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PSA: Need For Speed: Heat Will Be (Almost) 50% Off This Month

Need For Speed: Heat is the latest title in the popular Need for Speed franchise, and those of you who went out of your way to buy it on day one are set to be rewarded by paying a $30 premium for a couple of weeks head start. Need for Speed is going on heavy discount this Black Friday.

Target this past week released their Black Friday ad which runs from November 28-30 and Need For Speed is about to get a substantial discount. $35 in fact, down from its current asking price of $59.99. The $35 sale includes “over 10 games” and also contains recent releases like Borderlands 3, NHL 20, and Monster Hunter with Iceborne. We do not know what the other titles are that are included in the sale.

Need For Speed: Heat launched on November 8 and notably released with no microtransactions.

Bad Press: Kotaku’s Owner Demands Removal of Article Criticizing Obnoxious Ads

How do you guarantee that something will gain traction on the internet? Try to silence it.

Kotaku today penned an editorial from the staff explaining to readers that ads are not at the discretion of the editorial team. More specifically, the editorial team has no input over the obnoxious automatically playing video ads with sound that are popping up on the website. The article dutifully pointed users to where they could complain to Kotaku’s parent company, G/O Media.

Had the story ended there, there wouldn’t be anything worth covering. G/O Media has since apparently ordered the article taken down, as the article is now gone and Jason Schreier posted on Twitter; “This article is no longer up. The staff of Kotaku did not remove it.”

In G/O Media’s attempt to silence the article, they have only ensured that a lot more people will be talking about it.

Less Massive: Dungeon Keeper Ad Deemed Misleading

A rather notable blow has been struck against the free to play industry, with the removal of a Dungeon Keeper ad on the grounds that it was misleading. The Advertising Standards Agency in the UK looked into a consumer complaint that Electronic Arts was misleadingly advertising Dungeon Keeper as a free to play game while omitting important information about the game’s cash shop. The ASA upheld the complaint, based on what it regards to be excessive, frequent, and unreasonable time-gates on content.

As posted on the ASA website:

While we understood that the average consumer would appreciate that free-to-play games were likely to contain monetisation functions, we considered that they would also expect the play experience of a game described as ‘free’ to not be excessively restricted. Similarly, although we acknowledged that a timer mechanism could be a legitimate part of gameplay experience, the nature of the timer frequency and length in Dungeon Keeper, in combination with the way it was monetised, was likely to create a game experience for non-spenders that did not reflect their reasonable expectations from the content of the ad. Because the game had the potential to restrict gameplay beyond that which would be expected by consumers and the ad did not make this aspect of the role of in-app purchasing clear, we concluded that it was misleading.

EA’s CEO recently called Dungeon Keeper a “shame,” after the game was met with overwhelming backlash and quickly dropped off of the app charts, followed by the closure of Mythic Entertainment.

(Source: Pocket Gamer)