Speelbal wrote:
Also question yourself if the expansion pack is worth your money. I know: 30 dollars/euros is ridiculous and this price is so high because of the copyright. (You pay 45 % for the brand, rest for development costs. -And ofcourse piracy-)
Thirty bucks is ridiculous? Are you serious? You clearly have a computer that is high-end enough to play BF2. You have a high-speed internet connection. You have spare time to post in BF2 forums. You may not be a Rockafellar but you are obviously not dirt poor.
Should the BF2:SF content have been included in BF2 in the first place? Probably. Chances are they couldn't release six months ago with that content, because they didn't have the resources dedicated to the project to finish and QA it. And it was probably a business decision to suck in some extra revenue by packaging a good chunk of what should have been original content into another $30 package. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that.
You get more play out of BF2 (and will out of BF2:SF) than you would a $20 CD, $100 concert ticket or $25 DVD. Hell, if you drink starbucks once a day, that's a week of lattes.
I know not everyone makes a lot of money or has a lot of spending cash for entertainment after their expenses and a lot of people are just kids with no sources of income. Still . . . Man, it's $30 and it's a fairly sizable content pack.
By the way, you don't pay anything for piracy. It isn't like a grocery store where you're paying for shrinkage of a physical product. When a copy of BF2 is "pirated", no tangible good is taken so no direct loss is caused. You can't even suggest that it's a lost sale, since it's unlikely there would have been a sale to such a person in the first place.
Development costs are expensive. You clearly have no idea what expenses are involved in the software business (especially the game industry). I suppose you think your local videogame store is making a killing on the sales, too? On a $50 box, the retailer is lucky to get $5 profit. The developer has to pay for a building to work in, an IT department, legal department, marketing and sales, executives, engineers, managers, taxes and other payroll expenses, physical packaging and delivery, QA/testing, servers to play on (which they don't charge any fee for), maintainance and monitoring of those servers and development of new content, customer service people, website content people . . . All of these expenses go up with the economy, yet games are still $50 (for the most part) just like they have been for at least ten years.
Maybe you're new to the computer world, but you shouldn't expect your hardware and software to run like a toaster. It is a significantly more complex device as are the things you install and run on it. It will always be this way unless you somehow develop an autonomous system that magically perfects your code for you and intuitively knows what you (a human) really had in your head when you wrote that subroutine late lastnight at work. That ain't ever going to happen.