Any gamer will tell you that reviews honestly mean nothing, and that some games are subject to either “Haters gonna hate” or rampant fanboyism. Developers however do tend to care about review scores and sometimes the publishers will try to manipulate them in their favor. Earlier in the news, Germany had quite a handful of furious gamers, and privacy of customers is a big deal in Europe. Using what developers think about reviews, the Germans have started another war, this time against EA and attacked the review scores of Battlefield 3.
Origin collects some basic info from your computer when installed in order to have targeted advertisments, but lack of computer-savvy has resulted in it getting more flack than it deserves. Despite this, users with access to Amazon have been rating Battlefield 3 with one star, sharply harming its overall score on the site. The German version of Amazon has 2234 reviews giving the game a rating of less than 1.5 stars on average. I don’t understand much German, but I have enough grasp of the language to know their beef is with Origin.
German newspaper Spiegel claimed that Origin didn’t just violate the expectation of privacy, but also violated consumer laws. An attorney named Thomas Schwenke said that Origin’s TOS and EULA had massive amounts of clauses and segments that breached consumer and privacy rights.
The Germans however are far more furious at this in their voice than the Americans are, who have only given around 238 reviews total where they’re likely to be seen. Most of their aggro can be found on gaming forums and aggregate sites like Reddit. However I do recommend you read this comment by Redditor mitsuhiko before throwing torches everywhere.
I don’t have a problem with targeted advertizing, but when a developer of any sort does not say in plain English what their program does, and does not fully research the laws of the country they are releasing the product in, it just causes controversy in spades. With the recent Wall Street protests and people getting sick and tired of being trod on by billionaires, this can be a rather risky time to screw over customers, whenever their fears are founded or not.
Rian Quenlin
Just in case you missed it, reading mitsuhiko’s post on Reddit is quite an important detail since the privacy violation isn’t as bad as people think it is.
I really don’t think this is fair at all. You can trash EA all you want, you can trash ANY publisher all you want, but if you thumbs down a game that hard, the only person that gets hurt is the developer.
Mark
Typical whiny entitled gamer BS – that’s all this is. Smart people will realize that BF3 is insanely awesome. NEWSFLASH to German gamers – get over it and stop whining. Nuff said.
Rian Quenlin
Maybe you should read it again, consumer rights and privacy are serious business in the UK. I don’t mean a collective gasp serious, I mean breaching those rights can result in massive lawsuits, running afoul of the European Union, and hefty fines as well. Especially in Germany, it’s not about the game, it’s about Origin.
ICHBINS
@Mark
I knew that your laws about pricacy aren`t very hard….
but i am lucky that it’s my !
You talk about smart people,what is it smart to spend your money to a campany who spy you ?
I wanna play, simply play and dont get looked into my stuff.
imagine a company sells you a screen with camera, after a few days you get notice about that this camera scanns your room and look around for equipment from the same company and sends the results to them.
The same principle use ea!
No one reads the terms and conditions very carefully, and thats the thing big companys deal with.
You give them money, and they earn to sell your data around the world.
Your data a cash money at the economy, although they still seem so unimportant.
No one has to look into my stuff without any reason !
Im really a fanboy of BF, but if origin remains as it is i will not buy BF3….