Has anyone tried Origin Access Premier?
I saw someone link it in a discussion about Bioware's Anthem. It looks like quite good value for money, especially if you like to buy newer games. It's $20 CAD/month or $130 CAD/year, but given that Anthem will cost $80 CAD at launch, that's basically 4 months of subscription. Or a full year is 2 new games.
The back catalog also looks pretty decent, with a wide variety of games available. I am particularly interested in Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition, as I never played them.
You can probably do better value for money through Humble Bundles and waiting for Steam sales, but this looks really solid for new games. Of course, I think you're restricted to EA games. And like most subscription services, you probably lose access when you stop paying.
But it seems almost too good to be true for games that you will play and finish. If anyone has tried this service, can you post your impressions in the comments?
Subscribing to that is my current plan once Anthem comes out, as I also have an interest in Battlefield 5. On sale, I could have gotten the latter for $30, but I figure that the odds of playing it for more than two months is low, same with Anthem.
ReplyDeleteTrue enough. And if you do end up playing Anthem for the full year, it's not much worse than an MMO subscription.
DeleteI am having a hard time with this. I basically played Destiny 2 for a month and battlefield 1 for less than that. It feels a bit like a rental, so maybe a month would be perfect. I'll feel less bad if I don't keep up with it and only a little duped if I end up buying it later. If it wasn't EA exclusive I'd probably be all in. I really liked gamefly
ReplyDeleteThat's very true, it's fairly hard to "rent" PC games, and there are a lot of games that would be nice to rent, but aren't really worth buying at full price.
DeleteIsey subscribed. ihaspc.com
ReplyDeleteLike you mention, it's a subscription and you lose access when it expires. Good for a few months I guess - which really makes me wonder how Anthem is supposed to make money? I mean, they are essentially selling 30 days of Anthem play for 1/4 the retail price...and I would be surprised if Anthem had anything close to the retention rate required to make that profitable.
Well, Anthem makes money by attracting people who only buy one or two EA games to this service. If I went with it, that's an extra $50 they get from me which they don't in the scenario where I just buy Anthem. Also, there's no middle-man to take a 30% cut or whatever, so that's an extra $25 they pocket.
DeleteAnd even if Anthem fizzles out, maybe there's a different game which keeps me playing.
I may has mistyped then. I mean, you can pay $20, get access to Anthem 1 week early, cancel, and end up with 30 days access to the game. The decision to buy the game is postponed by 30 days without any consequences. EA gets 1/4 of the income to support a body of players who won't stick around.
DeleteAgain, unless the retention rate, or conversion rate to "box sales" is extremely high. Certainly not getting the Fallout76 vibe from Anthem, quite the opposite.
I'm not really sure what you are getting at? Are you suggesting to pay $20 to try the game for a month, then spend the full $80 if I like it?
DeleteI suppose that's a possible path, but it basically sets up either paying $100 or $20. I'd have to think about the math for this.
Might be a bit late to the party on this one Rohan, but just in case not - here's my 2c on the matter.
ReplyDeleteIf you're interested in other games offered on the Origin Access platform, then a year's subscription starts to look a bit more interesting - especially if you're leaning toward buying Anthem as the alternative.
The price delta between buying Anthem on it's own vs. a year's sub is not that big (regional pricing makes the actual figure vary), so for me this was worth it. I was unlikely to buy Battlefield V, Darksiders 3, Battlefront 2 etc as individual games -- but as part of the package, when I was going to most likely invest in Anthem anyway it became a very appealing offer.
If there was nothing else in the Origin catalog of interest (or I already owned everything that was), then it's probably better to just buy Anthem outright. (Note: I say this not really having looked into what else is on EA's slate this year.)
The other main scenario I see is if there is nothing else of interest AND you're on the fence about Anthem itself.
In that case, just go in for one month of the Origin access. You get a 30 day period to try it out and see if it holds you. If it does, Origin subscribers get 10% off game purchases. You can hold out to the last few days of your subscription and get 10% off the game purchase to carry you past the end of your sub.
In NZD, that would put you about $10 worse off than just buying it day 1 if you end up liking it, but has potential to save you a fair bit if you don't.
Oh, I got distracted by the new WoW raid and didn't make any decisions on Anthem. Oh well, at least I get to see all the VIP demo impressions.
DeleteHmm, interesting info about the 10% discount for subscribers. I did not know about that, and I suppose it does change the calculation.