As many know over the past few years Electronic Arts has not been everybody’s favorite developer. So much so that they were named “Worst Company in America” for 2012 and 2013 by Consumerist.com. Which in many respects EA had coming with the implementation of day one DLC. On top of those shady business practices there were the terrible launches of certain video games. The worst that comes to mind is Battlefield 4, which should have been delayed and beta tested. It was not and suffered 6 months worth of game breaking bugs because of it.
But a lot of this anti-gamer mentality changed with the promotion of Andrew Wilson to CEO of the company. He has been instilling a gamer first mentality which has proven wonders so far. Games have been pushed back to make sure they came out perfectly such as Dragon Age Inquisition and Battlefield Hardline. This has shown to be the right choice, seeing how great Dragon Age has accrued multiple game of the year accolades across the gaming industry.
This was a great step in changing people’s mindset of what they thought of EA. In my opinion they still needed something a little more tangible to change my mind. That change came in the form of EA Access. Many were skeptical of EA Access because of EA’s previous track record and I was one of them. It officially launched on August 11, 2014 and has been great so far. Years from now this could change the way many game companies operate in the future.
It originally launched with Madden NFL 25, Battlefield 4, Fifa 14 and Peggle 2 as free games anybody could download with a subscription to EA Access. This also came with a 10% discount on all EA digital games sold from the Microsoft store. On top of that it included early access to each game EA releases five days before everybody else. This allowed 6-10 hours of game play time of the full game. This was all shaping up really well, but what really won me over was the fact that they would never pull a game out of the vault. This made it an even better service than what Ps+ and Games with Gold are offering in my opinion.
All this together had me sold on the idea and I am a proud day one customer. I assumed that it would take a longer amount of time for a game to be released into the vault, but EA has pleasantly surprised me with how fast they have released games in there. It has been basically every month since the service started that a new game has show up in the vault. Madden NFL 15, Need For Speed Rivals, Plants vs. Zombies Garden Warfare, EA Sports UFC and NBA Live 15 have all been added into the vault over the last 6 months.
To me EA Access can be used in many different ways. For the avid EA fan you can go buy these games online for 10% off. Or the other option is to buy the physical copy and sell it back when the game goes into the vault. Both ways will save you money in the long run. That is if you don’t want to wait for the games to hit the vault which normally takes about 6 months or more after the game releases.
Now I know EA Access isn’t for everyone because not every gamer like to play shooters or sports games. These type of games have been the forte of Electronic Arts over the years and EA haven’t produced many other games that fall into those genres. For those that do though there hasn’t been a better bang for you buck since the idea of the Humble bundles. I believe this service will really start hitting its stride when games like Mass Effect 4 and Star Wars: Battlefront 3. Even the new undisclosed Star Wars title Amy Hening is working on has me excited for things to come. For those who don’t know who that is she wrote the story for all three Uncharted games.
Right now it is currently only on Xbox One but I would like to see this great feature come to other systems such as the Ps4 and WiiU. All in all if you are an Xbox One owner I could not recommend this enough and hope you take the opportunity to try it out. At the cost of 30 dollars a year or 5 dollars per month it’s hard not to.
What do you think of EA Access? Let us know in the comment section below.
