10 WORST Cash Grab Attempts By EA

electronic arts is a huge company and they are so bad about doing cash grabs hi folks it's falcon and today on game ranks the 10 worst cash grab attempts by ea starting off at number 10 it's apex legends the iron crown packs at launch apex legends promised players that the free-to-play mechanics would feel worthwhile and fair and for a while respawn did stick to that promise they did eventually also start breaking that promise with a storefront a battle pass and loot boxes but it wasn't enough to really start bothering players that is until the infamous crown event which was despised by players as an obvious cash grab and in many ways it's because it kind of was the thing is at least this one nothing was paid to win everything earned in the iron crown collection was purely cosmetic still the fact that some of these things could only be earned through a special loot box which were both time limited and more expensive than the standard loot boxes really bugged players on top of that a certain legendary called raven's bike could only be acquired after unlocking all the other crown items and you still have to buy it for 3 500 coins or 35 bucks that's after spending more than a hundred dollars on loot boxes like they were really pushing things here so yeah for a game that would normally have comparatively harmless micro transactions and loot boxes this stuff went way beyond what players expected and the outcry of course was swift respawn eventually relented and made some of this stuff easier and cheaper to get but the damage was done and the beloved developer now had a black mark on their usually stellar reputation at number nine this is anthem and whatever the hell this thing is uh anthem's in-game store was and still is not very good it works on the standard games as a service model of having rotating inventory of a couple of items so there's a perceived scarcity you know to entice you to buy something so you don't miss out blah blah blah the problem is that there just isn't much stuff worth buying sure there were a couple of new javelin models that looked alright but the vast majority of the stuff the anthem store was just plain the worst of all is this thing i guess called the fire light wrap which basically amounts to a fancy name for a skin for your iron man one of you i just look at this thing it's so cheap looking what's with the dumb skull and the random symbols like it looks slapped together like an ms paint in a half hour worst of all is it worth the price absolutely not 61 000 coins or 850 shards that's as much as an entirely new armor set but instead of getting carefully crafted armor created by a talented team of artists you get this goofy skull with a green cross beside it sure most of microtransactions in anthem aren't worth the asking price but this one might be the worst because it is so lazy at number eight is mass effect andromeda and the gameless collectors edition here's a totally classic ea cash grab a collector's edition that doesn't actually have you know the game in it nowadays we see things like collectors editions with digital versions of the game at least but the mass effect andromeda one uh no you're just gonna have to buy the game separately it's especially ridiculous because this whole package includes a special asian steel book you know something to put your game into famously ea pulled this stun again with battlefront 1 once again making it kind of hard to tell that no you're actually not getting a game like it's ridiculous it's just a bunch of stuff and number seven is battlefield 3 the ultimate shortcut bundle like these are of course just lame on its face for nearly the price of the game you can simply skip the entire multiplayer unlock grind and get access to everything from the start battlefront 3 isn't the only game in the series with a literal pay-to-win scheme either but it was the first to incorporated it so that one gets special mention here battlefield games are a ton of fun but i don't get these things players have been complaining about them since day one saying it gives anyone who buys it an unfair advantage on launch day and it's a claim that's hard to deny sure things even out as people won't shell out 40 bucks to ea to skip the grind and unlock everything but at first things are just totally unbalanced and that is no fun it only unlocks the stuff in the base game so none of the dlc weapons are unlocked you still have to grind for some of the best stuff even though you paid not to like there's not a lot to say about this these things just let you skip some of the tedious grinding for a premium but i mean they don't even give you what they promise you it just sucks in every way and number six is the dead space three bot personality pack uh okay we were going to talk about how the whole crafting system in dead space 3 negatively affects the game and how it's grafted on literally just to be an in-game store we actually found something dumber to talk about than any of that we are talking about the whole bot personality pack which has to be one of the most pointless pieces of dlc we have ever seen and believe me we've been there since the start here's the description this upgrade contains an rag3 scavenger bot voice and personality firmware update it will automatically upload advanced speech and sarcasm protocols to all your scavenger bots sounds like a great addition to a horror game right that'll be five bucks please you know what you do with scavenger bots most the time in this game you drop them on the ground and then you leave like you're not gonna be running around in a lot of situations we'll get to enjoy which by the way is a word that is doing a lot of work here but enjoy their witty banter and even if you do a lot of times it's hard to hear even what they're saying yeah in the grand scheme of things five bucks isn't much but this has to be one of the most pointless pieces of dlc ever made like it doesn't matter in any way shape or form and number 5 is mass effect 1's pinnacle station it's funny to see pinnacle station back in the news after so long because it's now a missing piece of dlc that can't be brought back to the mass effect legendary collection because the source code was lost if you remember me talking about it in the other video though you'll know exactly where i'm going with this however i've seen some articles make a big deal about its laws i've even seen someone mention it as a fan favorite maybe that's true i don't know but in our opinion at least pinnacle station is one of the worst pieces of dlc we have ever seen after the first mass effect dlc called bring down the sky released people hope for something similar for a second add-on some shooting some story some role-playing you know a mix of things that made the game so well-liked instead we got a few arenas no story and one new gun the whole thing just felt lifeless and lazy especially after two years two years which had passed between the original release and this dlc mass effect 1 just isn't that great of a third person shooter so it's just no fun at all to run through combat encounters with only the barest possible plot stringing things along barely yeah it sucks for completionists that this 5 dlc wasn't included in the new remaster but for the rest of us it's just not much of a loss mass effect games have always kind of not had the best dlc but this is easily one of the