Dear EA,
I recently purchased Battlefield 4 for the Xbox 360. Being a fan of the Battlefield series, I was extremely excited for this release. Let me set you up with with a few details about myself. First, I do not make a lot of money. I had to trade in 4 of my favorite games in order to be able to buy your game. Second, I am a parent of a 5 year old child. I do not have a lot of time to play video games, especially violent ones, so I only purchase games I have high expectations for that I will get satisfaction from even with the very little playtime I have. Now, let me tell you the problem I am experiencing that appears to be affecting quite a large amount of people. I bought my Xbox 2 years ago to replace the one I had which quit working on me. It is the slim version with the kinect bundle which I purchased so my son could play. You can probably imagine where this is heading. I do not have a hard drive, only the internal 4GB flash unit. I purchased Grand Theft Auto when it came out, and naturally had to buy a flash drive, as I could not afford a hard drive, because of the mandatory install. It worked out great and I could not have been happier with the results. I bought Battlefield without the knowledge that it required a mandatory install. So far in my research, the only place I can find mention of this is a tweet on the EA page, a social media site that I do not use. I was not informed when I purchased the game nor did I see it on the box until I got home. Finding out that it would not install the content on my external flash drive, I thought I had found a workaround when I moved all of the content on my Xbox onto my flash drive. Then, I am greeted with the message that the content cannot be installed onto the memory unit as it is not a hard drive, which I was not aware of up until this point. I spent 2 hours waiting for this content to be moved only to have my solution not work. Now, to my point. I find this to be very poor practice to force consumers to use a hard drive when there is clearly enough space on both my internal and external flash drive. I understand they are different games, but I have had no issues with GTA V despite the fact that its mandatory install is almost 4 times as large as yours, as well as drawing mind bogglingly large amounts of information from both the game disc and the flash drive at the same time.I am not asking for any compensation or anything of that nature, I simply want to be able to use the game I bought with my hard earned money without paying another $130, that I do not have, to buy a hard drive for a console that is on its way out with the release of the next generation consoles. High definition textures were not a required download for battlefield 3, why do I have to download them for Battlefield 4? I look forward to your response, and I hope that the cost of this mistake is not forwarded on to me like it has been so many times before.
Jacob Rowell