, the integration of DLC in to EA’s games will be so seamless that, like a back alley sex fiend, you won’t see it coming until it’s too late.