Controversy has no effect on Mass Effect 3 release

Numerous controversies associated with the release of Mass Effect 3 had little effect on first day sales of the game. The 890,000 copies sold on the release date are more than the Mass Effect 1 and 2 first day totals combined. Since the release date EA has sold over 3.5 million copies of the game. This is the first game released by EA to be created simultaneously for PC, XBOX 360 and PS3.

The gaming community reacted with outrage two months ago, when EA announced that the use of Origin would be required to play the game. In addition, the game would not be made available on Steam. EA also announced that a DLC would be made available on the day of the launch.

These decisions were perceived as unethical corporate tactics by many fans of the Mass Effect 3 series.

“They just wanna make more money,” said Tiffany Smith, one of the 80 customers at GameStop’s midnight release of the game. “It irks me that they are hurting themselves, hurting their own reputation to do it. It’s a money grab.”

 DLCs are typically released a few months after the game. Smith joined other outraged gamers in claiming that a DLC released the first day is content that could have been included in the base game, but was purposefully taken out in an attempt to make more money.

Casey Hudson, director and executive producer of Mass Effect 3, said that is simply not true.

“When we finish a game, we finish it many months before it actually hits the shelves and that team goes on to work on something else that in those intervening months represent millions of dollars of development time, which either goes towards the next game that you might not see for several years, or a different game that they might go to work on like Dragon Age or The Old Republic. We work on all these different things,” Hudson said. “So in this case, we chose to work on a DLC, which people really enjoyed for Mass Effect 2 and we also wanted to make sure that people had it as an opportunity to build it into their first play-through if they wanted that as an optional thing.”

Aside from the first day DLC, which affected all platforms, PC gamers were particularly distressed by the announcement that the game would be unavailable on Steam, and only accessible through Origin, EA’s new client, which is still being beta tested.

  Another customer at the GameStop release, Brandon Scriver, was annoyed by the decision.

“Well, given that Origin hasn’t had an impressive track record,” Scriver said. “It sucks.”

EA stated that Steam has more restrictive terms of service which prevent EA from interacting with its customers the way it would like.

“During initial release Mass Effect 3 will be available on Origin and a number of other third party digital retailers, but not on Steam at this time,” said Chris Priestly, Biowares community coordinator. “Steam has adopted a set of restrictive terms of service which limit how developers interact with customers to deliver patches and downloadable content.”

Hudson believes that the release of the game has helped the community understand the reasons behind the decisions.

“Ultimately, I think people get it now,” Hudson said. “They get the fact that sometimes the way that things work in game development isn’t known very well by a lot of people, so there’s an opportunity for misunderstanding.”