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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

As someone who has generally bought 2 or 3 sports titles a year from EA, this seems like an awesome deal. But since it is EA afterall, I have to ask "What is the catch?" I just don't see what exactly they get from this type of system. At $30 per year it is the cost of one game every two years. I have to imagine most of EA's customers who would be interested in this type of program make a lot more frequent purchases than that.

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Knowing EA there is always a catch.

I'm pretty sure that they just want to push more downloadable content on to you, and start releasing less and less complete games. Just look at the Battlefield-series, you have to buy four individual extra packages in order to play it (more or less), or you're basically stuck with the single player or empty servers. They also offer a "premium" service, where you get all the packages at a better price, but you have to pay up front.

The end result is that EA goes F2P for AAA games and makes it up on DLC/IAP.

Yeah - or almost F2P. You can get AAA titles for $10-15, so they're almost there already. I think they've realised that releasing often is much more profitable. People are more inclined to pay a little fee many times, than one big one time fee. Even if the total adds up to more.

The catch is that the updated (this year's) versions of these games probably won't be available right away.

Or, that only title available is this year's version.

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