Dear EA,

I’ve been over this before: in the past two decades or so, you’ve confused the crap out of me.  I’ve loved you, I’ve hated you, I’ve nothinged you.  Now, just as you’re starting to move pretty solidly back into gamers’ collective good graces, you get fast and furious with some pretty serious mixed messages.

You’ve recently shown you’re really the only large publisher willing to dive into new IPs with titles such as Mirror’s Edge and Dead Space.  Your CEO, John Riccitiello, proclaimed just a few months ago that a policy of “fewer, better games” was being instituted, even saying that the same old updates of sports and racing games wasn’t going to cut it anymore, and that the RTS genre was in need of some serious innovation.  You’re DICE’s publisher, and DICE has expressed a seemingly sincere devotion to PC gaming.  You’ve allowed SecuROM to be patched out in Battlefield Bad Company 2 on Steam.

That whole “Project Ten Dollar” thing?  I don’t love it, I don’t hate it — I nothing it.  But it doesn’t exactly paint you in the most favorable light.

Now you’ve released Command and Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight and guess what?  It’s more of the same.  You were jumping up and down telling us that there was no DRM, but it requires an internet connection to play even the singleplayer.  Bad Company 2‘s launch was seriously (but not surprisingly) botched, and it’s still suffering from constant problems on your end.  DICE posts to the Battlefield Blog claiming that gamers should be able to enjoy a game without being nickel-and-dimed, and what do you do?  You say you’re going to start ramping up your digital distribution revenues by charging for “glorified game demos.”  Writes Kotaku:

One of Electronic Arts strategies will be to release what they call “premium downloadable content” on the Playstation Network and Xbox Live for $10 to $15 and then later release the full game for a full price, EA Group General Manager Nick Earl told Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter during the recent meeting.

Pachter writes in his report of the meeting that this premium downloadable content would “essentially be a very long game demo, along the lines of 2009′s Battlefield 1943.” The “full-blown packaged game” would released [sic] shortly after the download version, he writes.

I’ll await some clarification on this before I make my final judgment, but this doesn’t look good, EA.  Since you seem so fond of the back and forth announcements of late, you’d better have something great up your sleeve to counter this.  I have a feeling anything short of a resurrection of a Bullfrog IP is going to see you slipping further into the depths of publisher disdain currently occupied by Activision, at least in my eyes.

Kisses,

Mack