10/20/06 12:34 PM
"Nothing Micro about the Payments"
So, as most of you probably already know, both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 come with a form of an online market. You can download demos, movies, and arcade style games. Until very recently, on the 360, the most expensive arcade game to download was just shy of five dollars. Pretty reasonable for a classic arcade style game, like gauntlet, that takes you forever to play through with massive amounts of content.
Then Doom came out and everything changed.
Doom debuted at an unreasonable 10 dollars. Now remember, these are all games that feel like a homebrew, or are more than 10 years old. Doom is no exception. 13 years ago a little shareware demo of this game took America by storm. Let me say part of that again, cause I really want to make sure that is sinking in, 13 Years Ago. The game doesn’t allow you to aim, you just point in a general direction and fire. The game looks the same that it did when it came out while I was in 4th grade, well before any game required you to have a dedicated video card. There have been upgrades, this is a direct port of the PC classic.
Fine, if you wanted to play Doom for that price, all I can do is urge you to stop because of the pricing.
On a side note: The only really strange thing about all of this is that the original fit on two floppies, why was this one 50 megs? I guess that just goes to show that programmers are getting really, really lazy with how they compress and handle coding.
This week was pretty much the point that I got completely fed up with all this “Micro” transaction magical redirection shit. Lumines, a game that I was obsessed with for no real reason when the PSP came out, was set to come out on Xbox live Market Place this week. The Xbox live price? 15 dollars. But wait, there is more. If you want to play the entire game there is an additional download you must pay for. That’s right, 7.50 more. The game launched with an expansion pack. Launched, 0 hour, not fully there expansion. Basically the game that you are paying fifteen dollars for is half finished, they know this, and are expecting you to pay 7.50 for the completed version.
But it gets better.
When you finish this game, that you have now paid 23 dollars for, you get a message saying that the next expansion pack will be out very, very soon. If logic is any kind of guide in this matter that means that the next expansion will be just around 7.50, bringing the grand total of this game up to 30 dollars. That isn’t a micro-transaction at all. That is a full blown game that you are buying off of the store shelves. With no box or instruction manual I might add.
Here is something interesting to think about: Microsoft does there transactions through something known as “points” that you buy in amounts of 20 dollars. So, say you want to buy this entire game, but you don’t have any points. That means you are going to end up spending about 40 dollars on the entire experience. Suddenly this doesn’t sound like something that is Micro at all. That is the price of a current generation, new release. Go buy Yukuza instead.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, sadly.
Games on the Xbox live arcade are being priced entirely too high. But what about the downloadables that aren’t games that are being sold? At one point it was just maps and extra quests that were finished after the game, but they are expanding, limiting things that were once included in the game.
Cheat codes, for one, are now being sold. With the new Tiger Woods game you can go online, drop 2 dollars, and experience the game like never before, with cheat codes. Want the away jerseys for your team in Madden or NBA Live? Those are going to cost you about 2 bucks a pop as well. Want a couple more stadiums that were in last year’s NBA Live? Those are going to be about 5 dollars. How about training videos for those games that you just bought? Well those very, but you can spend upwards of five dollars for them.
I have heard a ton of people saying that this is just a learning curve that the industry is going through, seeing if it will work out in the long run. I hate to rain on their parade, but this isn’t a learning curve, and they aren’t going to figure this out. Even if no one buys this stuff they are still turning a massive profit from people just buying their games. The extras are things that used to be included in the game to begin with. It takes no effort for them to write a code to unlock stuff that might already be on the disk that you bought. If five people buy a jersey that is 10 bucks more than they would have gotten to begin with. They aren’t going to learn. If this doesn’t work out they just won’t include the content or the downloads next year. Meaning you get less game for the same price.
The only way to really make sure that this kind of stuff doesn’t happen in the future, sadly, is to stop buying the games altogether. If you find out that a company, like EA, is locking out stuff that used to come with a game for free and is telling everyone that if they want to “Fly their team flag” they are going to have to buy all eight of the extra jerseys, then just don’t buy the game. Don’t show the company that they can even make a profit from not including all of the stuff that came free.
The fact is that things are just going to get worse. The new Gran Turismo is coming in two versions, one that comes with very few cars and very few tracks and one that comes with no tracks and no cars at all. For the later of the two games to even be close to equal you have to go online and download cars, roughly 1 dollar a car, and tracks, up to 5 dollars a track. If the game ends having the same amount of content that the last did it will cost anywhere between 4 and 8 hundred dollars given the price ranges announced.
It just got very, very costly to fly your gamer flag.