Tiger Wood's complete prostitution of the games format

Tiger Wood's PGA Tour 11 has many faults. The hierarchical menu system is completely nonsensical, the graphics are too clinical and glitchy, the online skill level system is totally broken and the commentators are as annoying as hell. But it does play a good game of golf that rewards experience well. It represents a big change from my previous golf game, Everyday Golf, which was a lot prettier, easier, less buggy but probably less rewarding.

But let's forget about all that, because I want to talk about how this game completely prostitutes itself to try to screw every penny from its players. These are the top 4 marketing ploys TWPGA11 presents to the consumer:

1. The On-line voucher, as I wrote about here, monetises the second-hand market for EA.

2. Extra courses are available as DLC for the gob-smacking price of £6.29 for a single course. This seems particularly steep to me - far more than I'd expect to pay for a single map for an FPS for example.

3. You can gain some easy XP (the game's currency) by sending a message to each of your friends advertising the benefits of the game. I presume. I've never seen it. All my friends have.

4. Instead of earning XP to buy new items in the pro shop (from shoes to clubs - and they give you various skill bonuses) you can stump up some cold hard cash and buy them on the PSN. They cost from under a pound to several quid, and there's usually a new better item every level or two.
A quick hint here: learn to grind the skills challenges for fast xp.

This seems quite enough to me. I don't buy many EA games, so don't know if this is (ahem) par for the course - but I'll guarantee it will be, and not just for EA. This ghastly nonsense is going to spread and spread until we can't frag someone on Doom 2012 without being asked if we want to buy a bigger gun. There's nothing much to be done of course, gamers being a slothful lot, all but impossible to rouse.

Tiger Woods Pro Tour 11 and the online voucher

Whilst I'd read about this new "online voucher" idea in the games press, this is the first title I'd bought that included the feature. In practise it works very simply, you get a code that you put in and it lets you use the on-line parts of the game. Buy a second-hand game or get your game without the code for some reason, you have to pay some money for the "voucher" (a new code) and you can go on-line too.

This is the games industry monetising the second-hand market and presumably an attempt at monetising piracy on those platforms which allow it. Many think it will destroy the second-hand market - not an area I know or care much about - but as far as I can see it'll just devalue your second-hand game by a few quid.

Morally it's less easy to justify. Without consulting us, the industry has taken away what we thought was ours and gained from the move themselves. Whatever they believe is the legal case - we never actually own these games remember, just a licence to play them - is frankly immaterial. In addition, it's not clear what will happen should your console break and you need to re-install your game.

On the whole, I believe that the games industry is right to bring in the vouchers. It doesn't effect the original owner (as long as new console reinstalls are allowed), it might keep costs of games down slightly and frankly it's a great idea from their perspective. And compared with the complete prostituting of the rest of Tiger Woods Pro Tour 11 it really is nothing.