I respect EA's need to have good results to report back to their shareholders every 3 months. In the case of their business plan around BF2 if you remove the mod community .. it's a good business plan: release a game, churn out cheap add-ons for it that keep people interested and continue to make them money.
I wouldn't consider BF2 to be awful in terms of quality, certinaly not significantly different than many other "AAA" titles released recently. I do see these booster packs being rushed out tho... I mean there is no arguing the Challenger looks like ****.
But if I add back in the mod community dimension into the EA & BF2 world... their approach does seem soemwhat "cannabalistic". If I were EA I would be very wary of their model and how it affects the mod community. Not sure if it would be viable, but it would be interested to see if, through great tools, funding & support, they could actually help mod makers commercialise their product and actually draw these booster packs from within the mod community.
If they built some kind of micropayment / commercial infrastructure into their aftermarket system, mod makers could be encuraged to produce content that would have some kind of comercial benefit to it.
You'd still see guys doing it "for the fun / love / hate" of it, but at the same time you could see many mod developers and mappers actually participate in an aftermarket opportunity that might land EA into a "best of both worlds" scenario.
That said .. hehe... it's all going consoles anyways
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