One Great Deal and One Huge Mess (Updated)

Oh EA, what are we going to do with you?

I was browsing /r/GameDeals late Friday night/early Saturday morning and came across a post about an Origin promo code. Things started out innocently enough: EA was sending out surveys and rewarding those who participated with $20 promo codes usable on Origin.

It didn't take long for some enterprising individuals to figure out that the promo code could be used twice, once via the Origin client and once via the website. Don't worry, it gets better (or worse, depending on your perspective). Whoever set this thing up must have been in a hurry to get out of the office on Friday, because the promo code could be used an unlimited number of times on a couple dozen games. By adding games to the cart one at a time and applying the promo code to each individual game, people could basically walk out with a sack of games for free.

As much fun as it would have been to load up a cart with everything I was missing à la the Nickelodeon Super Toy Run, I only added Sim City 4 to my account. It's hard to imagine EA just letting this one slide, but then again it'll be hard to distinguish between people who may have innocently snagged 2 or 3 games and those who were deliberately trying to game the system.

Update: EA has supposedly said that they will honor all "purchases" from this event, so download away.

Deal Alert: Battlefield Games for 10 Bucks

Battlefield turns 10 this year, and today in particular marks the 10-year anniversary of Battlefield 1942's release in Europe. To celebrate, the Origin store has a bunch of BF games available for $10.

Image source: Origin

For something like Battlefield 3, this is great - you're getting a popular, modern shooter for 10 bucks. Some of the rest of the deals make me wonder, though.

The Digital Deluxe edition of Bad Company 2 is available for $10 and includes BC2 and the Vietnam expansion. For the same $10, you can also get the vanilla Bad Company 2 or the Vietnam expansion separately. Forgive me for saying that this pricing is as stupid as it is cute.

Rounding out the sale are BF 2142 Deluxe and BF2 Complete with each available for, you guessed it, $10.

The value of some of these games is questionable, as a lot of them don't contain single-player campaigns and multiplayer may or may not be very populated. The Steam statistics page shows Bad Company 2 as having 700-1000 concurrent users, while Xfire shows Battlefield 3, Battlefield 2, and Bad Company 2 as the 8th, 35th, and 46th-most-popular games, respectively. As a reminder, these numbers depict both single-player and multi-player gameplay and don't represent the total number of users, but they offer pretty decent view of a game's activity level.

The deal is good until tomorrow morning, so make sure to grab everything tonight if you're interested. Check out the sale on Origin here.