I loved the original Dungeon Keeper and Dungeon Keeper 2 back when Bullfrog made them. I spent untold amounts of time playing the games!

EA has now ported Dungeon Keeper to mobile devices, and not in a good way.

Just to play 1 level normally, you need to pay anywhere from $2.50 USD to $12.00 USD in micro transactions.

Why the #### did EA decide to ruin such a classic game ?

[ LINK TO GAME ]

Edit: I'd be more than willing to pay $40 USD for a copy of the original 2 games ( if they were updated for modern operating systems ) .

Yeah, I was talking to people about this yesterday.

You can't play the game without paying, and the most popular "microtransaction" costs $49. (I think it's time to stop calling them that when they cost MORE than a retail game does). To top it off, EA are triple-dipping by feeding the player adverts from "selected partners" and by collecting user information for distribution to "third parties".

I've had a lot of offers to work on mobile titles, but I can't bring myself to do it, because quite frankly I find the product model used by these titles to be very distasteful - I don't want to work on something only to become a part of what I see as a genuine problem.

As long as consumers are stupid enough to pay anyway, this will continue. Why not, it's more revenue? Who cares if a few people complain if there's still another stupid guy who is paying.

It's much the same with HD+ television here. The socialists already make you pay for TV because of some absurd reason that nobody can understand. Then you have some stations in HD and normal quality, which really costs more or less the same to broadcast, only older TVs and recorders aren't ready to receive the higher res stuff.

And then, there is now HD+, mostly run by the RTL/Pro7/Sat1 cartel, where you pay around 50 euros or so per year for a special decoder. What this "decoder" really does is a perverse kind of DRM, which not only prevents you from recording some select transmissions, but it also prevents you from skipping over commercials when you have recorded other programmes. My father recently bought such a thing, and I asked him WTF why. He said it's "plus", so it must be better.

So basically you pay extra for being DRMed in an obnoxious way. Still, there's enough people who fall for it, and as long as that is the case, there is no reason for the unscurpulous not to take that money.

Edit: I'd be more than willing to pay $40 USD for a copy of the original 2 games ( if they were updated for modern operating systems ) .

Dungeon Keeper ($5.99): http://www.gog.com/game/dungeon_keeper

Dungeon Keeper 2 ($5.99): http://www.gog.com/game/dungeon_keeper_2

You're welcome

Edit: I'd be more than willing to pay $40 USD for a copy of the original 2 games ( if they were updated for modern operating systems ) .

Dungeon Keeper ($5.99): http://www.gog.com/game/dungeon_keeper

Dungeon Keeper 2 ($5.99): http://www.gog.com/game/dungeon_keeper_2

You're welcome

Nether one of them are patched to run on anything newer than Windows 2K ... The longest I can get DK2 to run is 10 minutes before crashing. DK1 will not even start.

Why the #### did EA decide to ruin such a classic game ?

If they released the game without micropayments then they would have to charge. The only people who would buy it are nostalgia hungry gamers like us which is a tiny market.

Devils Advocate Here.
Freemium pay to play games are a sure fire way to make money. The amount of money that some of these games are making is more than games such as COD, HALO or GTA make and require a fraction of the development costs. OK for us gamers they are just crap games but from reading the reviews and seeing the scores on both Google Play and the app store it is obvious that the general public love them.

You may say that the general consumer is stupid to play these games but then look at how many people play online poker, bingo, go to cassinos or play on fruit machines or buy lottery tickets with very little chance of ever seeing a return for their money.

Of course there are a few game developers who have scruples and genuinely put good games out there on mobile with no ads or in app purchase. They get a few favourable reviews a big rush of sales from gamers who have an actual real game they can play and then the game vanishes as nobody downloads it any more. Candy crush on the other hand has been the number 1 app in the games section for 12 months solid and Clash of Clans and Simpsons Tap out and Hay days are not too far behind.

It is true that these games need to make money - if they did not, then they would be pointless. My real qualm goes two ways:

1) The microtransactions are less microtransaction and more macrotransaction. In the past 2-3 years mobile games have stopped charging people $1.99 for a small pile of meaningless in game currency and are now charging as much as $49.99 (Dungeon Keeper) to a whopping $99.99. This trend is now finding it's way into retail games that cost more than $60 to purchase from the outset and additionally may contain as much as $200 worth of DLC within a year of release.

2) The microtransactions provide a meaningless, non-tangible resource that is literally tied to ability to progress in the game. Buyers aren't getting access to more content by paying $49.99, nor is it play time. They're literally buying the ability to progress in a game that often makes it near impossible to do so otherwise.

IMHO, both of these trends completely anti-consumer. They are unacceptable, exploitative and need to stop.

IMHO, both of these trends completely anti-consumer. They are unacceptable, exploitative and need to stop.

Well the UK govenment has only this week given developers deadlines to sort some of this stuff out otherwise they will end up in court. Apple has also changed its rules so that in app purchases are now age restricted which will have put a few parents off letting their kids install them.

However buying progress in a game isn't a new things I used to do that when I was 12 with Double Dragon, Splatterhouse and Salamander everyweek in the local arcade and that was nearly 25 years ago.

Also most consumer goods cars, clothes, music Bluerays have increased in price over the years. Games however have not.

Games however have not.

There are two flaws in this argument.

The first is that they actually have, even when you adjust for inflation. The Sega Megadrive's RRP at launch was £189.99 in the UK and games from £19.99. Adjusted for inflation you're looking at £300 for the console and £32 for a game. The Playstation 4 on the other hand retails for £350 and the Xbox One at £430 - games on both systems are priced from £45, but often reach £60. Whilst the cost of the consoles might not have climbed massively - 16% and 43% respectively in this example it is still an increase. Games themselves have increased between 40% and 88% in price after adjustment for inflation.

Let's not forget that games in 1990 didn't include £40 DLC season pass / premium edition on launch day and / or (in the case of Forza as an example) a potential £3000 worth of IAPs. Those four Call of Duty DLC map packs per year (the type of release that used to be for free in the past on the platforms that supported it) are a whopping £60 on your initial £60 investment - if you go so far as to include that kind of additional expenditure, games have increased in price 375%, though this is more arguable and brings the debate as to what constitutes the original game purchase.

It's a common misconception that seems to be heavily perpetuated at the moment that games are not any more expensive to buy than they were before (I'm wondering where the origin of this widely perpetuated 'fact' has come from).

In any case, these IAPs for 'buckets of gems required to progress you a level' are more expensive than an entire game was 20 years ago, even adjusting for inflation.

The second issue is something called economies of scale. The more of a product that is produced, the cheaper it can be sold - it's an (almost) infallible rule of modern manufacturing. The newest consoles have sold millions of hardware units in their first week alone - some games have sold in excess of two million copies on week one (along with season passes!) - a third of what the biggest games may have sold on former consoles in their lifetime (Sonic the Hedgehog was bundled with the console and managed 6 million copies!).

So whilst development costs may have risen, the player base has risen too. When you have 27 million active players like some games are now boasting, you have more players than older hardware units were even manufactured.

Who makes in game purchases is just a dumb person, ( sorry if i just offended you ).

In the future they wanto have online streaming, Why ? : They can charge you per hour of play or whatever.