I'm not going to argue business needs here. I don't have balance sheets.
I do respect coming out and directly acknowledging that the community might not be happy with pricing instead of just straight up ignoring backlash or hand waving it away.
I'm in other topics arguing that training on copyrighted content is not infringement in any way, but I think using someone's likeness is different and probably not legal, because there are separate laws there.
You can usually get away with it if you have deniability, but I don't think straight up adding lines to characters gives you any way to argue that.
So I think it was "games played" "contracts" and there were ways to earn extensions through normal play when I briefly played the single player part a while back. I recognized the giant trap for what it was and bailed and am not sure the current state, but if it did exist and is scummy and makes them more money, I'd be surprised if they walked it back.
That's basically what ultimate team is in practice.
If it had no cash involved and was either tuned to a level where a normal person could build a team that was competitive at the high end in a month or so (since it is, ultimately, an annual game) or you just had a budget and could sign who you wanted (based on "market value" that was set based on overall rating and position or that fluctuated with how many people had a guy on their roster), it could be awesome.
But yeah, it's basically a card game (that I think also has cards expire, though I don't play it at all) that's designed to milk whales for cash. And they replaced a lot of the normal Madden tournaments you could win money playing to use this nonsense mode instead.
The only semi-saving grace is that it's mostly self contained. There are obnoxious ads for it, and other game modes haven't seen the development work they should because they spend most of the non-engine work on that nonsense, but you can still just play online head to head of a great football sim if you tune out the nonsense.
It's super scummy and I would love to see legal involvement shut it all down. Lootboxes are unregulated gambling and in sports games specifically they're very obviously targeting kids.
A lot of stuff is Iike that. Ultimate Team in Madden or FIFA, without the monetization, could potentially be one hell of a game mode (though also maybe hard to balance). The idea of being able to build out a team to your personal preferences and play style and match up against others head to head is awesome.
But "fuck you, we want users dropping $10k on their team", so we can't have nice things.
There are some games that aren't DRM free on Steam that do go on GOG and remove the DRM. In some cases (unfortunately) the GOG version doesn't get consistently updated like the Steam version.
It's kind of a habit for people telling you about GOG deals or promos to mention that it's DRM free whether the Steam version has DRM or not, because DRM free is the primary selling point of the store. (They also sometimes include hacks/patches to deal with compatibility with modern systems that aren't always on the Steam version.) It isn't necessarily meant to imply that any other versions have DRM (though in a lot of cases they do).
That's why I mentioned languages, too. I'm not saying that it's bad that more people can access it in their native language, just that a lot of games include it by default when they're not going to be used.
It's possible BG3 is an exception, but a lot of publishers pretty clearly just don't care how much space they take up (and I kind of think a few of the GAAS nonsense see more space as a positive so they can monopolize users's time even more by limiting the number of other games they have). I really wish that Valve had pushed for an alternative "trim the fat" branch that defaulted to less, less heavy assets and let you choose what else you needed for Steam Deck verification (over, say 10 GB, so you only really needed to do it for modernish AAA type games). I think it could have made a difference because the cost isn't high to do.
I want Valve to encourage developers to use their branch tool like Witcher 3 did with the next gen upgrade to make high resolution assets optional.
There's no reason to have 100-something GB of assets on an 800p device. Same with languages. Support is awesome. Disrespecting my storage to pack them all without any way to cut out the waste isn't.
That's before the heavy duplication of assets for sequential HDD loads that I'm guessing hasn't disappeared yet.
I do know that if they do, they explicitly had contracts in the past, when the games were published structured in a way that gives them permission to do so now. There is no way for Nintendo to do the same. They would have to negotiate new deals and it's not actually possible to do so for more than a small handful of third party games at absolute best.
Also, Microsoft is a far bigger company than Nintendo.