EA Sports is always looking for a way to make a buck, their newest way is the EA Sports Season Ticket. For $24.99 per year (365 days) or / 2000 MS Points you get the following for FIFA, Madden NFL, NHL, Tiger Woods PGA TOUR, and NCAA Football series:
- Early Full Game Release: 3 days before their scheduled retail release, you’ll be able to download and play the full version of participating titles
- 20% discount on downloadable content for participating EA SPORTS titles, beginning with Madden NFL 12
- Premium Web Content for Free: beginning with FIFA 12 Creation Centre
- Exclusive Membership Recognition: Identification in and out of game
Lets break this down piece by piece.
- Being able to download games 3 days before the release is a pretty cool idea, the only problem is that you need to pre-order all your games to make sure they get there on release date because if not you’re going to have a useless, presumably large file on your hard drive. Speaking of a large file, I can only assume this downloads are going to be in the neighborhood of 4gb +, so if you do plan to spend the money, hopefully you will have a fast enough connection to make getting the game early worth it.
- 20% discount of all paid DLC is probably a bigger deal then it may seem. FIFA made somewhere around 70 million off of FUT packs last year, so being able to save 20% off those could be huge if you are into boosters or Ultimate Teams. Also, this takes a little bit out of the sting of the very pricey Tiger Woods Course DLC.
- From what has been said so far, premium web content for free may just be the same things you were getting for free with pre-orders.
- Exclusive membership recognition, are you kidding me? That sounds as good as turning your Twitter avatar green.
Depending on how many games you buy, it seems like it might be a half decent idea. I plan on buying everything but Tiger Woods, so that breaks it down to about $6.25 per game. I’m probably an edge case but I would be willing to pay that just to get into the game 3 days early (don’t get any ideas EA). So to me the 20% discount on DLC is a bonus which would also pay for itself in FIFA Ultimate Team Packs.
What do you think? Is this just a money grab or do you think its a good idea?