Comment on EA Announces No F1 26 Next Year, F1 25 Will Get a Major Expansion Instead
rayquetzalcoatl@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I wonder if they’ve figured out that because they just release essentially the same game every year (for this franchise and other sports franchises like FIFA) with different content, it’ll be cheaper for them to just basically sell a patch?
Just read the article to confirm - yup, it’s a paid “expansion”. God, that’s so funny.
They litterally did 4 years of re-releasing the exact same FIFA on Switch with only a roster update, just slapping a “legacy edition” on them for good measure. If it’s the same game, by comparison, making it a DLC of the previous edition is slightly more honest.
Annual sports game editions are just a wet dream a marketing genius had back in the 90s. A shame that it must still work on a significant part of their audience.
Initially it made a lot of sense though. The differences between each fifa version between the first one and 2003 were massive with each iteration. But as the graphics got better and better and the gameplay was more or less settled, it became less sensible to have a new edition each year. After fifa 2003 there were noticeably less differences between the iterations.
That cycle was artificially squeezed into one year though.
If we’re staying in the area of games that don’t rely on story or lots of new manually crafted environments, a game like, say, SimCity could have had a minor update and be released slightly better every year. That didn’t happen, it got 3 games in ten years despite being quite popular.
AlexisFR@jlai.lu 4 months ago
Releasing a new game every 5 years with paid expansion every year is exactly what they should be doing.