worst at number four is the sims 4's romantic garden stuff pack the sims 4 has really gone nuts on the expansions add-ons and bundles but the simple mention that has got to really go in here is the stuff packs they're ten dollars they contain a few random bits and bobs and generally beyond that just aren't that great however most of them at least introduce a new item or two that's interesting but some of them just don't like it's debatable which of these stuff packs gets you the least bang for your buck but but for our money it's this one the romantic garden pack it's got a few new garden accessories like a hedge wall but with roses in it now and more random garden stuff i'm sorry that i sound so unimpressed but i i mean look at this stuff look at look it's nothing usually with these things there's a little something interesting to latch on to but for this one there just isn't unless you're really needing something to mix up your garden it's not something to get excited about what's worse is that this is a game that has released a lot of holiday stuff for free but for some reason valentine's day is the holiday they're gonna charge for that's not just gonna justify a price tag for this kind of crap it's not worth it really it's just a highlight for how bloated sims 4 has become there's now 10 expansions at 40 of pops nine game packs for 20 bucks a pop 18 stuff packs at 10 bucks that's a hell of a lot of stuff we're pretty sure fans of the sims have their own ideas about which one's the worst the romantic garden pack though it's the worst for us it just sucks and number three is buying a better sniper rifle in battlefield uh so outside of the regular battlefield franchise ea created free-to-play versions of the series first one was called battlefield heroes which was billed as an easier to get into and more action-packed and colorful version of the battlefield and it proved pretty popular popular enough that ea released a sequel called and this is a bizarre name battlefield play for free sounds like a card game this is one game where ea just went way overboard with the pay-to-win crap there was a weapon rental system you could buy attachments you can even buy armor and healing basically if you dumped money into this thing you were pretty much unstoppable probably the most ridiculous part of this game though was the purchasable guns like many of which were just all around better than the free guns you could get like literally all of their stats were just better than the standard versions the worst example is definitely the sniper rifle the sniper rifle you start out with couldn't even kill a dude with a headshot while the premium one you could buy had much longer range and did a ton more damage it was pay to win in a way that is not open to interpretation or discussion it just had guns that were flat out better but only if you paid for them at number two is plants vs zombies two's lawnmowers for many players who love plants vs zombies the sequel was seen as a disappointment the original game was the complete package it was microtransaction free just a game like any old school game you bought it you had it but the sequel created notably after the ea buyout of podcat games was created as a freemium title so if you wanted access to all the stages you'd have to pay up that wasn't great but what ea did next was just plain ridiculous they made it so you had to pay for lawn mowers and i understand that four plants versus zombies lay folk some explanation is needed so how plants vs zombies works is that each stage has you defending against a swarm of zombies trying to invade your lawn if all the zombies break through then there's one last defense the lawnmower which will clear the zombies from a lane after a zombie activates it so basically these are pretty important in a true act of cash grabbing ea made it so players had to purchase replacement lawnmowers for 2000 coins regardless of if they lost or won a level this means that if you used a lawnmower it would be permanently gone unless you bought a new one this whole thing was so blatantly greedy that ea immediately retracted it after getting called out claiming that it was a small scale test and even if that were true i'll let you decide whether or not you believe it is but even if it were the fact is it was something that they considered and that shows how the minds at ea see these things with dollar signs in their eyes and finally at number one hellgate london's lifetime subscription that lasted for less than a year this one's a little complicated because while ea didn't directly make this game they did publish it in north america and while they're never specifically mentioned as the reason why hell gate london ended up crashing and burning it's pretty easy to read between the lines from developer comments that they were strongly encouraging the developers flagship games to get the game out more than six months before it was ready so all of that out of the way what's the cash grab well in the months leading up to the release of hellgate london the developers began selling lifetime subscriptions for the low low price of a hundred and fifty dollars instead of having to pay a monthly subscription for this quasi mmo you could just pay this one-time price and have unlimited access for a live sounds like a pretty decent deal uh only problem is the game was alive for less than a year all told the game ran in its original form from october of 2007 to july of 2008 when flagship studios shut down and the us and european multiplayer servers were closed all that money you thought you were saving was all gone now the very fact that the developers sold lifetime subscriptions for this game seems to be pure hubris on their part like the game was already wildly ambitious and being a new studio it probably would have been smart to be a little more careful about what kind of features you were promising instead they promised the moon got people to buy in and quickly ran out of money from the backlash against the game that happened for some reason hell gate london is still around to this day all thanks to the complicated web of publishing agreements the developers made but even though you can still buy the game on steam it's a version that has no multiplayer so if you were hoping you'd get something out of that lifetime subscription more than 10 years later you're gonna be disappointed and that's all for now although there is an endless number of stories we could take from ea what's your favorite leave us a comment let us know what you think if you like this video click like if you're not subscribed now's a great time to do so we upload brand new videos every day of the week the best way to see them first is a corset subscription so click subscribe do not forget to enable all notifications and as always we thank you very much for watching this video i'm falcon you can follow me on twitter falcon hero and we'll see you next time right here on game ranks

Channel: gameranx

Views: 672,220

Rating: 4.920702 out of 5

Keywords: ea cash grab, ea gamers, ea game company, ea games microtransactions, sims microtransactions, video game industry, greedy game companies, gameranx, falcon, electronic arts, ea problems, worst of ea, ea worst company, ea lootboxes, ea dead space, ea headspace 3, ea ruined, ea gaming

Id: kI8pkI1ROfg

Length: 13min 26sec (806 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 10 2021